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English is weird
pwhodges:
--- Quote from: Thrillho on 27 Nov 2020, 13:57 ---his is when Hodges met me, the only person who still frequents this forum regularly enough and has met me to be likely to comment. So I would be most interested to know what the fuck he thinks I sound like if anything
--- End quote ---
I am not a good person to ask about accents, and more so in this case because I met Thrillho some years ago now. I don't particularly notice accents, or at least I don't link them with people in my memory, so I'm afraid I can't recall what I thought about Thrillho's! If he was then "Northern sounding" that would simply have been a variety of normal that my father had familiarised me with, and so unremarkable in my mind.
My own background is solidly upper middle class - father was a university professor in Reading, though from a Sheffield working-class background, mother a grammar-school English teacher who grew up in a country rectory, and I went through a classy (not famous, though) boarding school and Oxford University. So my accent is variously described as RP, BBC, or simply "posh" (but not proper posh like landed gentry etc). Back in the 70s I used to get Americans come over to me in an aeroplane and ask to listen to me speak - I guess they found me quaint! You can judge for yourself - there are a number of links in this forum of me reading various stories and book extracts (early in this thread, even). But because some of those links are dead, I've collected them all here for you.
Gyrre:
Why the hell is the 'l' in 'solder' silent?
pwhodges:
You mean the "i" in "soldier", I presume. Well, it isn't; it modifies the "d" to be more of a "j" sound in many people's speech - though I was ridiculed at school by my Latin master for that pronunciation (in the 1950s, to put it in perspective), as he insisted on a simple "di" as the central one of three syllables...
Tova:
--- Quote from: Gyrre on 05 Dec 2020, 02:22 ---Why the hell is the 'l' in 'solder' silent?
--- End quote ---
I've never understood this myself about US English, but Google has answers.
pwhodges:
Ah, I misunderstood - you were on the "l" not the "i" (I read it as capital i and presumed a typo).
I have never heard the "l" in solder not pronounced nor had any idea that was a possibility, and so that is a complete surprise to me. British dictionaries don't mention the possibility either.
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