Re: HUMOUR: "EuroEnglish": is this for real???

At 2:55 pm +1300 6/10/00, andrew wrote:
[....]
>>
>Since this regularly comes up (I was the culprit once), what would a
>EuroEnglish look like?  What are the sound changes that our friend(s)
>Johnny make to EuroEnglish and
They don't all make the same changes!  It's simply impossible to
generalize.  Some Germans do, of course, retain strong features of their
native accent - which ain't the same in north Germany as in south Germany.
But, as more than one person has testified, many Germans speak English with
no perceptible 'foreign' accent.  The same is true from many other regions.

Probably the most troublesome consonants are /T/ and /D/ - but they occur
'naturally' in Castilian Spanish and in Modern Greek.  And, in any case,
are troublesome for many native born Brit speakers. /T/ and /D/ are
regularly pronounced [f] and [v] in many colloquial dialects of England and
south east Wales.

The changes individual foreigners make to English are IMHO no greater than
those which can be found made by English natives - indeed, usually far
less.  The Jordie English and many Scots Lowland varieties are not always
readily comprehensible to us southerners!

>how can we sensibly describe them without
>retreating into xenophobia?
I don't see how we can.

>Then after that we might want to look at other features of EuroEnglish.
I'm not aware that there any such animal.  Surely, English has gone way
beyond that now and has reached the stage, for weal or woe, of a global
koine.

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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