Re: dialectal diversity in English
| From: | Stone Gordonssen <stonegordonssen@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, May 7, 2003, 17:23 |
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Thanks. I had wondered if it was that.
>Bah. I don't believe a word of it. "Die, Yankee/rebel scum!" is perfectly
>intelligible in either dialect.
Well, it wasn't re: epithets but normal dialogue. E.g. "Would you like fries
with that?".
I, too, thought they were just putting on aires ... sorry, coppin' a
'tude...
> > but when I first began
> > studying German, I was surprised how unintelligable my teachers found
>even
> > one shift of stress in polysyllabic words. I can't remember a specific
>real
> > example, but it was similar to saying [ar\"bait@n] instead of
>["ar\bait@n]
> > in _Wo arbeiten Sie?_.
>
>I'll bet that you were also laxing German "a" to [@], causing what you
>said to sound like "*Wo er beiten Sie?" King of confusion.
I don't beieve so. I make every effort to mimic, as far as oppossible, the
phonemes of any language I study. If anything, I tend sometimes to lax [a]
to [A] rather than to [@] in general re: a new language.
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