Re: Of accents & dialects (was: Azurian phonology)

You don't have to go outside England for weird dialects, by the way! Yes,
there certainly are huge differences
in both vocab and syntax just within England. Yorkshire does often leave out
(or adds a glottal stop to the previous phoneme,
as in "trouble at' mill" /trub@l [? mil/ = 'trouble at the mill'.
Often, different dialects will also have completely different lexical items
for the same, often narrow, concept.
A particularly 'yucky' example springs to mind. I have a friend who comes
from Yorkshire (Ilkley moor area!)
and what he calls 'Clinker' I call 'Clowdingles'. If you're squeamish, by
the way, don't read on...
The lexical items refer to what gets stuck to your rear end if you don't
wipe it properly. I told you it was yucky.
Cajun sounds interesting. I'd expect it to be more divergent from mainstream
American with all that French influence.
Mike
>
> But as for English dialects (that is, dialects of the English language,
> spoken
> within parts of the nation of England), are there really big differences
> in
> syntax between one and another?  If so I've never heard of them.
>
> I know that Yorkshire dialect (or is it some other dialect?) frequently
> leaves
> out the definite article.  That's a difference in syntax, but I think it
> might be
> reasonable not to call it a big one.
>
> Using "yon" to mean "that guy" is more of a difference in vocabulary, I'm
> thinking, than of syntax.
>
> Differences in vocabulary can be big enough to be major obstacles to
> mutual
> intelligibility, without differences in syntax being major at all, I'd
> think.
>
> At any rate; as has been said, within England, dialectal differences come
> closer to being mutually _un_-intelligible than they do in USAan and
> Canadian
> English.  And differences in North American English tend to be more
> like "accents" and less like "dialects" (though Cajun and Bajun, among
> others,
> might be reasonably considered "dialects" rather than "accents"); at least
> compared to differences within England.
>
>
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