Re: CHAT: Cockney Orkish as she is spoken.

Ray to Matt:
> >From
> >that point of view it makes sense to portray Orcs as Cockneys, who are
> >commonly stereotyped as being crass, vulgar, and criminal.  I'm not saying
> >I agree with the analogy (I actually find it quite offensive), but I can
> >understand where it might come from...
>
> I regret I very much think Joel is right and the film makers are
> perpetuating a senseless stereotype.  Like Joel, I find it quite offensive
> - indeed, extremely offensive.
>
> I find it very sad that after a century which has witnessed far too often
> the hatred, bitterness and senseless cruelty & killing that such
> stereotypes too readily engender, some people seem to be taking these often
> groundless & quite mischievous stereotypes into the 3rd millennium with
> them.
[...]
> I'm afraid IMO the attitude "Oh, let's make the nasty orcs sound like
> Cockneys" shows both lamentable laziness as regards research and
> inexcusably offensive stereotyping.
It certainly is a stereotype, and perhaps, as you say, senseless, but
it is not baseless and I don't think New Zealanders can be blamed for
thinking in terms of it. Think of Ray Winston in "Nil by mouth" (made
by a formerly-proletarian Londoner), of Vinnie Jones et al. in "Lock,
Stock and Two Smoking Barrels", Bob Hoskins in most things (such as "The
Long Good Friday"): this is even how proletarian Londoners depict
themselves, and although they would deny that they in general are "crass,
vulgar and criminal", they perhaps would not lay claim to being the
most sophisticated, and perhaps would not deny that the bulk of
Britain's most estimably criminal criminals have been cockneys.

I speak here as someone born & resident in (north) London, with a
somewhat "estuarial" accent, and with a son with an increasingly
cockney accent.

OBConlang: in purely phonetic/impressionistic terms, Scouse, with its
famously velarized articulatory setting, or Glaswegian sound to me more
Orkish than Cockney.

--And.