Re: Of accents & dialects

Sally Caves told me that the only giveaway of Hugh Laurie's Englishness in "House
(MD)" was that he pronounced "respiratory" as "respiratory", as the English do,
rather than as "respitory" as the Americans do. (The English pronunc is
/'respIr@tri/ or /r@'spIr@tri/; I don't know which one Hugh said.)

Fans of the Wire -- which surely includes everybody who's ever been fortunate
enough to see it -- will have been impressed not only by Dominic West's
American accent but also by his superbly crap British accent in the episode in
Season 2 where he pretends to be a Brit to infiltrate the Russian bordello.

In answer to Eldin's question, it used to be very rare for American actors to
play English people in British films, and formerly the prime example of such a
case would have been the notorious, heroically dreadful case of Dick Van Dyke
in Mary Poppins. But latterly we have had Gwyneth Paltrow, Renee Zellweger,
Gillian Anderson & perhaps others acquit themselves admirably doing English
accents in British films.

--And.

Gary Shannon, On 29/10/2008 22:40:
> I watched a movie years ago, I wish I could remember the name, where the lead
> was a Brit actor (a fact I didn't know at the beginning of the movie). He had
> a flawless American accent UNTIL he said the name of a church, "St. Thomas",
> rendering it "Sen Thomas". I immediately knew he was a Brit, because
> Americans, regardless of regional dialect, never drop the "t" at the end of
> "saint" in a name, and would never render "saint" to rhyme with "zen".
>
> --gary
>
> --- On Wed, 10/29/08, Eldin Raigmore <eldin_raigmore@...> wrote:
>
>> From: Eldin Raigmore <eldin_raigmore@...>
>> Subject: Re: Of accents & dialects
>> To: CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu
>> Date: Wednesday, October 29, 2008, 11:30 AM
>> I've noticed that British actors playing American
>> characters in American shows
>> usually have quite good American accents; but British
>> actors playing American
>> characters in British shows frequently have very bad
>> "American" accents.
>>
>> From what I've read, American actors playing British
>> characters in American
>> shows frequently have very bad "British" accents.
>>
>> Do American actors playing British characters in British
>> shows, usually have
>> good British accents? Or is this situation asymmetrical?
>

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