Re: CHAT: R: Re: CHAT: Blandness (was: Uusisuom's influences)

At 7:20 pm -0400 5/4/01, Roger Mills wrote:
>Ray Brown wrote:
>
>>At 11:56 pm -0400 4/4/01, Roger Mills wrote:
>>[snip]
>>>slang/idioms, or some of each?   I hear items from the BBC over our public
>>>radio network-- most of it's RP, though for some reason the man who talks
>>>about sport usually has a regional accent of some sort--
>>
>>That's de_facto mandatory now-a-days - region depends upon the sport, to
>>some extent.>
>
>So I kind-of figured out.  Also, some of the regular news-readers aren't
>totally RP-- I gather this introduction of other accents is considered quite
>a plus, a radical step even...:-)
Yes, it was - but we've got so accustomed to it that few people notice it
at all now.

>Still, they never go beyond the pale, as far as my understanding is
>concerned.
That's right - I think the different broadcasting companies would draw the
line at strong regional accent for news-broadcasts - not through bias, but
just on grounds of comprehensibility.

>And it's interesting that your
>regional accents seem to be more alive and well than ours.
Indeed - and they are not comprehensible to all English speakers on our
small island.  I have Scouse (from Toxteth in Liverpool, in fact) collegue
at work who would be almost imcomprehensible if he spoke to us in his
native dialect; so for the benefit of us southerners he adopts what he
calls "poshed-up Scouse".

>>>never impenetrable,
>>>however.  The accent in the TV show ("Dalziell and Pascoe") was, I
>suspect,
>>>Scots
>>
>>Yorkshire, actually.>
>
>Aha.  I have to confess my knowledge of British dialects comes mainly from
>TV police imports-- "Cracker" and "Frost" are usually difficult.  Thank God
>for the late Morse, and the upper class twits on Poirot.  (Somehow I suspect
>these shows are long-gone from the UK.)
Not at all - on cable-TV we have a channels like UK-Gold that do nothing
but keep showing these and other golden oldies ad infinitum.

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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