Re: CHAT: Being taken for a furriner ...

On Aug 31, 2004, at 3:15 PM, Andreas Johansson wrote:
> Had a strange experience on the train this morning; I went to the
> train hostess
> to buy new tickets, and, of course, addressed her in Swedish. Yet, she
> replied
> in English, and continued to use it for a few more turns before
> switching over
> to Swedish in the face of me stubbornly sticking to the same. She
> spoke English
> with a clear Swedish accent, so I can only assume she thought I was a
> foreigner and tried to be helpful.
> I've been taken for a foreigner before, but that's always involved me
> speaking
> in a foreign language. Possibly, my recent one-year stay in Germany
> has left
> some mark on my Swedish, but the whole incident nonetheless seems
> somewhat extraordinary to me.
> Anyone else here experienced something similar?
>                                                    Andreas
When i was little, i was once at a friend's house, and one of her
friends said i have a strange accent.
Somehow she came to the conclusion that i have a Polish accent because
my great-grandfather immigrated to the USA from there in the 1880s.  Or
at least we thought so at the time, it turns out the town he was from
is actually in Belarus now, and was probably a part of the Russian
Empire at the time.  But he came from the 'Lithuanian' Jewish
culture-zone, which is the only important thing because it makes my
brother the only Left-Handed Lithuanian not on the list ;).

I do/did have a slightly weird accent, though.  Until i was in 6th
grade or so, i constantly mumbled and my brother was the only one who
could 'translate' properly.  Once he decided that he didn't understand
me anymore, i had to learn to enunciate better.  That's the closest i
remember to us having one of those 'secret twin languages' - at least
until highschool when we made our first conlang ;) .
In 1st or 2nd grades, i was in speech therapy because i couldn't
pronounce /T/ - it came out as /s/.

But the most enduring weirdness about my idiolect i actually only
figured out a few months ago - i don't consistently devoice /l/ in
initial clusters with voiceless consonants, for instance in the word
"cluster".  I think i also used to not use velar(ized) Ls 'properly',
so all initial  "/kl/-" clusters came out sounding strangely emphasized
and disjointed.  My middleschool nemesis used to make fun of how i said
"close the door".


-Stephen (Steg)
  "...and so Moses smote Pharoah
   upside the head with the staff of God,
   wherewith he hath done wonders..."
      ~ not quite the book of exodus

Reply