Re: Probability of Article Replacement?

Joseph Fatula wrote:
> You might be interested to know this:
> I often thought that BBC English was quite similar to American English and
> that that's why we could understand it.  But in talking with some friends
> who are here from Mexico (and whose American English comprehension is _very_
> good), they mentioned that they had a _very_ hard time understanding what
> Brits were saying.  We were watching some movies, and one of them asked me
> what we called the particular language they were speaking.  They were under
> the impression that it was some closely related language like Catalan is to
> Castillian (Spanish).
Which is just another part of the debate about where languages end and
dialects begin (and if a dialect is just a language with a army/navy,
there are a lot more English-derived languages around than I thought :P)

And if they had trouble understanding RP (BBC English), I wouldn't send
them to Australia any time soon. You sometimes hear the ee-vowel being
pronounced with a somewhat fronted [@\] vowel gliding onto an [i]-like
vowel. Which is just as well, what with the ear-vowel being a
monophthong, making the system something like:

i i:                     u
e e: ei     @ 8:    @u     o: oi
& &: &i &u               O O:
             a a: ai au

bid beard                                    hood
bed bared bead            bird        booed       board Boyd
had bad   paid bowed                         nod  gone
                       bud barred bide load

(Perhaps add /u:/ 'fool' and /ou/ 'bowl' to that, depending on if [5]s
are pronounced. /&/ is probably not [&]. I don't know where exactly /@u/
fits. The /a/-series looks like it probably wants to move forward. Oh,
and [u] doesn't sound anything like some English [8] pronunciations or
American [Y](?) ones.)

(But from what I've heard of it, Cockney is much scarier. But at any
rate, the non-rhotic vowels are different enough from the American ones
that rhotic American who had never come across non-rhotic speech would
probably have a hard enough time with it.)

Tristan.

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