Re: Probability of Article Replacement?

On Wednesday 26 February 2003 1:11 pm, Tristan wrote:
> 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.)

Cockney( though not the kind of old) is slowly spreading throughout Southern
britain.  In fact, I once caught Prince Edward using a Glottal Stop.  And no,
we do not use rhyming slang or say "guv'ner", unless we're being facetious.

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