Re: CHAT: Vowel shift - angry-beaverisms

At 00:04 -0500 19.6.1999, Nik Taylor wrote:
>Barry Garcia wrote:
>> However, i think the funniest east coast accents are
>> those from massachusets. Like that carpenter guy Norm Abrams on PBS. Its
>> always funny hearing him say his er's like a's and his a's like er's.
>
>That's nothing compared to the Minnesotan accent, with its beautiful,
>yet funny, intonation patterns.  To me, that was the funniest part of
>Fargo.  I mean, that accent is just so hard to take seriously, I mean,
>they could say "Ja, my wife was butchered and cut into a million
>pieces", and it just wouldn't sound like a bad thing.  Okay, slight
>exaggeration, but it does sound just funny.  :-)
I met one American who thought that intonation was due to Swedish/Norwegian
substrate influence.  His imitation surely sounded as if that could be
true, but then his wife was Swedish...  Altho most Swedish and Norwegian
dialects have a system of distinct word tones, which gives the sentence
intonation a quality that is peculiar to speakers of other Germanic
languages, they are not uniform among themselves.  I guess Matt is the only
one who can judge this theory! :)

/BP

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  B.Philip Jonsson  <bpj@...> <melroch@...>

        Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant!
                                            (Tacitus)