Re: OT: accent atlas online
| From: | Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, April 19, 2004, 19:21 |
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Now THAT's interesting ! I haven't a fast connection,
so I just listened to 2 "French native speakers" until
now (one from Nice and the other one from Gabon). It
couldn't hear any Southern French accent in the
pronunciation of the woman from Nice, but surely some
French accent. The most typical is the pronunciation
of "plastic": typically, when a French sees a word
he/she already knows from French, he/she pronounces it
just like in French (plastique), thinking "haha, this
one I know !" But it seems that the "academic
learning" brings a very difficult reading: she just
deciphers like a child at school (or maybe it comes
from the sound file ? doesn't seem so, the woman from
Gabon speaks somehow more fluently). Very interesting
too, the narrow and monotonous voice register: when an
English speaker would use at least 3 octaves, a French
seems to use less than a half...
But now I would like to find Anglo-Saxon accents ! So
at last I could hear pronouncing "ku%§\=" for "cure"
(I think my IPA is not very famous yet, maybe it will
improve :-)
--- jcowan@REUTERSHEALTH.COM wrote:
> Mark J. Reed scripsit:
> >
http://classweb.gmu.edu/accent has a fascinating
> survey of
> > 300+ different English speakers (including natives
> from a variety of locales
> > as well as non-natives of many different
> backgrounds) reading the same
> > paragraph.
>
> Fascinating material.
>
> I note that the L1 speakers, like the L2 speakers,
> are on their best
> linguistic behavior: the speech samples are
> uniformly clear and slowly
> and carefully spoken. None of them are "dialect
> speakers" in the
> classic sense, but it is clear that the Americans
> are using regional
> norms, whereas the English are using various
> approximations to RP.
> (There are also two Australians and one speaker from
> Northern Ireland,
> about which I can't readily generalize).
>
> --
> John Cowan www.ccil.org/~cowan
> www.reutershealth.com jcowan@reutershealth.com
> [T]here is a Darwinian explanation for the refusal
> to accept Darwin.
> Given the very pessimistic conclusions about moral
> purpose to which his
> theory drives us, and given the importance of a
> sense of moral purpose
> in helping us cope with life, a refusal to believe
> Darwin's theory may
> have important survival value. --Ian Johnston
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