USAGE: pronunciation mimicry (was: rhotics)

On Thu, 4 Nov 2004 10:33:24 -0500, Sally Caves <scaves@...> wrote:

>From: "J. 'Mach' Wust" <j_mach_wust@...>
>
>> A most remarkable and seldom gift! I've known A Swiss German who told me
>> that native speaker of Spanish had taken him for mentally challenged
>> because of his lack of vocabulary.
>
>Ha!  Yeah, that's the problem.  You have some basic vocabulary and some
>useful phrases, but you speak them well.  Then no defenses to muster
>against charges of idiocy.  But I usually have some trace of an accent.  I
>prided myself, though, in Geneva in being able to hide my American
>heritage.  People usually asked me if I was from Britain or Germany.  Had
>to practice, then, on my plosives.
>
>Is mimicry of pronunciation that remarkable?  I'm fairly good at accents,
>too, but not flawless.  A lot of Americans like to make fun of a southern
>accent, assuming that it is monolithic and not multifarious and regional.
That kind of mimicry is not remarkable, but it is remarkable that somebody
can so totally acquire a foreign language that even native speakers of the
same region are cheated!

gry@s:
j. 'mach' wust



<off-topic>

>>>Are you Swiss?  Do you or have you live(d) in Switzerland?
>>
>> Yes, I do, I live in Berne and speak Bernese German.
>
>I had a very pleasant visit to Berne.  We went in December of 1985.  We
>clocked the time it took for the signs to change from "sortie" to
>"Ausfahrt" on the Autobahn.  We fed carrots to the bears, all of them very
>antic, and I took a picture of my friend next to a wall near the bear pit
>that had graffiti written on it: Ba"r oder nicht Ba"r: das ist hier die
>Frage.  I have a picture here of store on a corner (a no entry sign on the
>street).  The building has a corner tower on it next to an arcade.  Painted
>on the cement wall is "Apotheke und Drogerie: Scheidegger," and above it is
>a mural of customers dressed in seventeenth century clothing.  IS THAT
>STILL THERE?
I don't know. I've been in the old city and have had a look at the pharmacy
I thought you were talking about, but it wasn't that one...

By the way, the name "Scheidegger" is very Swiss, even in its spelling: The
|gg|-digraph is only used in Switzerland for a fortis /k:/, which is
represented by |(c)k| in standard German. Swiss German "der Egge"
(corner/hill) corresponds to standard German "die Ecke/das Eck" (corner).

>I had no Schwiizertu"tsche, much less the Bernese German
In Bernese German, it'd be "Schwytzerdütsch"! ;)

</off-topic>

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