Re: USAGE: English, Masculine, Feminine

On Mon, 14 Jun 2004 12:41:08 -0700, Emily Zilch <emily0@...> wrote:

>{ 20040612,0840 | Philippe Caquant }
>
>"What I meant is that when I listen so some English
>people (not all of them, clearly), I feel a sheer
>pleasure, just when listening to music or attending a
>theatre play. It is both very expressive and very
>rich, it is ART. Here I'm just talking about the
>melody and the pronunciation, not about the message.
>This I seldom feel when listening to Americans, but I
>could also compare it to the music of French language,
>which is also usually very motononous and hardly
>exciting. I don't mean that every English speaker
>should talk this way, I just enjoy some way of
>speaking that seems to me typically English of
>England.
It always seemed to me that the English accent sounded more formal and
proper than Standard or Continental American, which is what I was brought
up to speak.

>"If you take the name "Holmes", for ex, it can be a piece of art in
>itself, just like a painting or a small piece of music. [ snip... ] (I
>don't know how Americans pronounce it and I'd better no ask, as I'll
>get thirty-two different answers; the only thing is to listen to it)."
>
>emily says [ ho:mz ]. I have one of those interesting speech registers
>that notes all three vowels in Mary, Marry & Merry (which Pacific Coast
>speakers hear & say as an even [ E ] instead) but which cannot
>distinguish [ o ] - I have a monosyllabic diphthong for orange [ Ar\nj
>] and no l in salmon [ s&mn= ], palm [ pA:m ], holmes [ ho:mz ].
Rob says /hOlmz/ or /hO(:)mz/.  The /l/ is very weak, as it is in 'palm,'
which I pronounce as /pAlm/ or /pA(:)m/.  (It's hard to tell if the vowel
is actually lengthened when I don't pronounce the /l/.)  'Salmon' I always
say as /"s&m@n/, but some of my Southern friends say /"s&lm@n/.  As
for 'orange,' I say /"Or\@ndZ/.

- Rob