Dialect, was: Relay now complete!

On Thu, 24 Jun 1999, Sally Caves wrote:

> What's a Ryshas accent?
Turnyi ilain, ei? ("The speech of Turenay, eh?")

Characterized by ssharp essess, slightly palatalized l's, barely
voiced v's, very open a's and [O] rather than [o] (though I found out
last night that [O] is actually standard, and [o] is south-western
broad). I never realized my pronunciation was like that, until I
listened to the recording. It was easy to be objective, as the
recording is not so faithful as to make my voice recognizable (I hate
my recorded voice) and I thought "that's someone from Ryshas
singing!" There are some idiosyncrasies of intonation as well, but
they're not apparent in singing.

It's spoken in eastern Valdyas, in the region of Veray and Turenay.
The river Rycha that runs through it gave it its name: /rych-yas/ ->
/rySas/.

We had a lot of fun exploring dialects in the role-playing campaign;
when someone from Tal-Crun in the far west took his wife from Ryshas
to meet his family, they couldn't understand her though they
technically spoke the same language.

People are proud of their dialect, and you're not really taken
seriously if you can't "talk broad" even if that's a very different
kind of "broad" from what is spoken where you happen to be. The usual
course of events when travelling is that you speak your own dialect
at first to establish that you can, then use _valein ilain_ ("the
king's language", that you learn in school) to make yourself
understood. Obviously, if you happen to be from Valdis, the capital,
where _valein ilain_ *is* the local dialect, you have a problem, and
indeed people from Valdis have a hard time being taken as seriously
as others when they travel out of the region.

   Irina

            Varsinen an laynynay, saraz no arlet rastynay.
                     irina@rempt.xs4all.nl (myself)
       http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/index.html (English)
    http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/irina/backpage.html (Nederlands)