6 ms·

The bit I find neat is the rhotic 'R'. Most of the US says 'R'... not quite as strong as pirates did (I'll get to that) but the 'r' is there. A British woman

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• jbjohns 3y ago
  Interestingly, at least British and Australian people tend to make the 'R' sound when the word ends in a vowel sound (e.g. "dater" instead of "data").
  • arnsholt 3y ago
    That’s called an intrusive r: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linking_and_intrusive_R https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linking_and_intrusive_R Originally comes from a final r being pronounced before a word starting with a vowel, and then that cropping up in places with no final r.
    • arrowsmith 3y ago
      As in the Beatles song A Day in the Life: I saw-r-a film today, oh boooy
      • denton-scratch 3y ago
        Yeah, that sounds like classic Scouse to me, but you certainly hear it in other UK regional accents.
        • arrowsmith 3y ago
          Is it a regional thing? I have a very "standard" middle-class home counties English accent and I use the intrusive r.
          • kzrdude 3y ago
            I'm extremely underqualified (non-native speaker) but first time I heard this and paid attention was from Dave Chinner (linux developer) who is australian and he was using a very pronounced linking r.
      • SilasX 3y ago
        Or Oasis’s “Champagne Supernova” sounding (to my American ear) like “supin’ over”. Also, The Lincoln Lawyer has an Australian actor playing a character (Cisco) with a gruff, throaty American accident, but at one point it slips through and he says “Lisa” as “Liser”.
    • denton-scratch 3y ago
      French pronunciation has something like this. They can't abide a word that ends in a vowel-sound smooshing into a following word that starts with a vowel-sound. So, for example, the word "suis" is pronounced "swee", unless the next word lacks an initial consonant, in which case the trailing 's' is sounded. So "Je suis anglais" is pronounced as "Je sweez anglais". Compare "Je suis francais" ("Je swee francais").
      • pessimizer 3y ago
        Pretty sure that English non-rhoticity started with higher-caste London people trying to sound French.
      • froddd 3y ago
        This is called “faire la liaison” (“make the link”) between the two words. If the first word ends with a consonant, and the next word starts with a vowel, then do pronounce that last consonant.
      • jhanschoo 3y ago
        In most cases, it is more a preservation of sounds that have been dropped elsewhere. But see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liaison_(French)#Liaison_on_inverted_verbs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liaison_(French)#Liaison_on_in... , e.g. "parle-t-on", "a-t-il"
      • kmill 3y ago
        Interestingly, when people speak slowly it comes out as "je swee zanglais". The terminal sound is deposited onto the following word!
        • denton-scratch 3y ago
          Another example: there's a French children's song with the line: "Pendouillez moi avec" ("hang me as well" - don't ask). I have a recording of this song, and it's pronounced "Pendouillez moi za vec" (equal stress on each of the last three syllables). What's interesting is that the intruding consonant isn't an otherwise-silent 's' that is being sounded; it's completely spurious.
  • walthamstow 3y ago
    Our Aussie data scientist does it at the front of data as well, so if comes out 'dartah'
  • arrowsmith 3y ago
    Only if the next word starts with a vowel.
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  • thewix 3y ago
    Common in the States too. I'm from Eastern MA and work in Boston. If I order a "vodka, soda" it sounds normal, but if I say "vodka AND soda" then "vodka" becomes "vodkar". My accent is a pretty standard Eastern New England accent.
  • vintermann 3y ago
    I've taken Andrew Ng's coursera courses. I'm almost blind to American dialects (compared to Norwegian dialects the changes feel extremely subtle), but I noticed that one! "Dater science" was definitely on the "agender"! But I don't feel like all Americans have it that strongly.
• canjobear 3y ago
  Also the high-status dialect of American English until the 1950s was nonrhotic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent
• timeon 3y ago
  > "car park" sound to my ear like "ca pack" Why not "ka pak" or "ca pac"? I'm not native English speaker. Pronunciation is still mystery for me. Is it like in Dutch or Norwegian that two consonants are enclosing short vowel while one consonant makes long vowel? And I'm ashamed to admit that I still do not know what is difference between "c" and "k" in English language.
  • arrowsmith 3y ago
    > what is difference between "c" and "k" in English language They're the same sound, including when it's written "ck" as in "back". Although sometimes the "c" is pronounced like an "s", e.g. "face", "celery". English spelling is highly inconsistent and it's often hard to tell how a word should be pronounced based on the spelling alone. Don't expect it to make sense.
    • shaftoe 3y ago
      As an American who has attempted to learn other languages, it's amazing to me the concept that spelling should reflect pronunciation. As advice for those folks learning English, don't assume spelling means anything.
      • duped 3y ago
        Spelling does reflect pronunciation. The attempt to standardize spelling is rather new, though. It's actually more surprising that there should be canonical spellings when the pronunciation itself varies between speakers and dialects, and it changes over time.
        • int_19h 3y ago
          Dialectal variety is true for many other languages, though, which nevertheless manage to do some kind of standardized spelling. Thing is, in most cases when it's claimed that "spelling reflects pronunciation" for some language, it's not actually true - what it reflects is the phonemes of the language, not phones (actual sounds). To give an example in English, /t/ is a single phoneme, but it can be realized in a bunch of different ways ranging from actual [t] in words like "tea" to a glottal stop [ʔ] in words like "butter" (frequent in UK). Native speakers often don't even notice that these are two completely different sounds, because they are mentally mapped to the same underlying phoneme. But because our brains are already perfectly capable of handling such mappings (so long as they happen according to consistent rules, which they almost always do), a phonemic spelling works great in practice. And when you deal with phonemes, the difference between various accents and dialects is usually much less than when you look at the phones. English is problematic because its spelling is strongly inconsistent even with the phonemes, never mind the phones. And, yes, the rather extreme dialectal variety of English means that different dialects do have some phonemic variety as well. But, again, it's much less than actual pronunciation differences would make you believe, and it's certainly possible to come up with a canonical mostly-phonemic spelling that would cover, at the very least, British RP and American GA, and be reasonably adequate for most offshoots of those. It's also possible to just adopt phonemic spelling based on specific dialects and expect the speakers to handle the differences at least for the popular ones (just like we already do with different words like "elevator" vs "lift"). This was the approach taken by Serbo-Croatian, where e.g. "vreme", "vrime", and "vrijeme" would all be valid spellings of the same word.
• arrowsmith 3y ago
  FYI the stereotypical "pirate accent" is in fact a West Country accent - that is, it's from the southwestern region of England known as the West Country. And the reason this particular accent became associated with pirates is not because historical pirates actually spoke like that (although many surely did) - it's almost entirely due to a string of popular movies about pirates in the 1950s starring the actor Robert Newton: https://people.howstuffworks.com/one-guy-responsible-for-pirate-accent.htm https://people.howstuffworks.com/one-guy-responsible-for-pir... > A British woman who I worked (from London) didn't have the 'r' sound "car park" sound to my ear like "ca pack". Most English people don't pronounce the rhotic "r", with the main exception being the West Country. It's still widely pronounced in Scotland, Ireland, and parts of Wales.
  • 2ICofafireteam 3y ago
    What's in a name? An earlier association could be The Pirates of Penzance.
  • shagie 3y ago
    (For additional on the background on this: https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/09/pirate-speech-origins-in-west-country-english-via-robert-newton-aka-long-john-silver.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/09/pirate-speech-origi... ) Let me rephrase... the less wealthy parts of England had more rhoticity in their accent than the upper class parts. These poorer parts - either as indentured servants or immigrants to the new world (and Australia) had a stronger influence on what would become the American English accents. Rhoticity can be understood by the further exaggeration that pirates displayed which was again exaggerated in popular media. Their accent was part of the West Country English which was in the poorer parts of the country - ship builders and young men with little to lose. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Country_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Country_English > not because historical pirates actually spoke like that (although many surely did) Blackbeard was presumed to have been born in Bristol. Francis Drake was born in Tavistock. These locations are both firmly in the West Country English dialect.
    • wyclif 3y ago
• bombolo 3y ago
  Eh, in Italy an inability to correctly pronounce the R letter is normally associated with "rich asshole".
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• darraghenright 3y ago
  Very interesting! Many poor people in Ireland emigrated or were sent to the new world too. The rhotic "r" is prevalent in the Irish language, and it is a distinct characteristic of the sound of Hiberno-English (and other accents with a Celtic influence of course). There's a cool video on YT called "A London Accent from the 14th to the 21st Centuries"[1] — I'm sure it's not meant to be definitive, but it's very interesting to note the presence or absence of the rhotic "r" during different periods. -- Speaking of the New World — this is something of a side topic, but I think it's fascinating that "caulk" is commonly used in the U.S. and Canada; e.g: bathroom tiling. In my experience at least, you wouldn't really hear someone use the word in that context in the U.K. or Ireland. Most people I've asked associate it exclusively with boats. I have a speculative pet theory on this — originally, caulk specifically referred to the materials used to fill the gaps between boards in a wooden ship. Since practically everyone who originally came to the New World came on old wooden ships, it's not hard to imagine that "caulk" — once specific to ship building and maintenance — became well known to emigrant populations and took on a broader meaning over time. In contrast, it's likely very few people who remained in the Old World at that time were ever in a wooden ship, and "caulk" remained less well known and retained its specific meaning. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lXv3Tt4x20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lXv3Tt4x20