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George Mason University Speech Accent Archive 191
JT Olds writes "Apparently George Mason University is running a project to document differences in speech and accents from different backgrounds and the like. They have a paragraph that 306 sample readers have read and recorded, and all of these sound files are categorized by background, gender, age, and other things. They say that this is primarily for teaching and learning, and is especially useful for any linguists out there, but I just thought it was cool. The sound bytes are released under the Creative Commons license. Of course, the Google cache of the main frame is here.
As a side note, I did get the link to this from Penny Arcade's Jerry Holkins."
What??? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What??? (Score:5, Funny)
Groundskeeper Willie (Score:2)
Ack! Me retirement grease!
(/scottish accent)
Massachusetts (Score:3, Funny)
Doc "Ok, open your mouth and say 'R'"
patient "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh"
Doc "Good!"
G. W. Bush Accent (west texan?) (Score:2)
George Mason (Score:4, Funny)
IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:5, Insightful)
Which British English? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:4, Insightful)
If you think it's the former, then since Britain isn't the great empire she once was, and is only just a regular country these days, then you could consider US english as being the "root" english language.
If you think it's the latter, then one could also consider than english, which is a normand anglo-saxon tongue, originated either from Saxony (in Germany) or Normandy (in France) and therefore is itself an accented version of these languages.
What I'm saying is, every language is the derivate of something else, it all depends on your point of view. And what's more, within the UK and the US, there are great variations of accents, so I'm not sure it means anything to say "british english is true english".
Perhaps if someone could come up with a "reasonable average" of the lingo, then that would be the true english...
Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:5, Informative)
Plus Latin (old and Renaissance) and a bunch of other stuff. Here's a nice chart [danshort.com] and some links for the curious.
Actually... (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe the question you meant was which is closer to "correct". If you consider correct to be closer to the root of the evolutionary language tree then the Brittish are probably closer since the Americans' language changed more quickly since the split.
Re:Actually... (Score:2)
Is that an assumption on your part? I thought it was the language in the satellite countries that changed the least. And the language in the original country that changed and evolved the most.
Re:Actually... (Score:3, Insightful)
One thing that has pushed the evolution of American English (more so than British) is the ongoing influx of non-native speakers adopting it. Britain has had immigrants of its own since the American colonies were created, to be sure, but particularly since that nasty split with the British, American English has been spoken more by former Africans, Germa
Re:Actually... (Score:3, Informative)
That's because they all live on our border and watch our TV shows. :) Seriously, the accent we're talking about here evolved mostly in the Great Lakes region, where there's always been plenty of interaction between the two countries. When you get away from that area (e.g. Newfoundland, Georgia) the similarities fade.
Its not that different from noting the similarities between Tyneside and Lothian accents. Sure, one's
Re:Actually... (Score:3, Interesting)
I've heard this before too. One key example that comes to mind is Icelandic. Both modern Norwegian and Icelandic are largely decended from Old Norse, which of course was spoken in what is now Norway. A long time ago, some people from there went off to settle in Iceland. Interestingly, the language as spoken in modern Iceland is much more similar to Old Norse than Norwegian is to it. I think the usual explanation given is
Re:Actually... (Score:2)
Re:Actually...it depends on the language (Score:4, Interesting)
For example, German. There is an official "High German" (Hochdeutch) that is learned in school and is considered "correct." Other dialects, of which there are many of course, are considered "nonstandard." This is more than just a Texan being proud of speaking Texan, they are really considered different. Someone who speaks Hochdeutch natively (there are a small number) are considered by others to have "no accent."
Remember: this is a language that standardises its spelling, hyphenation, capitalisation and comma usage by international treaty. Making one accent official is comparatively speaking, trivial.
As a native english speaker myself, I find this all all a bit berserk. But other people, other ways.
Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:2)
The accents across england, imo, are extremely varied -- as much as the differneces between american and australian for example. Of course, this is coming from an american who only spent 4 months over there but take it as you will.
Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:2)
Err, last time I checked Glasgow was in Scotland, not England. I suspect that you may be about to learn the phrase "Stitch that, Jimmy!" from our Scottish brethren who are less understanding...
Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:2, Informative)
True, but you'd ever been to Cumbria [jpb.co.uk], you'd understand why an American would easily get confused.
Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:3, Insightful)
And remember that racially, the Scots and the Irish are pretty much the same people. What if they got over their bickering? A unified
Re: IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:5, Informative)
> We were just talking about how the British English language was the true "natural" English language, all other derived languages that were English with an accent. For example, If I (a person who lives in America and speaks US English; no born American (thank goodness)) were to go to England and converse with an Englishman; who would have the accent, me or him? The obvious answer, as a lot of Americans fail to realize, is me.
Maybe not. It's a curious but well-known phenomenon in dialectology that peripherial/frontier dialects tend to be conservative while innovations accumulate more rapidly in the core areas. IIRC, scholars study the isolated communities on the islands along the US Atlantic coast to see what Shakespeare's actors would have sounded like.
Re: IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:2)
Well, you could argue that accent change is a kind of meme propagation, and new memes propagate much faster in (densely-populated) core areas than in (sparsely-populated) peripheral/frontier areas. Rather like the extreme vagaries of fashion being primarily urban rather than rural.
No idea whether that's the real explanation, but the phenomenon you describe doesn't sound all that curious.
Incidentally, the Shakespeare's Globe theatre here in London is doing a couple of "original pronunciation" performance
Re: IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:4, Interesting)
Also true in genetics, where's it's called Founder's Effect.
It's not that difficult to understand. Assume that in one year 1 person in X comes up with a language innovation -- a new word, a new way of pronouncing a word, an idiom, whatever. Or sate in another (but equivalent) way: assume that a language innovation happens on average every X person-years. Also assume that the innovation spreads with some frequency to persons who hear it.
Then then more people interacting in a place, the more innovation you'll have. More people will be present in core areas, fewer in peripheral or frontier areas.
And every time someone leaves an area for a previously unsettled area, that person will take with him his knowledge of the language as it currently exists in that area, like a snapshot -- but once settled in the new area, the smaller settling population will generate less innovation, causing language change to slow in the newly settled area.
In genetics, Founder's Effect of course refers to genes (and alleles): if a small group branches off from a larger group to settle a new area, all alleles/traits present in the larger group may not be represented in the settlers, or represented in the same frequency. What was a rare trait, (e.g., blue eyes) in the larger group might not be so rare in the smaller group.
Indeed, physical separation of groups of animals of the same species, as by geographical barriers, is though to be one of the main causes of speciation, where one species splits into two.
Interestingly, there are a number of parallels between genetic distribution over space and language transmission over space. Of course, we should remember that we get our genes exclusively from our parents, but our language from peers as well as parents.
Re: IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:2)
As a child in the South in the Forties, I was taught that we were speaking essentially pure Elizabethan English and every other form was a corruption. My linguist uncle, OTOH, says that the true story is that children of colonial farmers, isolated from other white children by the sparsity of the population, were each given a slave child to play with...with the o
Re: IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:3, Interesting)
> As a child in the South in the Forties, I was taught that we were speaking essentially pure Elizabethan English and every other form was a corruption. My linguist uncle, OTOH, says that the true story is that children of colonial farmers, isolated from other white children by the sparsity of the population, were each given a slave child to play with...with the obvious linguistic outcome.
I don't know about your uncle's explanation of the mechanism, but the suggested outcome is certainly correct. When
Re: IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:2)
As to the 'original' accent, I remember reading that the area whose accent has changed least since Chaucerian times is the north-east of England
Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:5, Informative)
British English isn't the 'true "natural" English language'. In some ways, American English is more conservative than British English; American retains the flat a in words like 'fast' and 'pass' (so 'pass' and 'mass' rhyme), whereas in southern British English they've become the broad a. Most American dialects have retained the rhotic in almost all positions (and where it's been lost---words like 'ass' (from arse) and 'bust' (from burst)---the r is no longer written, left no trace, and the resultant word is generally distinct), but in almost all English English dialects I've heard (I'm Aussie), it's gone. Of course, British English is more conservative in other ways---it retains a three-way distinction between father/bother and cot/caught, for instance. (In everything here, Australian follows British. Sometimes Australian follows American. Sometimes Australian is original or shares changes with the other Southern Hemispherean Englishes.)
British English is no truer an english then any english. Just because the name of the language is the same as the adjective for things that come from England (and the name of the people from there, too) doesn't mean the English have any particular claim to English any more. Especially because there's probably as much variation in English English as there is in World English.
Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:2)
Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:2)
No, but we might call it "Southern French", "Parisian French", "Norman French", "Provencal French", etc. :)
French is an unusual case in linguistics, however, as the people who live where it originated are (at least officially) trying very hard to keep it from evolving naturally.
Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:2)
There has never, ever been an English language. If you pick up untranslated copies of Canterbury Tales and Sir Gawain and the Green Knights, two works composed more or less contemporaneously, you'll find that they're barely even the same language. Chaucer happens to be easier to read because he wrote in the London dialect, whereas Anonymous lived out in the boonies. Does that mean Chaucer has a
Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course that's not to say that American English doesn't have variations (Southern drawl, New England, Bronx, etc), but I think there's less variation in all of Texas than there is in the city of London.
Part of this is that the US is younger and part of it is that the US grew up in a time of mass communication. Although variations have appeared, with recorded media, at least people know that they exist. Otherwise isolation from different regions would have made the phonetic variations more pronounced and widespread.
Chinese has many dialects due to it's several thousand years of existence, and they don't sound anything alike. Chinese people can't talk to other Chinese person if they don't speak the same dialect. Whereas Spanish and Italians can converse with a bit of work because most of the phonetics and grammar are still the same.
Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:2)
Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:2)
Maybe related -- I've always tended to say "warsh" instead of "wash". My mom (Norwegian ancestry) says "wash", but my dad (Scot/Irish/English) said "warsh", and my mom swears I inherited it from him. (But my mom's sister also says "warsh", so the "surplus R gene" is clearly present in both families
Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:2)
As to
Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:2)
Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:2)
I betcha it's just habit and coincidence and nothing to do with biology.
I've seen films made in Australia where all sorts of accents were to be heard, from pretty close to generic American or "British light", to "you're from WHERE??" Well, Australia is a big country too
No. Australia's accent variation has typically been whether you say 'carsel' or 'cassel' for 'castle', or 'grarf' or 'graff' for 'graph' (as well as country folk using broad accents, which are kinda close to Hollywood Australian). So
Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:5, Funny)
As someone who moved from the US to the UK [colingregorypalmer.net], let me tell you that the British people here don't consider the language I speak to be English. It's American, and I better not forget it. : )
Is it offensive to "adopt" an accent? (Score:3, Interesting)
When Dick van Dyke adopted a "cockney" accent in Mary Poppins, he was beloved by Americans but panned by the English. Yet most people didn't realize that Monty Python's Terry Gilliam wasn't English and that his accent wasn't natural, or if they did, they didn't hold it against him. For years, I thought Peter Jennings, who was based in London for ABC news for many years, was British because he spoke with an accent at that time.
If you adopted an English accent,
a) Would the British
Re:Is it offensive to "adopt" an accent? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you adopt my accent well enough, then I won't see it as faking my accent, I'll see it as losing your accent, and the extent to which I see it as losing your accent depends on how well you adopt mine.
However, if your attempt at adopting my accent is based on cliches and generalisations of what my accent sounds like, then it will sound wrong to me, and probably be offensive, as it will seem like you're making fun of it.
I
Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:2)
who's got the accent now? (Score:2)
Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:3, Interesting)
I shared a flat with 5 UK citizens while at university in Scotland. We all had accents. There was a Glaswegian accent, a northern highlands accent, a Mancunian accent (i.e. Manchester), a Birmingham(?)-by-way-of-Australia accent, an East London accent, an
Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev (Score:2)
The problem with this analysis is that American English started to diverge from the mother tongue at a point when British English didn't sound a thing like modern British English. In fact, there are linguists who think the Southern accent sounds closest to how people spoke in the Elizabethan era -- which means Shakespeare should properly be perfo
Canadian Is The One English To Rule Them All (Score:2)
Then bugger off (Score:2)
If you don't like Americans, what are you doing here, you insolent swine?
-ccm
(PS. Before you reply, you should know that I was born in England, and thank my lucky stars that I am now an American citizen.)
Geeks Law (Score:2)
Re:Geeks Law / Role playing (Score:2)
Very curious methodology (Score:5, Interesting)
It might be useful for tracing people's origins when they are in an Anglosaxon country. But you might as well just ask them.
What would be more useful, perhaps, is a study of the relative differences in accents between native speakers of the "same" language, and how these differences come about.
Re:Very curious methodology (Score:3, Insightful)
If you eve
Re:Very curious methodology (Score:2)
I can't recognize southern France accents through english. It's very well known that the "singing" rolling accents found in the south of France just isn't compatible with pronouncing english properly, so either someone from there will speak english so badly you won't get a word of it, or he'll speak english properly and his native french accent will be filtered out by his very act of speaking english.
It's just harder to learn
Re:Very curious methodology (Score:2)
When I talked about recognizing the native language accent, I was talking about people who learned English in high school and haven't spent much time in an English speaking country.
Re:Very curious methodology (Score:3, Funny)
I can't recognize southern France accents through english. It's very well known that the "singing" rolling accents found in the south of France just isn't compatible with pronouncing english properly, so either someone from there will speak english so badly you won't get a word of it, or he'll speak english properly and his native french accent will be filtered out by his very act of speaking english.
"He had a minkey."
(obligatory Clouseau quote)
Re:Very curious methodology (Score:2)
I have to agree here with recognizing German accents in English--at least the more major variants. I'm a native English speaker, but I can instantly recognize if somebody is Swiss or Austrian or German based on the way they speak English. At a finer level though, it seems to get more difficult, especially since regional variation in English education tends to have a larger impact.
Re:Very curious methodology (Score:5, Interesting)
Getting speakers of English as a foreign language to repeat a standard English phrase. It's highly unlikely that this produces accents in the sense of two speakers of the same language would recognise. I.e. would a Flemish Dutch speaker recognise the accent of a Dutch speaker from Amsterdam when mangled through an English phrase? Somehow, I don't think so.
Probably not, for the same reason kids don't understand you when you baby-talk them. With kids, they hear the word the way the adults say it, presumably correctly. Then they speak it in their "I'm still learning to talk" accent. So I might say "later", but my daughter will say "waiter". I understand her because I've been hearing her trying to talk, and she understands me because it's my speech she's trying to emulate. But if I say "waiter" when I mean "later", she'll be confused.
Mind you, she knows that she's not perfectly emulating my speech, and she tries everyday to speak a little more clearly. This is the reason you don't baby-talk kids, and you don't imitate a foreign-speaker's accent when you talk to them. They won't learn the correct speech (assuming you're speaking it 'correctly', whatever that is), and most importantly for the foreign-speaker, they won't understand you. (It's less important that the kid understand you and more important that they hear the word correctly. Understanding will come with time, but breaking an accent you imposed on them will be very difficult, if not impossible) Also, mind you, it's perfectly ok to limit your vocabulary to theirs, if necessary, to get your message across. But in neither case will the person's vocabulary expand when you do that, so unless you're trying to say something of grave importance ("Your house is on fire! Call 9-1-1!"), you're better off going ahead and taking the time to teach the new vocabulary. :)
Re:Very curious methodology (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure. Why not? I'm an American who's been living in Paris for several months, and I've noticed the following things:
weird... (Score:3, Interesting)
I concur on your second point. I've never tried the third one, as I don't hang out with any of the American expats here, and even if I did they would want to speak English, not Norwegian.
Re:Very curious methodology (Score:3, Interesting)
I can answer the question in terms of Indian English. As an Indian who speaks English but not as a "mother" tongue, I've always been able to recognise the respective mother tongues of other Indians through English; that is, not that difficult to differentiate between English as spoken by a native Tamil speaker, and that spoken by, say, a native Hindi speaker (even if I don't neces
Re:Very curious methodology (Score:2)
For people living in non-english speaking countries, TV and music are probably the only sources of spoken english, so they tend to copy the accents.
Re:Very curious methodology (Score:2)
Her English was puzzling: grammatically flawless, French-accented, but with another accent mixed in that I just couldn't identify. It suddenly became forehead-slapping clear when we found she was on her way home from a year of teachi
Problems with study (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not a speech synth/recognition researcher, but I do know that generally, for speech research, much stricter constraints are placed on audio being acquired. The extreme variety of the site is nice, but I'm not sure that it outweighs the drawbacks.
Re:Problems with study (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Problems with study (Score:2)
Hmmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Japanese people can't pronounce L!! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Japanese people can't pronounce L!! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not particularly correct. Japanese has neither an R nor an L; it has a sound that stands somewhere roughly between the two (whether or not it sounds more like an R or an L depends on the exact speaker, their particular regional accent, and to a certain extent, their gender). And while Japanese speakers of English do not always or even consistently reverse the two consonants, as a consequence of growing up in an environment where the two sounds were conflated, they often have trouble distinguishing the two and have trouble remembering which tongue positioning they should be using for a particular word. Hence it is not uncommon to hear a native Japanese speaker produce an R instead of an L, or vice-versa, in English.
If you want proof of this, just look on any Japanese Katakana or Hirigana chart. These contain all the phonetic sounds in the Japanese language. notice there is no L.
That proves nothing, as Katakana and Hiragana charts contain neither Rs nor Ls; they contain, by definition, Katakana and Hiragana. On an English translation (and the key word here is "translation", as in close approximation of the sounds in english) of the (ra ri ru re ro) portion of the charts they are often presented as R sounds (as this is what they tend to sound like, especially when produced by male speakers in the standard accent), but it is not truly an R (or L sound), as the tounge is at a different position with respect to the upper teeth, and it shares elements in common with the R, L (and to a certain extent D) sounds.
Uhmm, no... (Score:2)
Of course not. Hell, I said as much in my post. Did you, perhaps, mean to attach this comment to the parent, and not to my post?
Re:Japanese people can't pronounce L!! (Score:2)
With Japanese speakers and the English L and R sounds, it can be a combination of not hearing the difference and not being able to pr
Re:Hmmmmm (Score:3, Informative)
It is like the French U which English speakers never get right because they don't even realize the difference (rue is not pronounced like roo, it is like the German u (that should be \"u, but no Umlaut in
Re:Hmmmmm (Score:2)
Not quite. They tend to use a (single) sound that we Engish speakers hear as an R when they want L and an L when they want R; we're hearing the differences, not the similarities. Same with some European dialects that sound like they're mixing up V and W: In fact, they're using one sound in between V and W for both.
They could learn from actors... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:They could learn from actors... (Score:2)
I teach juggling, too, and it's much the same way. Both really require an expert eye/ear to tell you what you're doing wrong. Some people are gifted and can pick it up without help, but most of what I hear from people using dialect tapes comes across as bad parody.
Quicktime!? (Score:2, Informative)
Anyone know how to get quicktime working in Firefox on Linux (Gentoo)?
Re:Quicktime!? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Quicktime!? (Score:2, Informative)
They use standart quicktime files with imapcm audio
get mozplugger or that mplayer plugin for your browser
Re:Stop being cheap (Score:2)
(long period of dumbfounded silence)
aawww...gawd....now I have to scrub my mind with bleach....thx alot for the imagery, my sic mind....
either way, I don't see the correlation between the archive and being too "cheap to get a mac".....or maybe there was a speaker at GMU who talked abo
Accents (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Accents (Score:3, Funny)
Not at all, it was an acute [wikipedia.org] mistake...
Re:Accents (Score:2)
Not at all, it was an acute mistake...
There are also those who say that circumflex [wikipedia.org] is a mistake.
No, wait... I'm thinking of circumcision [wikipedia.org]. Never mind.
I just got back to Oz from NZ (Score:3, Funny)
A foreigner was at a sheep farm watching them shear the wool off the sheep. Knowing a better way he said "Here, let me show you how to shear your sheep"
The Kiwi replied "I'm not shearing with anybody!"
Never let it be said that Kiwi's don't know how to laugh at themselves! (and for this instance we'll forgive them their rediculous accents
Bork bork bork... (Score:3, Informative)
In SweDia you can listen to 100 Swedish dialects recorded 1998-2000. Hurty flurty schnipp schnipp!
Meanwhile on YRO.slashdot .... (Score:2, Funny)
Don't forget these resources (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Don't forget these resources (Score:2)
Re:Don't forget these resources (Score:2)
Does anyone here speak l33t? [megatokyo.com]
Serious oversights... (Score:2, Funny)
Bill Shatner
Christopher Walken
Dana Carvey's Ross Perot
James Stewart
I have at least 4 accents combined (Score:2, Interesting)
International Dialects of English Archive (Score:4, Informative)
interesting... (Score:2)
hack patois (Score:2)
Not the most representative sampling...yet (Score:2)
Still if you listen hard and know the accents already you can almost imagine what the real versions sound like. I hope they continue to gather a more realistic sampling.
i'll give them two samples (Score:2)
Of course, get me drunk and I'm a prime candidate for a remake of Hee-Haw. If you're not a Southerner, and I'm drunk, good lu
Pirates ? (Score:3, Funny)
Does the study show if software pirates say "arr" more often than other people ?
Age and accents (Score:2)
My father grew up about twenty miles from where Strom Thurmond was born, and I about twenty miles from there. But after I've been in deep conversation with non-Southerners, you would never know I was from the South unless you caught a particular turn of phrase. My father has a gentle lowland draw
STELLAAAAAA!!!! (Score:2)
Re:quicktime??? (Score:2)
Re:Creative Commons.. (Score:2)
lack of real slashdot moderator accountability sucks.
Troll Moderation = Proof of Ignorance (Score:2)
Moderating a post as "-1 Troll" isn't always a sign of ignorance, but clearly it was in this case. Someone in apparent ignorance of Creative Commons decided to punish you -- and the /. reader community in general -- by using their moderation power to flaunt their ignorance. Another red letter day for Slashdot's moderation system.
As you accurately and Informatively pointed out, CC is a set of licenses, not one license. The person who submitted the story is apparently just as ignorant about that as the pe