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Re: [lojban] Re: Chinese names



On Thu, 1 Jun 2000, John Cowan wrote:
> For English, at least, there is no other choice, as English lacks any
> widely accepted standard pronunciation, in the sense of a single
> pronunciation which cultivated speakers aspire to using and learn
> to approximate.  Cultivated Bostonians, Londoners, and Texans don't
> sound anything alike, nor do they desire to.  (If you train
> to become an actor or a TV news reader, you will be taught a specific
> national non-regional accent, but that is specialized to those occupations.)

When I attended grad school at the State University of New York at Stony
Brook, there was a guy in the dorm who sounded perfectly normal, not a
trace of New Yorkish accent.  I was astonished when he told me he had been
born and had grown up in Hicksville, on Long Island, not 20 miles from the
school.  I think pervasive exposure of people, particularly children, to
(American) English "stage speech" heard on TV and radio is totally
homogenizing USA regional dialects, and I imagine something similar is
happening in every coherent broadcast market.  Nobody speaks proper New
Yorkish any more.

Not that I'm too sad about that particular congeries of dialects.  Flames
to /dev/null, please :-)
 
James F. Carter        Voice 310 825 2897	FAX 310 206 6673
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