Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Chinese names

From: "James F. Carter" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2000 09:01:07 -0700 (PDT)

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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