From jimc@MATH.UCLA.EDU Thu Jun 01 09:01:09 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 6334 invoked from network); 1 Jun 2000 16:01:08 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by m4.onelist.org with QMQP; 1 Jun 2000 16:01:08 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO bach.math.ucla.edu) (128.97.4.246) by mta1 with SMTP; 1 Jun 2000 16:01:08 -0000 Received: from simba.math.ucla.edu (root@simba.math.ucla.edu [128.97.4.125]) by bach.math.ucla.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id JAA12971; Thu, 1 Jun 2000 09:01:07 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (jimc@localhost) by simba.math.ucla.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id JAA00334; Thu, 1 Jun 2000 09:01:07 -0700 X-Authentication-Warning: simba.math.ucla.edu: jimc owned process doing -bs Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2000 09:01:07 -0700 (PDT) To: John Cowan Cc: "Alfred W. T|ting" , "lojban@onelist.com" Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Chinese names In-Reply-To: <393673F7.31AABBFB@reutershealth.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII From: "James F. Carter" 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 UCLA-Mathnet; 6115 MSA; 405 Hilgard Ave.; Los Angeles, CA, USA 90095-1555 Internet: jimc@math.ucla.edu (finger for PGP key) UUCP:...!{ucsd,ames,ncar,gatech,purdue,rutgers,decvax,uunet}!math.ucla.edu!jimc