NESSAholics.com
Other Topics => Completely Off-Topic => Topic started by: Holly on November 13, 2003, 07:38:15 pm
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my grandpa told me this story tonight and he said that during WWII one of his friends had to go to the hospital. The nurse was Australian and had a heavy accent, she went up to this guy and was like "Did you come here today?" but she said it sounding like "Did you come here to die?" 8O
needless to say this guy was shocked! not something you want someone to ask you, lol
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Wellll . . .
Considering the fact I don't have an accent and CERTAINLY not an Australian (or Southern) accent. ;)
No, but I promise I don't have an accent. Except, acording to Alexxx, when I say, "sentence" and something else I really don't know.
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thats impossible, everyone has an accent! its the way you speak, and if you speak you have an accent. maybe you dont think you have an accent because most the people around you speak the same way. but i'm sure if you were to talk to someone from scotland or somewhere with a scottish accent, they'd say you have an american accent or whatever.
lol... i learned this years ago when i was talking to someone on a plane.
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ye if ye tAk like me yull se whut a meen
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áççëñts
:razz:
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You ALL have accents! Honestly, if anyone doesn't have an accent its me. Hahaha, its big headed Rosie! No seriously, they say that the area i live in England is the area where English originated. So naaah.
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I looooooooooove British accents and Spanish accents!!!!!!!!! They're sooooooooo cute!!
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I looooooooooove British accents and Spanish accents!!!!!!!!! They're sooooooooo cute!!
When i went to America in the summer you could just see people's faces change when they heard your accent- it was really weird! When we stood in queues for things people would hear us speak and go "oh i love your accent!" i just DON'T understand it!!
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I looooooooooove British accents and Spanish accents!!!!!!!!! They're sooooooooo cute!!
When i went to America in the summer you could just see people's faces change when they heard your accent- it was really weird! When we stood in queues for things people would hear us speak and go "oh i love your accent!" i just DON'T understand it!!
haha it's because we are all soooooo obsessed with accents!!
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I looooooooooove British accents and Spanish accents!!!!!!!!! They're sooooooooo cute!!
When i went to America in the summer you could just see people's faces change when they heard your accent- it was really weird! When we stood in queues for things people would hear us speak and go "oh i love your accent!" i just DON'T understand it!!
haha it's because we are all soooooo obsessed with accents!!
*nods* it's the truth. it's because Americans are losers :wink: i myself find any accent whatsoever to be amusing and facinating. my friend has a british friend, and we made him read the first chapter of the harry potter book to us :oops: kind of sad, but you have no idea how much fun :D
i think it's because british accents sound so much nicer than american accents.
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No seriously, they say that the area i live in England is the area where English originated. So naaah.
Whoever said that would have to be incredibly misinformed about the orgins of the English language. It is a combination of many linguistic traditions, including the Celtic, Germanic, and Romantic. One can think of English as a form of Low German with a massive Romance vocabulary taken from Norman French. No one place can claim to be the source of English.
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No seriously, they say that the area i live in England is the area where English originated. So naaah.
Whoever said that would have to be incredibly misinformed about the orgins of the English language. It is a combination of many linguistic traditions, including the Celtic, Germanic, and Romantic. One can think of English as a form of Low German with a massive Romance vocabulary taken from Norman French. No one place can claim to be the source of English.
I knew you'd say something like this. There was a whole programme on it on BBC Radio 4 here- saying Wessex was a main source.
Oh and don't ever link English to German again in front of an English person- you will be beaten up! lol
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I knew you'd say something like this. There was a whole programme on it on BBC Radio 4 here- saying Wessex was a main source.
Oh and don't ever link English to German again in front of an English person- you will be beaten up! lol
Well, it depends on how far you want to go back. The begininngs of modern English start, as far as we know, in the 5th century A.D when a group of invaders came from mainland Europe. They brought a form of West Germanic with them. Some of the trappings of the Celtic tradition were integrated. So far, you see that the base language of English ORIGNATED ON THE MAINLAND.
Then of course, the Norman conquest eliminated most of the complex Anglo-Saxon words and replaced them with Romantic equvalents. The Enlightenment period brought many loan words from many languages....
And yes, I will link the English language to German. It happens to be one of the closest modern linguistic relatives to English, although Afrikaans and Dutch are closer.
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ohhh yes. On my AOL I have huge grant saying...you look lovely today...and you have letters!! OMG!! It's sooooooooo cute!! and and and I watch two weeks notice just to hear his accent. If only I could get me a nice Englishman someday....I think my life would be complete at that point.
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No seriously, they say that the area i live in England is the area where English originated. So naaah.
Whoever said that would have to be incredibly misinformed about the orgins of the English language. It is a combination of many linguistic traditions, including the Celtic, Germanic, and Romantic. One can think of English as a form of Low German with a massive Romance vocabulary taken from Norman French. No one place can claim to be the source of English.
you're both quite right. i never thought i would actually use the stuff i learned in my anthropological linguistics class. But your history is a little off. Normans yes, but not Norman French. Saxons. Wessex, Middlesex, sussex. etc are all anglo saxon terms for their territories in England. The names stuck. All forms of English are just vernaculars of this initial Anglo-saxon tongue. Sorry to be rambling but i just had an exam on this.
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Normans yes, but not Norman French.
What language then, did they speak? I was under the impression that the Normans spoke a form of Old French. Would 11th Century Norman French be more accurate then?
And I wasn't debating that the names came from the Normans. I know the names stuck from beforehand. Linguistically as a whole, I meant.
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it's very difficult to find an "origin language" because after a number of years (say a couple hundred) the language has mutated so much it becomes unrecognizeable. From what I understand from the film "The Story of English" that i saw in class, these Normans (or Angliii) spoke forms of Dutch and Frisian. These languages spread with the invasion of Great Britian, pushing Celtic, Welsh, Gailic, etc. to the fringes of the isles where some traditions still survive. You're right when you said that these Normans borrowed words from Latin, Romance languages and so on, but 90% of the common words found in Great Britian come from Anglo-Saxton language.
When you start to discuss the origins of modern English, that's when I side with Rosie. There is just so much evidence from Shakesphere to the King James Bible that the development of modern words and phrases originated in this area.
If you're really interested in this type of study a really good book to pick up is The Power of Babel by John McWhorter.
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it's very difficult to find an "origin language" because after a number of years (say a couple hundred) the language has mutated so much it becomes unrecognizeable. From what I understand from the film "The Story of English" that i saw in class, these Normans (or Angliii) spoke forms of Dutch and Frisian. These languages spread with the invasion of Great Britian, pushing Celtic, Welsh, Gailic, etc. to the fringes of the isles where some traditions still survive. You're right when you said that these Normans borrowed words from Latin, Romance languages and so on, but 90% of the common words found in Great Britian come from Anglo-Saxton language.
When you start to discuss the origins of modern English, that's when I side with Rosie. There is just so much evidence from Shakesphere to the King James Bible that the development of modern words and phrases originated in this area.
If you're really interested in this type of study a really good book to pick up is The Power of Babel by John McWhorter.
According to Dr. Harold Whitehall from Indiana University, only 15% of the English language comes from Saxon, as far as vocabulary is concerned. However, this 15% covers the most common words in the language such as prepositions, pronouns, common verbs, and conjunctions. Most of the stuff I have read tends to agree with Dr. Whitehall.
Sorry, I misread that. You said common words. We aren't talking words as a whole. So, I shall note that those 90% of common words come from 15% of the language vocabulary as a whole.
And I have read The Power of Babel. It's a decent explanation of the modern approach to the study of linguistics.
Oh yes, when I refer to a source language, I'm speaking mainly of structure in regards to case forms, sentence structure, conjugations, and the like. Not vocabulary.
Edit: A final note: Everything I have ever read on the subject of the derivation of English disagrees with the video you watched in regards to the language of the Normans. It is French. Linkage (http://french.about.com/library/bl-frenchinenglish.htm). And there are plenty more sources that say the same thing. I hesitate to say that the video is flat out wrong, but it may be.
If you wish to get a very good view of the evolution of the English language, an excellent book for the lay person is "The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way" by Bill Bryson. It seems like the person who wrote the article I linked to liked it too. :-D
One more edit: Here is some old English dated sometime around the 10th century.
Ic eom munuc, and ic singe ælce dæg sonfon tida mid gebroþrum; and ic eom gebysgod on rædinga and on sange; ac ic woulde betweonum leornian sprecan on Englisc ongemong minum oþrum manigfaldum bysgum.
If you read that carefully, you can probably understand it. Most of what is difficult there is where Saxon vocabulary has been superceded by Romance vocabulary and the older words are unfamiliar. English hasn't changed much since the Norman conquest. Read Chaucer's Cantabury Tales and you can probably understand the orignal manuscripts with a little work. Hmm.. that would have been a better example than the old English above... gotta find a copy....
Yet another edit: A passage from the Cantabury Tales.... (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-old?id=AnoGawa&images=images/modeng&data=/lv1/Archive/mideng-parsed&tag=public&part=1&division=div)
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8O
and who said the computer would make you stupid?
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According to Dr. Harold Whitehall from Indiana University, only 15% of the English language comes from Saxon, as far as vocabulary is concerned. However, this 15% covers the most common words in the language such as prepositions, pronouns, common verbs, and conjunctions. Most of the stuff I have read tends to agree with Dr. Whitehall.
Sorry, I misread that. You said common words. We aren't talking words as a whole. So, I shall note that those 90% of common words come from 15% of the language vocabulary as a whole.
And I have read The Power of Babel. It's a decent explanation of the modern approach to the study of linguistics.
Oh yes, when I refer to a source language, I'm speaking mainly of structure in regards to case forms, sentence structure, conjugations, and the like. Not vocabulary.
Edit: A final note: Everything I have ever read on the subject of the derivation of English disagrees with the video you watched in regards to the language of the Normans. It is French. Linkage (http://french.about.com/library/bl-frenchinenglish.htm). And there are plenty more sources that say the same thing. I hesitate to say that the video is flat out wrong, but it may be.
If you wish to get a very good view of the evolution of the English language, an excellent book for the lay person is "The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way" by Bill Bryson. It seems like the person who wrote the article I linked to liked it too. :-D
One more edit: Here is some old English dated sometime around the 10th century.
Ic eom munuc, and ic singe ælce dæg sonfon tida mid gebroþrum; and ic eom gebysgod on rædinga and on sange; ac ic woulde betweonum leornian sprecan on Englisc ongemong minum oþrum manigfaldum bysgum.
If you read that carefully, you can probably understand it. Most of what is difficult there is where Saxon vocabulary has been superceded by Romance vocabulary and the older words are unfamiliar. English hasn't changed much since the Norman conquest. Read Chaucer's Cantabury Tales and you can probably understand the orignal manuscripts with a little work. Hmm.. that would have been a better example than the old English above... gotta find a copy....
Yet another edit: A passage from the Cantabury Tales.... (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-old?id=AnoGawa&images=images/modeng&data=/lv1/Archive/mideng-parsed&tag=public&part=1&division=div)
ok, fair enough. It's sketchy when you go back that far trying to trace an evolution. And since you've read McWhorter you'd agree that he would argue that English is not the be all and end all of the Indo-European families, and there is no way of knowing the exact development of any language, which is the the opinion being taught to me. I tend to agree. Though I think that the intitial disagreement between you and Rosie was the development of modern English, though she only wrote English, which in turn spurred this debate. This is fun, I actually enjoy discussion like this outside of my class.
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*loves guys with brittish and australian accents*
:D
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*loves guys with brittish and australian accents*
:D
Come over here! I am considering going to America in my gap year, just to pick up fittays who like my accent! hee hee, and the boys here are rubbish!
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Dutch people trying to speak english sound horrible
LOL
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Dutch people trying to speak english sound horrible
LOL
I heard that once, quite humorous.
I love French-English and Slovak-English accents. Especially the Slovak-English. :wink:
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*loves guys with brittish and australian accents*
:D
Come over here! I am considering going to America in my gap year, just to pick up fittays who like my accent! hee hee, and the boys here are rubbish!
trust me!! i want to!! :)
i went to England a long time ago... but i was too young to appreciate it!
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I LOVE the scottish accent.i really dont know if i have an accent or not.I probably do cusmy first language is spanish.soo really dont know.Scott and Jamie can tell u.I dont know
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yah its right AmeriCan!