How a Fake British Accent Took Old Hollywood by Storm
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
Fraser's lines and Grammer's interpretation probably deserve a place in the canons of American English accents and linguistics.
So I could imagine a single Hollywood director could possibly start a trend (if everybody'a speech center were as spineless as mine).
Nit-pick, but everyone speaks with an accent :)
(I'm not sure if you meant it that way, but I have met people who genuinely think that they don't have an accent and are 'unaccented', and it's just other people who do...)
This is in stark contrast to the UK, or just England, where you have an incredible amount of linguistic diversity in a very small geographical area. RP is theoretically "standard", but in reality it's a niche upper class thing.
So this was actually the kind of thing I was hoping to address with my comment. The idea that there's a "neutral" accent is, linguistically speaking, nonsense. That said, there probably isn't too much harm in it, in that if you're an American talking to other Americans there's probably not much ambiguity.
The problem is more that it could create the mistaken idea that, say, "General American" is somehow "normal" and therefore anybody speaking with a different accent becomes "the other", for whatever that may mean. It becomes a reference point to judge other accents against, when that's not necessarily helpful.
And there's a lot of accent prejudice out there... ask anyone who's gone for a job interview, for example, who's been very well-qualified but has an accent that the interviewer didn't expect (this can be due to regional or social backgrounds, or even gender – e.g. so-called "valley girl speak"/high rising terminal). Just something worth thinking about, that's all. I know I've dismissed someone before off-hand based on how they sound, which is not a good thing, and something I'd like to be more aware of myself.
The misguided part here is that thinking because it sounds neutral/unaccented to you means it is the "right" one. That path potentially leads to xenophobia and tribalism.
And you ended with another appeal to consequences.
I doubt you really know what accent you spoke with when you were three or four. As to why you picked up an accent somewhere close to SAE, it's most likely for reasons of prestige.
Not sure what you mean here. There are rhotic dialects which lack a rule of 'r' deletion and non-rhotic dialects which don't. It has nothing to do with letters. It has to do with the presence or absence of a particular phonological rule. The relevant feature most certainly is fixed in time, in the sense that speakers of non-rhotic dialects consistently delete /r/ phonemes following a vowel whereas speakers of rhotic dialects do not.
>I think the standard accent just doesn't alias nearly as much among all the vowel sounds, and I think that's meaningful.
This is simply false. There are non-standard dialects that make more distinctions between vowels than standard dialects.
That is not all that unlikely an explanation, really. Newscasters are shared figures of authority. But it may also be deeper than that. We watch sit-coms or soap operas and share their stories in a similar fashion we might trade tribal social cues. We interact at a very young age with educational TV programming like Sesame Street. There's a lot of pop culture jokes about many of us being raised by TV in the last several generations, but there is a lot of truth there too.
«And you ended with another appeal to consequences.»
Only because I read that you were inquiring about specific possible consequences. My apologies if that is not what you were asking.
Personally, though I tend to think of it as the "American Chameleon" accent as I, like the poster above, find that it trends to adapting to regional variances (often without a conscious intent to do so). I have a hunch that this is a feature of the "accent" rather than a weakness in the speaker, but this is merely lay speculation. It's weird to think of a defining characteristic of an accent being its flexibility rather than rigidity to preferred forms, but I think that helps account for why this "General American" accent is so common in America at this point, because it seems to be sort of an American "Borg" accent: your regional distinctions will be assimilated.
Not sure if Cleese had a point, but it's an interesting take on his fellow actor and that he finds "having one's own voice" important, to some extent.
"CLEESE: Yes, I do. And it just showed why he was such a wonderful impersonator. But it showed that in a very strange way because he'd overslept. And his chauffer Bert said, sorry, boys, Peter's overslept. I'll make you coffee. He'll be out in a bit. And we just sat there sipping coffee. And when Peter came out, he was still in his dressing gown or his robe. And he was apologizing for having overslept, but apologizing in a voice that was not his own. And suddenly, he switched into a rather sort of plumy upper-class voice and was talking to us like this as he walked towards us. And at a moment, he was talking a bit like that. And then he went into another voice, sat on the sofa and 10 seconds later, he was talking to us in his own voice. And see, we were the first persons that he'd spoken to that morning. He'd only just been up a few minutes. And we realized when Graham and I - Graham Chapman and I - sort of compared notes afterwards, we realized that Peter Sellers in the morning had to find his own voice.
DAVIES: So he wasn't trying to impress you. It's like somebody tuning in...
CLEESE: No, no...
DAVIES: ...A radio dial and finding the station.
CLEESE: There was a lack of real personality at his core. And the people who were very good impressionists are often rather like that. Similarly, people who write very good parodies but don't write such great original comedy, those people often lack a certain emotional life. They're very clever, their observation is good, but emotion doesn't inform their work in any way. So their work tends to be brilliantly observed, but not very - what's the word? - not very powerful. They don't tend to be terribly funny. They tend to be terribly clever. So this kind of personality type - a person who has a weak sense of their own identity - they're frightfully good at copying other people, whether it's other writers or other performers.
But we realized that Peter literally had to find his own voice in the morning. And to that extent, he was a sort of personality that he'd had to manufacture himself from different parts. And I - one of the Pythons was ever so slightly like that. And we could always tell when he had been spending time with one of his Beatles friends because he would have a slight Liverpool accent for the next 24 hours."
" . . . elocution class is wildly offensive to most of the modern linguists . . . "
What is it with this childish writing, being "deeply, wildly" offended at, instead of disagreeing with? Its the wrinting caliber of a young teen, and it seems to be popular.
This is simply poor writing.
That is exactly why "mid-atlantic accent" is called that[0]. It's halfway between American and British, and it's the native accent of somewhere indistinct where nobody is actually from.
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[0] Also, since apparently this needs to be explicitly stated in this ridiculous, Gell-Mann-Effect-in-full-force HN thread: "mid-atlantic accent" and "trans-atlantic accent" are synonyms. They are different words for the same thing. BOTH ARE RIGHT.
So I enjoyed the article but (for myself) didn't necessarily judge the historical account to be accurate. Just read it with a grain of salt.
That's also how I took the author's use of offensive i.e. it offended his sensibility that mid-Atlantic has two meanings (or whatever it was that he was offended by).
Speak to any acting coach: it's more frequently called a Trans-Atlantic accent.
Edit: be less absolute.
Even the Wikipedia article is titled "Mid-atlantic accent": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent
What is it about this article that seems to so efficiently be bringing the armchair prescriptivists out of the woodwork?
The grandparent comment is framing this as "that word is wrong, because in the context I've encountered it in, we used this other, right, word".
When, assuredly meeting whatever measure you might use to qualify this besides the GP poster's personal experience (... though they do seem to recognize its meaning well enough), "mid-atlantic accent" and "trans-atlantic accent" are synonyms.
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Like, here's how this conversation looks in a different domain:
Article: ... so I found this horrific spaghetti code for traversing the tree ...
GGP comment: What is with this childish writing, being "horrific spaghetti" code, instead of not-yet-organized? It's the writing calibre of a young teen, and it seems to be popular. [actual quote. this is the thread we are participating in.]
GP comment: This is incorrect anyway. Speak to any network administrator: it's called iterating
me: Even the wikipedia article says "Traversing a tree involves iterating over all nodes in some manner"
you: As wikipedia mentions, don't cite wikipedia itself. The first reference on that article prefers "iterating".
You still shouldn't cite wikipedia!
In that role, wikipedia is as good as any other source.
No explicit comment on the wider applicability of your rule in other circumstances. But when was the last time you critically reexamined it?
Wikipedia is where lots of good cites are collected; quote any single one of them and you get only that single one. Quote the Wikipedia page and you get all of them. What's wrong with people, unable to click through to those further cites? (Mouse broken exactly as the WP page opened, or what?) Judging from the "Even the first WP cite prefers..." comment above you seem to have managed it, so I really can't see what the problem with citing Wikipedia is supposed to be.
Is it OK to quote the Britannica? If not, why not? If yes, then why not Wikipedia too?
But, regarding your second quote... if you bring up the idea of a way of speaking being "better" or "worse" to a modern linguist, trust, me: you will understand why the author uses "wildly offended" instead of just "offended".
If the author had just kept it at "The entire concept of an elocution class is offensive to most of the modern linguists I know", that would not at all be sufficiently conveying the degree to which the idea of a prescribed elocution class is violently at odds with everything most modern linguists believe in.
Not all modern linguists are descriptivists; some are in fact prescriptivists. It is a pretty fundamental personality divide: some people take the world as it is, others as it could be (or ought to be).
Even just a single modern prescriptive linguist, without any of those other qualifiers. I would genuinely love to see it.
Granted, it's from 1983, but Dr. Nunberg is still alive & writing.
My own thought is that the question, 'is linguistics descriptive or prescriptive?' is as wrong as the question, 'is salvation through faith or through works?' Linguistics can both describe language as she is spoke and prescribe the best ways to speak. There's nothing inherent in describing current practise that obligates one to applaud that practise; nor is there anything inherent in prescribing better use that prevents one from recognising that other uses exist.
The logical end of stating that all that matters is describing language as it's used, and not bothering to prescribe the best ways to use it, as to both not end up meaning-stand @talk.
I'll also not point out the elementary writing mistakes in your own comment.
I have a lot of southern and mid western speech habits, and learning a rigorous framework for analyzing speech helped me get control over them.
His accent was his native Bristol at base, with Americanisms heaped on top, a Mid-Atlantic destination arrived at from the opposite direction of contemporary American actors. But with his short American a's and clipped cadence, to my ear his delivery often seems closer to that of his American co-stars than to that of his English ones. For example, take a listen to the trailer of The Grass is Greener (1961) [0], in which Grant plays alongside a cast from both sides of the Atlantic. Hear it?
(I'm American and have lived in England, by the way.)
I've never thought of Cary Grant's accent to be anything but English. I don't hear any American in it at all.
I find this funny, as the monophthongal /e/ and /o/ sound utterly alien to American ears. So much so that switching from diphthong to monophthong pronunciations for those sounds is a quick-and-dirty way to fake a Scottish accent (yes, very quick and very dirty; nobody will believe your accent is real though they'll think you're trying to sound Scottish).
Edit: Forgot to include gemination marks here. Should be /e:/ and /o:/ above.
Actors like Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins were instructed to drop their Welsh accents if they wanted to progress in their acting careers, as RP was the "right" way for an actor to speak.
Even in other professions, regional accents were replaced by RP. My father was told to drop his Welsh accent if he wanted to become a lawyer.
RP was only really dropped in the 1980s.
On a side note, is Clara Bow's story the basis for "Singing in the Rain"?
With further advances in audio capture, recording, processing, and playback equipment, vernacular accents were possible without risking nonintelligibility to the audience. James Dean's drunken ramble at the conclusion of Giant being a notable exception.
Yes, early films were shot square-on into the set, as one would film a stage production. That changed with The Great Train Robbery, which introduced a very large number of the set of camera techniques used in film since: long shots, close-ups, tracking, panning, dolly, cross-cutting, and other methods. All in 1903, by Edwin S. Porter.
All that was well established by the time talkies started becoming widespread, particularly with sound-on-film in the 1930s.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Train_Robbery_(190...
I have yet to find a dictionary that advises the intervocalic "t" be pronounced as a "d", despite the hordes of individuals who wax tumescently indignant when one doesn't. All I really want is consistency, but I do not insist. And I am aware that the Gods of linguistics profess that language is living and ever mutating and therefore never harmonious or consistent. I doubt, however, that this is an eternal intrinsic attribute. I'm sure I push too far, but such a view seems to me an appeal to authority, while the authority-figures are us unbeknownst.
1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/12/saying-like-study-f...
My family of heavy readers enjoys finding them, and the memories of arguing with teachers about the 'proper' pronunciations.
And sometimes realizing that teachers had their own regional pronunciations they wanted to impose (days of the week as Sundee Mondee...)
A common phrase used in Croatia to describe how to write something is to write it "by the Wolf" (since vuk = wolf), indicating that it is supposed to be read as written. This leads to transliterating foreign words in a phonetic manner where one doesn't need to know a particular foreign language to pronounce the word correctly. From your example, to write water "by the Wolf" we would write "votr." :-)
I'm not sure why something has to be intrinsic and eternal in order to be true, or at least useful.
One of the most notable exceptions, of course, being Red Leader, a British actor doing a fantastic rendition of a midwestern american cowboy
A) The Imperial Navy is a euphimism for the British Navy / Empire.
B) It was filmed in the UK with almost all UK actors.
The new Star Wars - none of the accents are posh really.
Just English accents, again actors, filming etc. - although - I think there was some attempt by JJ to keep it UK-ish in that manner, though I'm not sure.
Do we Scots get an exemption from the "evil Brit" trope - (OK apart from Begby or Fred the Shred, but there aren't really people like that in Scotland, honest).
;-)
So it's not so much a "villain accent" as it is a "Republic leadership accent", where the Empire is just a corrupted Republic.
Oh, nonsense. Sociolinguistic prejudices are still with us and it's only those of us speaking the prestige varieties of English who have the luxury of pretending we all speak naturally now. If you don't think so, ask some people their opinions of AAVE or "Ebonics." Or even a Southern drawl.
Emphasis mine.
Are you a linguist?
And in fact I don't think they do, since linguists are among the specialists who contribute to "accent reduction" courses, which seems like a modern name for the same thing.
You'd have to ask a modern linguist, not just anybody. Class signifiers in speech still exist, but modern linguists are not likely to endorse one way of speaking as better than others.
I guess I agree with your objection though, this statement is pointless. Its comparing modern linguists to '60s rich folks from the east coast. They don't agree, what a surprise. I think you are right, in that a better comparison would be '60s rich folks from the east coast to 2010s rich folks from the east coast. And I agree that you would find things have not changed as much.
I think the whole statement was a way to introduce that the author has been talking to linguists, and start with a really crude overview of their opinion of the whole thing before we get to the details.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_declension#First_and_sec... gives the declension for adjectives such as obscurus.
I think the web site gets it wrong because of "camera obscura" (Latin for "dark room"). Camera (modern French: "la chambre") is feminine so takes the feminine form of the adjective.