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How a Fake British Accent Took Old Hollywood by Storm

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Re: How a Fake British Accent Took Old Hollywood by Storm

#31

Post by TillE »

Osmium wrote: post #30
matt4077 wrote: post #8

Whenever I'm traveling in areas where people speak with an accent (either english or my native language), I can't stop myself from imitating it. Really badly. After a week or so I'm terribly annoyed by the sound of my own voice. It has even happened when someone was visiting, and acting in some sort of leadership role with a lot of speaking time. So I could imagine a single Hollywood director could possibly start a t…

> Whenever I'm traveling in areas where people speak with an accent 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...)

But there's a neutral General American which a majority(?) of Americans speak, with very minor variations. Most accents that deviate strongly from it are slowly dying out.

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.

Re: How a Fake British Accent Took Old Hollywood by Storm

#32

Post by eth0up »

As a younger creature I had a minor speech complex which at some early point I became conscious of, excessively so. Tormented by the inconsistencies of vowels and consonants in english, I began experimenting with enunciation in grievous violation of convention. In what according to many linguists might be my own stubborn idiocy, I picked a fight with the intervocalic "t", which most Americans pronounce as a "d", e.g. water, little, or i.e. compu(d)er. Some force far less lenient than OCD thereafter compelled me to pronounce the intervocalic "t" as an actual "t", rather than "d". Such enunciation happens to be common in British english. The effects of this compulsion range from public curiosity regarding my origins, to accusations of petty affectation and artificiality. My meager sum of friends might imply a multitude of things, but none of them would dare say I was groveling for more. As for linguists, I adore Mr Pinker and a few others, but can muster no admiration for the notion that prodigious use of discourse-particles indicates conscientiousness[1], particularly the use of "like", which I observe ubiquitously used as punctuation, elocutionary wildcards, and thoughtless substitutions for thoughtfulness and basic articulation. I lack the bravery to willfully incur the wrath of linguistic titans such as Pinker, but I'll have self-definition however fake I seem. If a person's early years are spent in a ghetto where words are spoken one way, but circumstance transports that person to another ghetto where words are spoken differently, must they choose between either/or lest they be deemed "fake" for speaking in accordance with their own ideal? I suggest more scrutiny be placed upon the audience and less on the speaker. This procedure might influence critical-thinking while decreasing the volatility inherent in a system where listeners are trained to reject the unfamiliar and embrace the familiar, i.e cognitive bias, etc.

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...

Re: How a Fake British Accent Took Old Hollywood by Storm

#33

Post by pash »

dirtbox wrote: post #19
pash wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His accent, however, was not.

I'm British which I think qualifies me to say it very much was. He had a few inflections of the period, but there's no mistaking it.

I won't tell you what you hear, but his manner of speaking is often held out as an example of Mid-Atlantic diction, albeit an idiosyncratic one—Cary Grant spoke like Cary Grant.

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.)

0. https://youtu.be/JpCm22wh6qQ

Re: How a Fake British Accent Took Old Hollywood by Storm

#34

Post by SiVal »

Avshalom wrote: post #3

How did that many words get used with out once calling it the "Trans-Atlantic Accent"?

Decades ago, I remember it being called the "Mid-Atlantic accent". It was a joke, because it was an artificial accent. The name suggested both a blend of US and England, but also suggested, tongue in cheek, that it was the way people who lived in the middle of the Atlantic (in other words, nobody) actually spoke.

Re: How a Fake British Accent Took Old Hollywood by Storm

#35

Post by logicallee »

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #13

" . . . sometimes called the Mid-Atlantic Accent, which is deeply offensive to those, like me, from the actual Mid-Atlantic . . . " " . . . 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.

I didn't find the author credible because of their statements going back 'centuries' ("Skinner created one of the most non-neutral accents in the past few centuries" repeated somewhere else in the article which I didn't find just now), but despite this I found it interesting. I looked for youtube clips from several films mentioned, to come to my own conclusion. They matched what the author reports.

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.

Re: How a Fake British Accent Took Old Hollywood by Storm

#36

Post by ArkyBeagle »

Osmium wrote: post #30
matt4077 wrote: post #8

Whenever I'm traveling in areas where people speak with an accent (either english or my native language), I can't stop myself from imitating it. Really badly. After a week or so I'm terribly annoyed by the sound of my own voice. It has even happened when someone was visiting, and acting in some sort of leadership role with a lot of speaking time. So I could imagine a single Hollywood director could possibly start a t…

> Whenever I'm traveling in areas where people speak with an accent 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...)

I have been told that the least accent is the flat Nebraska pronunciation of say, Johnny Carson. I believe it's called General American. It's at least semi-mythic - but some variation of it is used frequently in broadcast.

Re: How a Fake British Accent Took Old Hollywood by Storm

#37

Post by ewzimm »

eth0up wrote: post #32

As a younger creature I had a minor speech complex which at some early point I became conscious of, excessively so. Tormented by the inconsistencies of vowels and consonants in english, I began experimenting with enunciation in grievous violation of convention. In what according to many linguists might be my own stubborn idiocy, I picked a fight with the intervocalic "t", which most Americans pronounce as a "d", e.g.…

I did the same thing when I was younger. There's still some of it left over, but the embarrassment of being a teenager definitely normalized it. I learned to read when I was pretty young, before I was exposed to a lot of words in speech. I also watched a lot of TV, and people spoke with different accents. Since there wasn't any authoritative way to say things, I preferred to say them how they looked on paper.

Re: How a Fake British Accent Took Old Hollywood by Storm

#38

Post by [deleted] »

flanbiscuit wrote: post #26
neffy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mermaid infiltration style? Colour me also more than slightly intrigued by this idea of being from the "actual Mid-Atlantic"- which was an ocean last time anybody checked.

I was under the same impression. I thought they called it the "mid-atlantic" accent because it was halfway between the US and British accent. Boy do I feel stupid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_states

[deleted]

Re: How a Fake British Accent Took Old Hollywood by Storm

#39

Post by foobarian »

eth0up wrote: post #32

As a younger creature I had a minor speech complex which at some early point I became conscious of, excessively so. Tormented by the inconsistencies of vowels and consonants in english, I began experimenting with enunciation in grievous violation of convention. In what according to many linguists might be my own stubborn idiocy, I picked a fight with the intervocalic "t", which most Americans pronounce as a "d", e.g.…

I think you would be a fan of these two guys [1] [2] who championed phonemic spelling. And in fact, Vuk is credited with getting Yugoslav writing to be phonemic.

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." :-)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Christoph_Adelung

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuk_Karad%C5%BEi%C4%87

Re: How a Fake British Accent Took Old Hollywood by Storm

#40

Post by cgio »

DonaldFisk wrote: post #18
StavrosK wrote: post #16

Completely off-topic, but does Latin have genders? Is "Atlas" feminine there? "Atlas obscura" sounds very wrong to me, I imagine it should be "Atlas obscurus".

Well spotted. Latin has three genders, and Atlas is listed as masculine in all of the online dictionaries listed here: http://www.lexilogos.com/english/latin_dictionary.htm so it should indeed be Atlas obscurus.

Or Atlas obscurae?
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