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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

#81

Post by hx87 »

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 doubt, however, that this is an eternal intrinsic attribute.

I'm not sure why something has to be intrinsic and eternal in order to be true, or at least useful.

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

#82

Post by kitd »

Funnily enough, while the mid-Atlantic screen accent was dying out post WW2, its English equivalent, RP, was being kept well and truly alive in the UK by the BBC.

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"?

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

#83

Post by nptatall »

neffy wrote: post #21
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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

#84

Post by WorldMaker »

TillE wrote: post #31
Osmium wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think a better name than "General American" is possibly the American Television Received Accent in that I think the key to the homogenization of a lot of the American English accent landscape is unintentionally a result of mass media consumption (primarily American TV) over a handful of generations now.

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.

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

#85

Post by arethuza »

BellsOnSunday wrote: post #58
arethuza wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Played by Guinness who was half Scottish and educated in Edinburgh and Mcregor who seems completely Scottish. 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). ;-)

It doesn't matter where Alec Guinness was born, he sounded about as Scottish as the Queen. Ewan McGregor's English accent OTOH sounds fake.

I was probably thinking of Guinness as Charles I in Cromwell.

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

#86

Post by zeveb »

nptatall wrote: post #72
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.

The first thing is obviously playful hyperbole, but I don't know about "childish". 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…

> 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".

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).

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

#87

Post by timthorn »

douche wrote: post #41
ewzimm wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was in college before I learned how hyperbole is supposed to be pronounced. I'd never actually heard a person say that (it's a little beyond typical small-town Maine vocabulary), so I worked for years under the assumption that it was hyper-bowl, rather than hi-per-boll-ee. I knew hyper, and I knew what the bole of a tree was...

Don't get me started on homogenous!

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

#88

Post by WorldMaker »

psyc wrote: post #76
Osmium wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But there's a neutral General American which a majority(?) of Americans speak, with very minor variations. 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…

There's too much appeal to consequences here. I'd rather see someone make an argument for why a set of pronunciations can't be canonical. I certainly know exactly which pronunciations are the "neutral" ones, even the ones I don't use myself. So how did those pronunciations receive their status? What does it mean for us to hear them as "unaccented", and why exactly is that misguided?

The armchair linguistics as I know it: Accents (and languages in general) are typically social, tribal. We use them as one of the markers of "our tribe" versus "not our tribe". Things that sound neutral/unaccented to us are things that sound like they come from "around us", from within our tribe. Things that sound foreign are clearly not from our tribe.

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.

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

#89

Post by nailer »

jewbacca wrote: post #74
nailer wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " . . . sometimes called the Mid-Atlantic Accent, which is deeply offensive to those, like me, from the actual Mid-Atlantic . . . " Speak to any acting coach: it's more frequently called a Trans-Atlantic accent. Edit: be less absolute.

> This is incorrect anyway 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?

As wikipedia mentions, don't cite wikipedia itself. The first reference on the site prefers 'Transatlantic' too: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/08/oh-old-timey-m...

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

#90

Post by jewbacca »

nailer wrote: post #89
jewbacca wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is incorrect anyway 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?

As wikipedia mentions, don't cite wikipedia itself. The first reference on the site prefers 'Transatlantic' too: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/08/oh-old-timey-m...

Key word: prefers.

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".

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