Hey everyone, I'm the author of the post. I'm a longtime HN lurker, so I was very excited to see it shared here. I've really enjoyed reading the discussion.
A quick disclaimer: I have zero background in linguistics. The only materials I used for research were Wikipedia and Google Books (http://books.google.com/books?id=ia5tHVtQPn8C). Moreover, this is nothing more than a short post on my personal blog. So, don't expect an academic paper on the subject. ;)
As a non-Dutch speaker living in Belgium, I find Flemish much nicer to listen to than "real" Dutch too. :-)
Is there really that much of a difference between Flemish and Dutch?
It depends. Some Flemish dialects are nearly unintelligible for a speaker of standard Nothern Dutch, but standard Flemish and standard Nothern Dutch are fairly similar. Which isn't surprising because standard Nothern Dutch was heavily influenced by the Flemish of well to do Belgians that fled to the North during the sixteenth century.
Same for Spanish, Spanish as spoken in Colombia is very crisp and precise, Spanish spoken in Spain much less so.
Spanish from Spain sounded really ... almost guttural to me the first time I heard it. Plus they do that lisp thing - thinco instead of sssinco. I think I prefer the new-world variety.
And their best player at the world cup, David Villa's name is correctly pronounced Dabid Biya
I read somewhere that before 1960 less than 50% of italians spoke Italian.
Here in the Veneto, the former Republic of Venice, the dialect is still very alive and well, and in many situations is more prevalent than Italian. And it really is quite different than Italian in many ways: "She's a beautiful girl" Italian: E` una bella ragazza. Venetian Dialect (at least one version of it): Xe na bea tosa. Lots of words change, and even the grammar a bit. Indeed, with many italian "dialects" it's q…
well as there are probably not many venetians present you might as well translate 'xe un mona' for us
I'm pretty sure you're thinking of the Great Vowel Shift, but as far as we know that occurred naturally, not as a direct result of any royal dictate. At any rate, it was basically over by the time the American colonies got going. The oldest colonies might have been affected to some degree, but my (strictly amateurish) feeling is that it doesn't really fit as the main explanation (except in that the English accent was…
Just to add to this, the Great Vowel Shift happened at around the time of Chaucer, which is why it takes a slight mental adjustment to read his text (well worth it though, the guy is hilarious once you get on his wavelength). Shakespeare used modern English.
The Great Vowel Shift happened after Chaucer, but was mostly complete by Shakespeare's time. One important change in vowels that didn't happen yet by Shakespeare's time was the unrounding of short u, that is, the modern sound in words like cut, but, knuckle, lust, blood, etc. All those words sounded like "put" during Shakespeare's time, and of course move/love was a real rhyme.
Interestingly, it's also hypothesized that Brazilian Portuguese is closer to Portuguese proper 500 years ago than Portuguese proper today. The fact that the Portuguese spoken in former Portuguese colonies in Africa sounds more Brazilian Portuguese than Portuguese proper suggests the hypothesis is right. Moreover, Portuguese poetry of the Renaissance period only makes sense phonetically if spoken with a Brazilian acce…
For what is worth, African Portuguese sounds more like European Portuguese to us Brazilians.
Portuguese poetry of the Renaissance period only makes sense phonetically if spoken with a Brazilian accent
In this case I wonder which Brazilian accent? I guess it would be Rio accent or some Northeastern accent.
In case anyone is curious the hear the differences, this page contains recordings of a Portuguese sentence spoken by people of several different areas:
I think Australia will be an interesting country to watch accent-wise. At the moment there are very obvious "city" (closer to British non-rhotic) vs. "country" (Steve Irwin) accents, but it's much harder to tell which city and which part of the country any particular Aussie is from. Considering the distances needed to travel between towns and cities, it'll be interesting to see if, over time, these accents become mor…
There are a few clues. Queenslanders will say 'castle' with a short 'a', rhyming with hassle. South Australians will always elongate the 'a' - 'caarstle'. Then there's the dialect differences - Victorians will go to the 'milk bar' to get some milk. Queenslanders will pack a 'port' to go travelling. It's true, though, it wasn't until I lived overseas that I could start to pick up the differences. And as for the city/c…
Yeah, I totally agree. You can tell some areas, most definitely! I grew up in Sydney and can tell Melburnians, partly because they can have a bit more of a nasal accent than us from Sydney. I bumped into some people from the Sunshine Coast today in Luxembourg and they had quite a Queensland accent (a la Pauline Hanson) but I couldn't really tell you what about it made it particularly Queenslandery. (The different names for things definitely makes it more obvious, but since we're talking about accents I didn't mention those :)
I do agree also on the city/country difference being education, you can definitely hear the "country" accent in the outer suburbs of Sydney, for example. Still, it's the best way I could really describe the two, since that's more traditionally where they're from :)
I read somewhere that before 1960 less than 50% of italians spoke Italian.
yessa de rest spoka de broken english
The above comment of mine received a fair number of votes with the majority being negative. The comment was intended to be humorous and in my view if people downvoted because they were offended on behalf of Italians they need to lighten up.
OTOH if they downvoted becaust they thought it was not funny, fair enough. I don't mind because it's not my joke I heard it on The Simpsons
As I recall from an article in Time a while back, the Southern American accent is the most authentic representative of the pre-revolutionary war accent. The Northern American accent has been changed more by waves of immigrants (especially those coming in the 1890-1920). I've heard that the French-Canadian accent is closer to pre-Revolutionary French as well. It seems that those areas with the least upheavals are wher…
I recall from an article in Time a while back, the Southern American accent is the most authentic representative of the pre-revolutionary war accent.
It may very well be that Time reported that, as I have read that statement in various places, but I have also read disagreements with that statement.
It's actually rather unlikely that any current dialect of American English has any strict correspondence to the various dialects that were spoken in America at the time of the Revolution.
I read somewhere that before 1960 less than 50% of italians spoke Italian.
Here in the Veneto, the former Republic of Venice, the dialect is still very alive and well, and in many situations is more prevalent than Italian. And it really is quite different than Italian in many ways: "She's a beautiful girl" Italian: E` una bella ragazza. Venetian Dialect (at least one version of it): Xe na bea tosa. Lots of words change, and even the grammar a bit. Indeed, with many italian "dialects" it's q…
Another good example is Bergamo, a city on the side of the Alps, where people from higher part of the town has a different dialect from the people on the lower one.
On top of developing independently from the Latin, the dialects where heavily influenced by the different dominations each part of Italy had. North-west dialects for example have a strong French influence while in south Italy the influence is more Spanish.