Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is Your English Accent British or American?

myaccent.cambridgeconsultants.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 144 posts

Re: Is Your English Accent British or American?

#121

Post by mcgarnagle »

coldtea wrote: post #114
forinti wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said the sentence in Spanish and it gave me 62% British. I tried Portuguese, and it gave me 55% British.

The NN (I guess) checks the accent, so it doesn't care about the content of the words. One could speak Spanish in a more or less British accent.

Yes, it would break your words into phonetics, and analyzes whether it's "american" or "british" phonetics which occur more frequently in the dialog. Unless well practiced, your phonetics likely cary over into other languages that you speak.

Re: Is Your English Accent British or American?

#122

Post by EGreg »

antirez wrote: post #120
baxtr wrote: post #117

Side question. I’ve been always wondering: how has the American accent evolved? Where does it come from? Is there any region in Britain that sounds American? Or did just evolve independently as a mix of British and something else? And: since when is it that different? Did Lincoln had an American accent?!

It's somewhat the contrary if I remember correctly. It's the British accent that changed after the split.

How did Received Pronunciation catch on? It seems that Britain is chock-full of different accents, especially from the north, but all the English ones sort of contain elements of RP, like the unpronounced R's (Irish and Scottish don't.)

Re: Is Your English Accent British or American?

#123

Post by yardie »

baxtr wrote: post #117

Side question. I’ve been always wondering: how has the American accent evolved? Where does it come from? Is there any region in Britain that sounds American? Or did just evolve independently as a mix of British and something else? And: since when is it that different? Did Lincoln had an American accent?!

The Welsh sound eerily similar to the southern American twang. Except for colloquial words you wouldn’t think it was out of place if you heard them in Kentucky.

Re: Is Your English Accent British or American?

#124

Post by yardie »

EGreg wrote: post #122
antirez wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's somewhat the contrary if I remember correctly. It's the British accent that changed after the split.

How did Received Pronunciation catch on? It seems that Britain is chock-full of different accents, especially from the north, but all the English ones sort of contain elements of RP, like the unpronounced R's (Irish and Scottish don't.)

The split came about through formalised education. The British you hear today is upper middle class, noble English.

Similar happened in France and French Quebec. Modern French is formalised Parisian french. While Canadian French is country French, according to a very posh friend, the most educated quebecois still sounds like a country hick the first time he hears them.

Re: Is Your English Accent British or American?

#125

Post by twobyfour »

baxtr wrote: post #117

Side question. I’ve been always wondering: how has the American accent evolved? Where does it come from? Is there any region in Britain that sounds American? Or did just evolve independently as a mix of British and something else? And: since when is it that different? Did Lincoln had an American accent?!

They began to evolve separately as soon as the Mayflower arrived. And American accents have been influenced not only by a broad variety of English immigrants over time by also by immigrants from other parts of the world.

For instance, the "standard" (TV broadcaster) accent originated in areas settled largely by German and Scandinavian immigrants. The "New York" and "New Jersey" accents have elements of Irish and Italian and Yiddish accents, and New York accents were influential due to being common among entertainers through the middle of the 20th century.

And accents can evolve quickly. The New York accent you'll hear in films from the 1950s is very different from the one you'll hear today if you go deep enough into Queens to find strong accents.

That said, IMO moderate Scottish accents sound extremely similar to the "standard" American accent. I think it's actually that the cadences are very similar, which for me at least is what makes other strong British accents (other than RP) often difficult to understand.

Re: Is Your English Accent British or American?

#126

Post by jcranmer »

baxtr wrote: post #117

Side question. I’ve been always wondering: how has the American accent evolved? Where does it come from? Is there any region in Britain that sounds American? Or did just evolve independently as a mix of British and something else? And: since when is it that different? Did Lincoln had an American accent?!

There's not really any such thing as an "American accent" or a "British accent," particularly when you're looking at the evolution of accents. Accents tend to evolve based on regional tendencies; what people refer to as "General American" (effectively the Midwestern US, but not including the Northern Cities Vowel Shift) and "Received Pronunciation" are accents that lack any recognized regionalism markers, such as the Southern drawl or the New England non-rhoticism.

Accents tend to shift based on contact with other linguistic groups and mixing from different accents that levels out pronunciation. You'll note, for example, that Canadian has more in common with the US accents than it does with British accents. I don't know the historical development of accents very well, but some US accents (I believe the southern one in particular) are closer to 16th and 17th century English than modern British accents. This isn't necessarily atypical--modern Icelandic is the closest in pronunciation to Old Norse, while modern Norwegian is closer in pronunciation to older varieties of Danish. Small, isolated communities are going to be able to better preserve pronunciation in a dialect.

Re: Is Your English Accent British or American?

#127

Post by ZenoArrow »

antirez wrote: post #120
baxtr wrote: post #117

Side question. I’ve been always wondering: how has the American accent evolved? Where does it come from? Is there any region in Britain that sounds American? Or did just evolve independently as a mix of British and something else? And: since when is it that different? Did Lincoln had an American accent?!

It's somewhat the contrary if I remember correctly. It's the British accent that changed after the split.

I find that far fetched. It's much more likely that accents in the two countries evolved from what came before, without either staying the same.

Furthermore, there isn't such a thing as a single "British" accent, there are a huge range of accents in Britain, just like there are a huge range of accents in the US.

Re: Is Your English Accent British or American?

#129

Post by gilleain »

forinti wrote: post #103
tbabb wrote: post #66

It's hard to tell if the speech recognition is working, or even if the microphone is on. If I hum the star spangled banner, it rates me as 79% British.

I said the sentence in Spanish and it gave me 62% British. I tried Portuguese, and it gave me 55% British.

Reminds me of the analogy games described by Hofstader in one of his books.

Like "New Zealand is the Scotland of Australia". If i remember correctly, the idea was to take two pairs of countries and construct an analogous mapping between them.

So Spain::Portugal -> UK::USA in this case.

Post reply on HN