• Life Advice & Visual Arts Welcome Guest
    Posting Rules Bluelight Rules
    🌌 Share Your Dreams! 🌌
    📸 15 Years of Photo Contests 📸
  • LAVA Moderator: Mysterier

Linguistic practices you would like your dialect to adopt

I'm from a city that speaks really standard international English (Toronto), with British spellings minus the British accent. We enunciate every word except of course the name of our own city (Tronno or Tronna). Because we don't have the British accent the precision comes across as arrogant and corrective to a lot of people.

I wish our words had softer endings and fewer enunciations, but not as relaxed as say, the American south. Foreigners always want to practice English with me because they find I sound identical to the recordings they use to practice... which... is kind of depressing. lol
 
ebola? said:
This, for me, is a sort of reverse pet peeve. Spending so much time on an international forum, I've accidentally adopted some less-than-Americanisms that I like:

1. reference to bell peppers as "capsicums". I dunno. Having a single word just seems cleaner and more precise.

ebola
Click to expand...

Then try "pepper" perhaps? Sorry for the crazy suggestion. I'm English.
 
"No flies on you (mate)" for, "You are acting quite astutely."

ebola
 
i like "ya'aburnee" which is an untranslatable arabic word that means "you bury me" which is one of those romantic words which are just absolutely crushing.

johnny marr asked why 'lush' never really happened as a positive word. "that party last night was so lush." "that girl is so lush." i agree, seems fun.

i really like the way that Bill and ChickenScratch speak, they have a very distinctive southern accent but both are extremely different. Bill's voice is slow and drawly and warm and reminds me more over my homeland in Arkansas than the "stereotypical southern accent" which is Alabama/Mississippi sounding. ChickenScratch's voice is very twangy and sharp - rocky top Tennessee voice. Banjo voice. Tried to explain to a northern friend how they were different and she could just not comprehend. Didn't even bother trying to explain a New Orleans (what is that anyway?) accent.

I'm sure you've all taken that New York Times test where it tries to tell you where you are from based on linguistic markers. They couldn't place me, exactly but got pretty damn close. I like that the thing in the middle of the road is "neutral ground" and that a "wolf wedding" or "wolf birth" are distinctive and I don't think I'd want everyone to adapt them.
 
Haha I took that test, and it was pretty accurate for me. It pointed out Springfield and Kansas City, Missouri, and Overland Park, Kansas. I am from Tulsa originally, which is a part of Oklahoma that identifies more with the mid-west than with the south-west, so it makes quite a bit of sense.
 
Shimmer.Fade said:
You know this one! Cajun, na. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cajun_English

I love Cajun english, and the people are freaking great, if a bit backwards at times.
Click to expand...

no not that one, i mean new orleans. it's one of the hotbeds for linguists because it's incredibly wide ranging, even from street to street.

AmericanEnglishDialects.png


there are five "cajun" accent examples listed here, and then 20 different ones for the city of new orleans.

http://aschmann.net/AmEng/#Au_Louisiana

Shimmer.Fade said:
Haha I took that test, and it was pretty accurate for me. It pointed out Springfield and Kansas City, Missouri, and Overland Park, Kansas. I am from Tulsa originally, which is a part of Oklahoma that identifies more with the mid-west than with the south-west, so it makes quite a bit of sense.
Click to expand...

I was born like an hour away from Tulsa in NW Arkansas. It's triangulation points for me were Lubbock, Texas, New Orleans, Louisiana and Jackson, Mississippi. I thought those were pretty good points for me.
 
ebola? said:
This, for me, is a sort of reverse pet peeve. Spending so much time on an international forum, I've accidentally adopted some less-than-Americanisms that I like:

1. reference to bell peppers as "capsicums". I dunno. Having a single word just seems cleaner and more precise. On the other hand, capsicums contain no capsaicin.
2. reference to things having gone awry as "having gone pear-shaped". I dunno, I just like it.

ebola
Click to expand...
I call different types of chili peppers different names like chili/aji Arbol, Piquin, Habanero, Mirasol, Poblano, Serrano, Hatch, etc.

I use different accents or dialects based on languages I know.

Where is the link to the article in the New Yorker about translators? Or the link to the article and test in the NY Times?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top