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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4909 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 9 of 32 19 September 2013 at 5:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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The Glaswegian that Bill Bryson spoke to said nothing but "f**kle muckle f**kle muckle f**kle muckle...." as far as he could tell.
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| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4828 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 10 of 32 20 September 2013 at 12:56pm | IP Logged | ||
I'm a native speaker of English, but I had problems the first time I went to the Republic of Ireland (to an admittedly fairly rural area). It took me a few days to "get my ear in", and understand what people said without having to apologise and ask them to repeat it. So if you simply aren't used to some regional variations, don't worry too much. You would soon get used to them if you were exposed to them for (I guess) more than a few days. As to whether you were making yourself understood properly (or were people unfamiliar with your accent), that's a whole other issue, and not what you asked about, but clearly could have contributed to communication problems. I'm not surprised you had problems in Glasgow, by the way. Chester shouldn't have been so bad. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4828 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 11 of 32 20 September 2013 at 1:08pm | IP Logged | ||
Reminds me of a trip I made way back, when I was around 20, and was part of an exchange trip aimed at people of my age group to our twin-town in Flanders. The young people who mixed with us (who either had been, or were coming to our town in exchange) could generally speak English very well, but they apparently had some problems with some members of our group who spoke a heavily-accented, non-RP version of the local (English) accent around here, which was probably a bit stronger then than it is nowadays. I happened to be interviewed by a local newspaper reporter about the trip, and he asked about this, and was it some obscure dialect or something. I remember telling him "it's just an accent". It's possible that some of the lads were exaggerating it a bit for effect, or to tease some of the Flemings. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4828 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 12 of 32 20 September 2013 at 1:25pm | IP Logged | ||
:-) enjoyed that. FWIW, they say "yonder" or "yon" where my parents come from in Cumbria. (And a lot of other things that I don't say). EDIT: my Concise OED gives Middle English for "yonder" + cf. Old Saxon: gendra, Gothic: jaindre (jaindré? - not clear because of the way it's printed) For "yon", it gives: Old English: geon . I often wonder whether US and British English will one day diverge into more distinctly different languages. I think there are some pressures in that direction, and some against, so it is not clear at this point how it will play out. They already are very different, especially the regional variations, but still (sometimes with some time and effort) mutually comprehensible. That could eventually change, I believe. There may still remain (in the future) a common written (largely academic) language. I think we have precedents for that in language history. Edited by montmorency on 20 September 2013 at 1:49pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 13 of 32 20 September 2013 at 2:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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The word "yonder" wasn't unknown to me -after all, several languages have a three-step distance indication system, where modern English just has two steps (here and there).
I listened to the Appalachians and it was not too hard to understand them once I had decoded their sound system (i.e. learnt to wait patiently for the end of the vowels). Most of the local words they mentioned were also known, but just not with the same meaning - for instance "poke" instead of "bag". "Jasper" and "peckerwood(er)" would probably have been comprehensible in a concrete context (with the speaker in front of you to provide facial expressions). I wonder whether "si-goggled" has something to do with the word "goggles" for glasses, but in the Appalachian Mountains it apparently means someting like "skewed" or "crooked". OK, guessable with enough context - and here we even got the explanation served on a silver platter The simple fact is that all languages, dialects, socialects and other -lects contain unknown words. I also see unknown words if I try to read about unfamiliar topics, and it is not more problematic to deal with it in a dialect than it is when it occurs with an unfamiliar subject matter. And concerning the pronunciation: some languages are notoriously difficult to understand if you mainly know them from written sources, but dealing with aberrant pronunciations is a general skill which can be trained. You just have to find out how the wellknown words sound in the foreign dialect to tune in to the foreign speech. And any mischievous dialect speaker can tease a foreigner by exaggerating the particularities of his/her dialect. Edited by Iversen on 20 September 2013 at 6:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4707 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 14 of 32 20 September 2013 at 2:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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Dutch also has "daarginder, daarginds". Same root as English "yonder". Sounds a bit
archaic to me, but it's still used. Edited by tarvos on 20 September 2013 at 2:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4665 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 15 of 32 20 September 2013 at 2:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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"Wild Blue Yonder" is a reasonably well know phrase: it's even made it into a few film
titles. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4099 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 16 of 32 20 September 2013 at 3:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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If you find that you often have trouble with regional dialects or foreign accents, you may need to expose yourself to more material or you are not quite as fluent as you thought you were, but even those with native level fluency will stumble upon certain dialects. If it rarely happens, and you don't have to spend extended periods where they speak a dialect you don't understand, don't worry.
In Swedish I have been known to have trouble with gutamål from time to time, and I'm a native. When it comes to English, I remember having quite recently moved to Aberdeen (Scotland). I was walking my bicycle up this enormous hill and the wind was so bad I could barely move. A very old gentleman came walking down the pavement next to me, nodded in a friendly manner, and said, roughly transcribed: "Eesskrauwkin av-vy towdee!" I still have no clue what it was doing heavily that day, but I'm guessing from context that it had something to do with the wind. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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