h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

That's the point I was trying to make. Perhaps I pronounced it wrong.

Can anyone recommend a recording of dialects - just out of interest? Preferably a funny one.

and most of us think you are kidding half the time.

Well you asked for it http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/entertainment/chewinthefat/neds/neducation.shtml the always funny Chewing the Fat and their take on the West of Scotland dialect.

Gnomon - you overestimate me. I'm not clever enough to kid you lot.

Sorry, TC. My remark about kidding was aimed at jwf. It was in reply to something he said in his posting.

(relief)

Here's a quite accurate index to languages of the world. Not actually funny, though:
http://www.ethnologue.com/country_index.asp

I remember hearing that Europe (with all its different languages) has the least language diversity of any of the continents. Except Antarctica, of course. The American Indians, for example, had over 500 different languages and I believe the was a similar diversity in Australia.

For me father is pronounced the same as farther - about as long a vowel as you can get

Darling Pa, the jar of lard in the larder will guard against the haar if you are going farther than the end of the rather hard tarmac in that car. See you after for darts in the bar.

'ow's yer father, argy-bargy - what a palarver.

This is fun

Father Christmas? Bah, humbug!

jwf, the distinction between long and short vowels existed in Old English (ANglo-Saxon). The long vowels were pronounced with almost the same sounds as the short ones, but for a longer time. Then came the great vowel shift. THe sounds all changed and the long/short distinction became one of sound rather than duration, but for some reason linguists continued to use the names long and short.

So we have the short vowels as in pat, pet, pit, pot and put. The long vowels would by the same scheme be pate, pete, pine, pole and pool. But there are lots of other vowels in English, some of them long and some of them short. The a in father is not pronounced the same as the a in pat in the UK or Ireland. The a in father is long. The words b
pat and path have a short and a long a respectively in UK/Irish pronunciation, but I believe that they are pronounced the same in some American dialects. I can't speak for Canadian.

Gnomon, it is perfectly true that Europe is the continent with the less live dialects. I find two reasons to account for it: it's by very far the smallest continent and it has a long history of 'nation-states', trying to unite their citizens by spreading the use of one standard version of their language.
Wandrin'star: Poles do indeed tend to learn English eagerly, though no more than in many pther countries, but certainly the French side of me must have spoilt it.

Yeah.

That's the French for you.

Gnomon,

"The words pat and path have a short and a long a respectively in UK/Irish pronunciation"

In Northwest England (possibly excluding Scouseland) the a in "pat" is indistinguishable from the one in "path".

It's my understandng that German is now favoured in Eatern Europe with coming of EU expansionist policy...

My lengthy experience in Poland and Bulgaria would suggest otherwise. My German is infinitely better than my Polish, but conversations in both Gdansk and Szczecin(on the German border) went:
WS:Sprechen sie Deutsch? Pole: Nein
I got canny and switched to :
WS Do you speak English? Pole:Zprochem, WS:Perhaps Deutsch? Pole:Ja,naturlich.
In Bulgaria I actually taught some of the time in German, but outside the classroom nobody "understood" it. Did better with miming and the words for "Sorry, I don't speak Bulgarian, I'm English"WWII casts a long shadow

may be interested to know that the web page referred to in 5723 mentions 'dugs baws' in the introduction. Is one of you responsible for it under an assumed name?

It may be true that there are less dialects on the continent, but they do exist. Some German friends of ours have commented how folk in Northernmost Germany are relatively unintelligible to those in Bavaria.

The Irish language, Gaelic, has three main dialects. These use entirely different vocabulary as well as pronunciation although the grammar is almost exactly the same.