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

Really good point!

When you say 'save' a language, you should maybe distinguish between:

- saving the *knowledge* of that language - which is a good thing in itself, and easy enough today. (Yay for the bilingual grandsons! At least they'll have fun with it. )

and

- helping a culture keep going, one that has a specific language. That's something that might be harder.

And sometimes, all the speakers of a language just plain find it advantageous to speak another one instead.

Think about it: what did most people in your area speak 2000 years ago? 1000? Why don't you hear that language now?

For me, how and when did Irish become reduced to a few unusual words in my great-grandmother's vocabulary?

"Indian classical music has inevitably picked up a lot of western idioms."

When I read this, I imagined some Apaches eating curry while listening to Buffy Ste. Marie play ragas. I have a CD of Native American flute as reimagined by modern-day classical composers. I also have a CD of ragas from Benares.

Please let me know what kind of Indian you are talking about.

Paul, when talking to Brits, people used to say 'Red Indian' to distinguish. However, American Indians tended to object. (See other thread about sensitivity. )

You might try 'American Indians' - which is the preferred term of the educational people I write for - or 'Native Americans'. Canada as usual has an elegant solution: First Nations people. Graham Greene (Oneida) is a First Nations person.

The best take on it I ever read was by VS Naipaul. He said that he got so tired of explaining in Delhi that he was an 'East Indian West Indian' (grandfather from Goa, born in Trinidad) that he gave up...and told everybody in India that he was Mexican.

That seemed to satisfy them and made the author chuckle.

Now I'm wondering if curry goes well with fry bread...

I've read books by Naipaul. Good writer!

So, do you think the post was about First Nations people? If so, then my flute CD is an example of the way modern "classical" composers reengineer First nations music.

No, I think Recumbentman was talking about musicians from India.

I like raga. I also like Anasazi flute. And I suspect both are influenced by other musical traditions these days, don't you?

All musical styles influence each other. But some musical traditions like to rebel and try to distance themselves from others.

For example, the Great Highland Bagpipe, otherwise known as the Scottish bagpipes, has a scale which sounds out of tune to people used to the classical diatonic or equal tempered scales. But it was not always as bad as it is now. Analysis of bagpipes from a hundred years ago shows that they differed slightly from the classical scale, but not by as much as they do now. The seventh note in particular has been getting flatter, presumably in an effort to make the Scottish music more different from the standard scale.

A similar thing happened with the Ottoman Classical Scales which due to a misunderstanding in how they were described have been pushed further and further from the scales of Western music. Eastern musicians regularly put in really flat notes to make things sound non-Western, while the same scales as described by the Ottomans would have sounded very much in tune to our ears. They were almost the same scales as the Western ones described in a different way.

I wonder does the same effect happen in language - people exaggerate the differences in languages through national pride and the urge to seem different.

Curioser and curioser.

>> I wonder does the same effect happen in language - people exaggerate the differences in languages through national pride and the urge to seem different.

I wonder if this is a question about language or dialect?

Living in an area that has had a huge influx of 'transplants' from other parts of the country over the half century or more, the local accent is more mid-western than southern. When I was in school it was unusual to have more than two or three children in a class of 30 who had been born in the state.

After a short drive into the rural areas you could notice the local dialect was much more southern.

This might also be a result of national broadcast television and radio.

Is the same effect noticed in Britain? I remember I spoke with a naval officer in Pompey for several evenings in the pub and I did not know he was from Liverpool until he mentioned it. Then again it might just be that I am not that familiar with English dialects.

I remember in the book 'The Secret Garden' the children took delight in adapting the Yorkshire dialect into their own speech patterns, I think this was also a theme in 'All Creatures Great and Small'.

F S

The media have used a one size fits all pronunciation as a standard. People strive to speak in such a way to as to conform. Regional accents are disappearing.

Absolutely. This has been something I've tracked all my life. I was "born and raised" on the upper Texas gulf coast. Back in my childhood, there was a pronounced accent in the region. It wasn't as pronounced as the accents in nearby regions however. We were close enough to the metropolis of Houston to soften our accent. I remember the first few times I heard a proper East Texas accent and thinking these hicks might be from Georgia!

Then by the time I got to high school there was a pronounced difference between my accent and my sisters. And I know why. My sister had a much thicker "twang". She was much more socially adept than I. She made friends easily and gabbed with them ceaselessly. I, however, was introverted and loved watching "teeVEE" (note the accent on the second syllable.) I have a much softer or neutral accent than most people from this area. I described it as a "Burbank, Texas" accent as it was strongly influenced by the "neutral" affected accent used in so many TV shows filmed in Burbank, California. Gilligan, the Bradys, and the Partridges were my linguistic influences.

By the time my little sister graduated high school, our accents differed by a few thousand miles.

Since college, I've become more sociable and my accent has thickened quite a bit, but it's still much softer than most people from this area.

(But seriously, those folks from deep East Texas sound SO hayseed to my ear. I'm sure I sound the same to folks from other places. Egad!)


Oh, so back on topic. I would definitely agree that our evermore connected world is blending accents and dialects. Idioms, phrases, and accents spread and blend much quicker the more we see and hear each other across cultures and regions.

Some folks may try to counter this trend, thickening their accents or dialects, but they're a minority.

People blend with those they interact with and the more we interact across regions and nations the more we homogenize.

That's a great account, BG.

I don't know what you folks from the Gulf talk like - is it Gulf Southern, like Mississippi? Memphis uses (or at least, used to use) Gulf Southern, an accent I lost by moving away. Instead, I adopted Appalachian Southern - my dad's people. I used it until I went to university, when I cleaned up my act a bit for teaching. Now that I'm a writer and not a teacher, I can talk any way I please, so I'm back to sounding like a hillbilly. It's relaxing, and annoys the locals here in the northern Appalachians.

Bit darned if I didn't go and pick up a hillbilly accent in *German*. My prof said, 'Tell them you're from Siegen. Everybody there has the same speech defect.' (Siegen is in the Eifel Mountains.)

I'm surrounded by people with "Boston" accents. I don't talk that way at all, nor does my father, who has lived in Massachusetts for 96 years. My mother, from Michigan, infected us with a Midwestern accent, which is to say hardly any accent at all.

When I want to be silly, in the privacy of my home, I adopt strange accents that would make Sid Caesar proud. One that I'm fond of might be called "Gandhi and the Bandit," after the Saturday Night skit about Gandhi in a cross-country truck . The clipped Indian accent [New Delhi, not Little Big Horn] just sounds so right somehow , especially for singing.

Or I could be a high-born Englishman of no particularly specific locale. Estuary, whatever that is? Pip, pip, and all that .

No high-born Englishman would speak Estuary. It's the accent of the lower classes.

And David Tennant, when he's trying to be understood by ignorant people who don't understand Scots.

"No high-born Englishman would speak Estuary. It's the accent of the lower classes." [Gnomon]

Fine. I will just cobble some incompatible English pronunciations together, or imitate Carol Burnett imitating Queen Elizabeth.

"He's all hollow!"

Gnomon: now you know why TV viewers in the US think Tim Roth's accent is 'classy'...

There's no accounting for taste -- but then, I've never tasted an accountant.

The city of Boston has one of the most distinctive accents in the US. Once you have heard it a few times you do not have to ask the speaker where they are from, I have several friends and neighbours from Boston, and I do not hold this against them. An interesting fact is that just to the north of the Charles River is the town of Cambridge, the location of Harvard University. Their accent is totally different, usually considered upper class and can best be heard in the speeches of US President John F Kennedy.

After ten hours or so on the road I drove into Boston, Being very tired, and in rush hour traffic, I pulled into a service station in Cambridge to ask for directions.

The mechanic, in grease covered overalls, climbed out from under the car he was working on and gave me directions with the perfect inflections I had always associated with our former President.

I was once at a living history event where a family came up who did not speak any English. One of our people was fluent in Spanish, his wife being Puerto Rican, and he talked with them for a half-hour or so. My own knowledge of the language is small, but I can usually pick out a word or two from time to time, so I listened from the side.

After they left he made a comment about something the 'Cuban' family had said. I asked him how he knew they were Cuban as I had not heard any place names in their conversation. He replied 'by their accent, of course'

I think a lot of us struggle enough to just understand the words of another language that we ignore regional differences.

Dmitri has already told us there are Germans who talk like Appalachian Hill-Billies



F S

About the "American" "Indian" -- a double misnomer --

I'm an Amerind, nominally,
By combining two names, as you see.
But the Merchant of Florence
And Hindustan's torrents
Mean equally little to me.

America in named for Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine merchant who mapped the east coast of South America and established that it was not, alas, a part of India after all; India itself is named for the Indus River which flows through Hindustan (to which it also gives its name).

Speaking of Indian classical music, it was the classical music of India I meant.

"I wonder does the same effect happen in language - people exaggerate the differences in languages through national pride and the urge to seem different." ~Gnomon.

This is not only true of humans, but of other species as well. In humans it is seen in the fact that Portuguese as spoken in Brazil is closer in sound to Spanish than the Portuguese now spoken in Portugal, bordering on Spain. They have exaggerated the differences.

In other species, the effect is described in fascinating detail in Dawkins's brilliant The Ancestor's Tale, where you read how two species can be kept distinct purely by the pitch of their mating call, a pitch distinction that is disregarded in places where only one of the two species is prevalent.