Re: Learnin' 'em good (was Labiovelars versus Palatals + Labiovelar

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:

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> --- On Sun, 11/2/08, tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
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> . . .
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> > I remember as a kid at the age where everything has to be correct
> > and everything else is intensely embarrassing I went to Sweden
> > with my parents, and people talked to and I read signs in shops
> > and I could barely understand some of it; I remember the conflict
> > I had between the impulse to set people right as I would have done
> > remorselessly with someone who spoke a ridiculous dialect of
> > Danish, and my more adult restraint that these were people over
> > whom I had no say to correct them. The idea that other people's
> > related speech is in some fashion just as good as your own is
> > something that is forced upon you if you are a speaker of a small
> > language, one's immediate reaction is to deny it and continue the
> > shibboleth behavior which comes natural to you. Speakers of
> > languages with many speakers can afford that, also the general
> > tendency today to despise restraint as a sign of weakness
> > reinforces that behavior.
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> > Torsten
>
> I disagree. On the whole, Americans don't have problems with
> regional accents.

Exactly. Accents. The general use in the USA is to call any
non-written variety of English (they all are) an 'accent'. In the
South people speak with a Southern accent and in Germany people speak
with a German accent. As a consequence Americans think Europeans
'speak English' (somew of them, that is, of course!) and are shocked
when they discover they don't.

> And remember that English is much more inclusive than many "smaller
> languages" in that it includes what in Scandinavia et al. would be
> considered a collection of different languages I've been to
> Caribbean Central American and to San Andrés, Colombia where people
> speak an "English" that for the first 2 days was almost completely
> unintelligeble, yet it's still considered as "English" by its
> speakers and by all English speakers other than linguists, who call
> it Costa Rican English Creole and San Andres English Creole and see
> it as a sibset of Western Caribbean English Creole.

Linguists are a kind of Europeans. Most Americans don't trust them.

> I work with Africans who pronounce English as if it were West
> African Krio but no one challenges what they speak as "English." I
> work with people who come from countries where English is not a
> first language for anyone (AFAIK), such as Bangladesh and Ghana
> (where I'm told there is no English Creole), yet their heavily
> accented English is readily accepted as "Ghanaian English" and
> "Bangladeshi English."

Those dialects (in the European sense) are not written; that's the big
difference.

> I'm told that German and Italian "dialects" as a whole are more
> divergent than Continental Scandinavian as well, yet the speakers
> are considered as speaking the national language.

That depends. In Bavaria people people either speak Bavarian, which no
one else understands, or some citified version of it which is closer
to Standard German.

For Europeans, identity is in the language´. The idea of an ethnic
group without a separate language is incomprehensible to us. Like the
guy on the reservation yelling into the back room: 'Hey Jim, this
foreigner wants something <the language of the tribe>! Do we still
have some of those old tapers?' To a European, he's just another
American pretending to be different.

I remember The World Almanac berating the Danes for having destroyed
the culture of the Greenlanders since they now were fishing cod from
fishing and not harpooning seals. That made no sense to me since eg.
the subtitling in Danish of the news on Greenland TV had just been
abandoned for cost reasons, leaving the Danish workforce in the dark.
But it's the consequence of two ways of seeing identity, the European
in the language (but the culture may be replaced), the American etc in
culture (but the language may be replaced).


Torsten