ELL's Cabin

Damkerng T.

22:00

in Language Overflow, Jul 22 at 12:39, by Damkerng T.

I think it's a thing in Hollywood that bad guys usually have the BrE accent. :D

Anonymous

How did we end up with what we call Standard English, and why do people look down on speakers of other dialects? What does that say about people who learn the standard form as children and are naturally privileged (e.g. Henry Higgins) and people who have to work to suppress the language they learned as children and replace it with a version perceived as standard to avoid being looked down on?

Catija

@DamkerngT. I guess that'd be the equivalent of thinking that... um... creole? wasn't a written language? I'm not sure we have an English equivalent.

Anonymous

Sometimes people work to destroy languages and dialects.

Catija

@snailboat But where do you make a cut off between "correct spelling" and destroying languages/dialects?

In English, we make up new words all the time.... and a lot of them are regional. If someone asked me what a "bubbler" was, I'd never guess "water fountain" ... but that's what it is...

Damkerng T.

Hah! Bubbler can mean "water fountain"?

I learned a new word!

Catija

22:04

@DamkerngT. But only in New England, so don't go too crazy with it.

Damkerng T.

Okay. :D

Anonymous

Well, when I said "work to destroy languages", that wasn't intended as hyperbole. People really did and do try to wipe out spoken languages. In Japan, there's an indigenous people called the Ainu, and they have their own language unrelated to Japanese.

Anonymous

Japan's official policy used to be that Japan has no racial minorities and that the Ainu do not exist, and they were forced to use Japanese names instead of Ainu, forced to speak Japanese

Anonymous

And today the Ainu language is moribund (all but dead).

Anonymous

So politics can have very real effects on languages.

Damkerng T.

22:08

nods -- Also, Chinese writing system was unified by just one emperor, iirc.

Anonymous

In the 80s, there were only 15 native speakers of Ainu left who spoke it on a regular basis, and although there are attempts to revive it now, I'm not sure how successful such attempts can really be . . .

Damkerng T.

15!?

Catija

@snailboat That's really crappy of them.

Anonymous

It is a fact of life, though, that different languages and language varieties are simply not viewed with the same level of prestige. Regardless of whether it seems fair or not, anyone who natively speaks something considered non-standard (for example, African American Vernacular English) would do well to master the standard variety of the language as well

Damkerng T.

I think non-English speakers will become more and more bilingual (at the very least), my problem is I don't know how well they, the younger generations, will maintain their other first languages.

Anonymous

22:12

@Catija Honestly, I'm amazed at how many crappy things humanity has done in the last 200 years. History is really depressing.

Damkerng T.

I was surprised when I heard that most Australian speakers used to shy away from speaking in Australian accents in the public.

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Oh! I don't know anything about that.

Anonymous

Most of my exposure to Australian accents was when the company I worked for bought an Australian company, and they came over to the US for a while so we could get everything working together.

Damkerng T.

I think it was only about a decade that the movement for speaking in AusE in the public has been going on.

Catija

@snailboat Which is why I don't like it. :P

Anonymous

22:13

I hadn't really heard Australian accents much before then, and the memory stands out for me because:

Anonymous

On the first day, I couldn't understand what anyone was saying!

Catija

@DamkerngT. But we love Australian accents in the US...

Damkerng T.

@Catija Nice! :-)

Anonymous

On the second day, it suddenly clicked and I couldn't imagine why I'd had trouble understanding them.

Anonymous

My brain had adapted to how they talked, and it was no longer an issue.

Catija

22:15

Meatie is being meatie again. :|

Damkerng T.

As someone who like varieties of things, I like the variety of accents of English. I just wish that I could understand most accents a little more effortlessly. :-)

@Catija Uh-oh!

Catija

@DamkerngT. You'll get there eventually :) Just remember that even native speakers can't always understand each other perfectly if there's an accent difference.

Damkerng T.

Thanks!

Anonymous

There are times we can't understand each other even when there isn't an accent difference :-) A lot of people mumble, trip over their tongues, accidentally mix up a couple sounds . . .

Anonymous

@Catija That seems to happen a lot.

Damkerng T.

22:22

@snailboat Oh, and the recording quality too.

Anonymous

Oh, sure. I was imagining two people talking to one another in person.

Damkerng T.

I remember that the sound recording quality ruined Ong-bak when I watched it.

(And Ong-bak was in Thai, my first language!)

Anonymous

Sometimes things are recorded well, but then processed or mixed poorly, and sometimes they go through multiple layers of compression through coders that were never designed to be fed into one another :-(

Anonymous

Lots of stuff can happen to make a recording sound bad.

Anonymous

Sometimes I wish people understood some of basics of perceptual audio encoding.

Anonymous

22:27

People make stuff sound so bad on YouTube.

Damkerng T.

I think sound engineers are supposed to know how to do their jobs.

@snailboat Ah, YouTube.

Catija

1

A: Usages Of "Turn To"

You are correct, this is a usage of turn usually reserved to describe political or social changes. In the first example, the "turn to" social media is being used to abbreviate "recent trends indicating the rise in importance of" social media. In the second, the "recent turn to" conservationism ...

Really? where's your data saying that it's "less common". I see it everywhere.

Anonymous

@DamkerngT. Well, some AEs actually aren't very good. And a lot of stuff isn't done by AEs.

Damkerng T.

nods

Anonymous

Besides, think about audio codecs used on phones. Everyone's trying to save as much money on phone audio bandwidth as possible, so they compress it as much as possible, using codecs designed to preserve only the key portions of the voice and no other sound.

Catija

22:29

Don't even get me started on sound guys... do you have any idea how much time and money it costs to re-record sound when your sound guy screws up? ugh... it's horrid.

Anonymous

But then the phone company connects to another company that feeds it through another codec that compresses it differently . . .

Anonymous

And the sound is basically terrible on the other end and you have no idea why.

Damkerng T.

@Catija I guess it's easier to boost up the sounds than to add something that was missing!

Catija

@DamkerngT. Yeah... until you get the sound of every car passing outside and every step that everyone takes... oh, and while we're at it, every rustle of clothing and breath they take.

Damkerng T.

Ohhh... I see! Those sounds can be very annoying!

Anonymous

22:32

@DamkerngT. It's actually really tricky, because the ear notices easily when you add stuff (bump EQ up) but it's much harder to directly perceive something missing (like if you bump EQ down)

Anonymous

And if you want to add something back that's been removed, well, you can't necessarily

Damkerng T.

nods

Catija

@snailboat Which is why you always record "room tone".

Anonymous

So you might cut out frequencies from something, then later realize you shouldn't've done that, but now it's too late.

Damkerng T.

My TV (a Samsung) comes with 4 modes of audio: Standard, Movie, Clear Voice, and Amplify. The Clear Voice mode is curious enough. :D

Anonymous

22:34

@DamkerngT. I don't know what any of those things do.

Damkerng T.

Me either. I just know that they make the sounds sound a little different, but not sure how exactly.

Anonymous

Flat EQ, smiley EQ, mid-boost EQ, multi-band compression? ← random guesses . . .

Damkerng T.

Reasonable guesses, I'd say.

Anonymous

I'm always suspicious of any feature like that. I try to keep everything as flat as possible.

Catija

My dad just wants to get rid of bass entirely.

Anonymous

22:37

Wow! Poor bass.

Anonymous

That makes me sad as a bassist.

Catija

He is definitely not All About That Bass

@snailboat HA HA... only in TV. Apparently the ad companies add a ton of bass to commercials to make them seem louder... that's what he doesn't like.

Anonymous

Oh god, that does sound annoying. I don't usually watch TV, so I'm not really familiar with commercials.

Damkerng T.

@Catija Oh, I hate that too!

Anonymous

I do know about loudness shenanigans, though.

Anonymous

22:38

Loudness being the perceptual quality: how loud does it sound?

Damkerng T.

It's like someone hit the vol. up button some ten times suddenly.

Catija

@snailboat so, apparently they passed a law that said TV networks can't boost the volume of adverts, so they make the audio "fuller" buy filling in bass.

Damkerng T.

And If I turned the volume down, I wouldn't hear anything much when the program resumed.

Catija

@DamkerngT. Yeah, it's pretty horrid.

Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act

The Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act (H.R. 1084/S. 2847) (CALM Act) requires the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to bar the audio of TV commercials from being broadcast at louder sound volumes than the TV program material they accompany by requiring all "multichannel video programming" distributors to implement the "Techniques for Establishing and Maintaining Audio Loudness for Digital Television" issued by the international industry group Advanced Television Systems Committee. The final bill was passed on September 29, 2010. No specific penalties are given; those are to...

Anonymous

@Catija Oh, yeah, I heard about that law! Although unfortunately loudness isn't something you can accurately measure at the signal level

Damkerng T.

22:41

I don't know who started the idea (that makes the ads so loud), but I guess it's widespread now.

(I mean, all over the world.)

looking for Decibel-A, B, C on that page...

and found nothing

Anonymous

The systems we have in place don't have any way of compensating for all the factors that affect loudness, like: ① the individual listener's anatomy; ② the room and the location of the listener; ③ multiple volume meters on multiple devices; ④ the frequency response of the playback devices

Anonymous

And so on

Anonymous

I'm sad to hear that the system was so easily gamed with increased bass.

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