English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

tchrist

00:01

@Cerberus Indeed so. He's speaking in a deliberately recognizable "redneck" accent, so rural/mountain/uncollegiate Appalachian/Great-Smoky-Mountains accent, probably Tennessean. He does not use the special features of that dialect that outsiders wouldn't be familiar with.

Cerberus

Why not?

tchrist

Why isn't he? Who knows? Perhaps because he's a comedian who wants to be widely understood.

Appalachian English

Appalachian English is American English native to the Appalachian mountain region of the Eastern United States. Historically, the term "Appalachian dialect" refers to a local English variety of southern Appalachia, also known as Smoky Mountain English or Southern Mountain English in American linguistics. This variety is both influential upon and influenced by the Southern U.S. regional dialect, which has become predominant in central and southern Appalachia today, while a Western Pennsylvania regional dialect has become predominant in northern Appalachia, according to the 2006 Atlas of Nor...

Is the unique Appalachian dialect the preserved language of Elizabethan England? Left over from Scots-Irish immigrants? Or something else altogether?

It's not preserved Elizabethan. But it is unusual.

Now listen to this guy, and notice how different it is:

Appalachian English

►

He does not sound like those people.

Some of those folks you really have to listen to in order to be sure what they've said.

Cerberus

@tchrist The first man visible in the video?

tchrist

Remarkable diphthongs.

@Cerberus The first audible, certainly. But you should listen to more of it.

Cerberus

His accent is thicker, but the sound quality is also much poorer, and his mouth is barely or not at all visible.

Those things make it difficult to compare.

But, yes, it is a much thicker accent than the one in Rob's video.

When the man sitting on a chair explained what a certain mountain-talk expression meant, the original was easily intelligible to me (I'll see you over yonder), but not his translation.

Oh, I see there are subtitles.

tchrist

00:12

Heh, yeah.

Cerberus

And the translation has the name of a place.

So that's not fair.

In Waynesville.

tchrist

Yup.

Wahnzvl.

We still get daily ELU question from foreigners thinking that people actually pronounce the literal IPA sounds.

Cerberus

I think you'd find various Dutch dialects harder to understand than even this, as do I.

tchrist

They'd melt down.

Cerberus

Or maybe they don't mean their questions quite so literally.

It depends.

tchrist

00:17

Their "airish" sounds like Irish.

"Sody pop".

The subtitles are mostly in standard English though.

The comedian has his own goals.

> Appalachian accents also differ markedly from the standard, such as in words ending in “oh” sounds, such as “holler” (hollow), “winder” (window), ‘tater” (potato), or “ah” ending words, such as “sody-pop” (soda-pop), “chaney” (china).

Robusto

@tchrist Yes, that was my takeaway. He probably is a legitimate redneck, but I think he lays it on more theatrically, and in channels that have worn grooves in the general ear more than most dialectical speakers would.

tchrist

> American language attitudes show a marked disrespect and prejudice for marked dialects like Appalachian English.

Yes, that's why he's doing it. Because under our skin without thinking it screams "poor, white, rural = hick" and we think less of the speaker.

Cerberus

00:34

He wants you to know that not all of those people are crazy and ignorant?

tchrist

Correct.

Cerberus

That's how I interpreted the name of the channel or video.

Liberal Redneck.

I've listened to some Kerkraads, the dialect of a certain town in Dutch Limburg.

I cannot understand it.

Only some words.

Like 'presentatie' or 'reageren'.

tchrist

Isn't it some other kind of Low German than Dutch proper?

Cerberus

It's probably somewhere in between, but with lots of slurring over varoous consonants and vowels.

tchrist

No, I'm thinking of Belgium, never mind.

Cerberus

00:36

Yes, it is pretty close to the local German dialects, I think.

Just as are the dialects of Flemish Limburg.

tchrist

Dialect continua.

Cerberus

At any rate, it is much harder than even your Appalachian example, I think.

Yes, somewhat continuous, though the dialect can vary wildly between towns.

tchrist

Right, it's not like English with extra heapings of Norwegian or something.

Cerberus

Probably more like Scots with lots of Norwegian influences?

Robusto

Old Cajun English Accent

►

This is an interesting hybrid accent.

tchrist

00:39

@Cerberus Right, that's what I meant.

Cerberus

OK.

Robusto

Cajun Talk: Best. Video. Ever.

►

This is Cajun French.

They speak a creole mix of English and French.

Cerberus

@Robusto That's pretty easy to understand?

Also because he speaks clearly and the context is well structured.

Robusto

@Cerberus Yeah, but it gets harder, especially when they mix the two languages.

tchrist

@Robusto The French speaker is harder. And yes, he sometimes mixes a bit.

Robusto

00:43

And what you find in New Orleans is a unique dialect of American English. They're in the Deep South, but they don't sound like other southerners.

Cerberus

@Robusto Haha nice.

I could follow it until he began scraping the pan.

tchrist

Right now they sound all washed up.

Robusto

@tchrist Well, yeah. But not as bad as Katrina.

tchrist

@Cerberus Do something for a few minutes he said. Not sure his verb.

Cerberus

I didn't mean I could understand every word...

Much, much harder than the other video.

tchrist

00:44

Right, but I got a lot of them once it starting to click.

Yes well.

We're not native French speakers either.

Robusto

BTW, @Cerb, Cajun (in case you weren't aware) is from "Arcadian" ... French settlers in North America who were evicted and moved to Louisiana.

Cerberus

I think I read that, long ago.

tchrist

Cerb is going to bite you for confusing Acadia with Arcadia.

Robusto

Did I write "Arcadian"? I did.

Acadia. There, I said it.

I can't help what my fingers do.

tchrist

Et in Arcadia ego.

Cerberus

00:47

> "Arcadia" is derived from the Arcadia district in Greece, which had the extended meanings of "refuge" or "idyllic place". Henry IV of France chartered a colony south of the St. Lawrence River between the 40th and 46th parallels in 1603, and he recognized it as La Cadie.[9] Samuel de Champlain fixed its present orthography with the r omitted

Funny.

Robusto

Funny, because I used to vacation in Bar Harbor, visiting Acadia National Park.

tchrist

> The settlers whose descendants became Acadians primarily came from the southwestern region of France, also known as Occitania, such as the rural areas of Poitou-Charentes and Aquitaine (Gascony).

Occitan? Gascon? Those will leave strange languedoc vestiges. It won't ever have been Parisian French.

Cerberus

Yeah.

And creoles are hard enough as they are.

Robusto

01:06

New Orleans Cajun, Justin Wilson - Gumbo

►

Notice how he pronounces andouille as awnDOOey.

And the diphthong in bedroom ... bedROO-um

"an' ya cook dem awnyawn till dey pure*

"dat's hard ta did"

I'm getting hungry for gumbo now.

"what I'm gonna did"

The do -> did transference is interesting.

tchrist

I despise okra.

I think all stressed vowels are subject to mutate from monophthongs down there.

Robusto

01:24

I don't mind okra, if it's made properly. I have no problem with cajun food in Louisiana, dat fo' sho'.

tchrist

Oh wow, "Lafourche Parish" is pronounced pronounced without the R.

Robusto

Oh yeah, of course. Lafoosh.

@tchrist Do you mean a double pronunciation?

tchrist

Right, I meant [lɐˈfuʃ] not [peiʃ]. :)

The don't have a lot of syllable-final R's down there. Many are complete arrhotics.

Robusto

"... because I didn't know how ta said it."

tchrist

Howdy sate tha time?

How'd he say it that time?

Robusto

01:31

The past form as infinitive is an interesting feature.

Justin Wilson Cajun Meat and Potatoes

►

About 10 seconds after the linked time.

He says "blackstop" instead of "blacktop" ...

tchrist

Reminds me of the Germanic lexicalization of preterite-presents into modals, like ought and many more.

@Robusto Notice his French still has fully rolled R's, so from before the modern weakening.

Robusto

Yes.

tchrist

He's a hoot. Almost only ever "soft" ch as 'twere sh per French.

He can say chuck but not chicken. :)

Robusto

Yeah. Shicken.

It's shickening. ^_^

tchrist

Oh yeah, he uses an inflected infinitive, kinda.

Robusto

01:41

I think only with strong verbs, though.

CowperKettle

This is cool.

I found the Holter monitor quite uncomfy.

tchrist

@CowperKettle Automated cooling? :)

CowperKettle

@tchrist Not yet

Robusto

@CowperKettle That's too much information.

CowperKettle

phys.org/news/…

Although I wish there was clothing with cooling.

Probably it's impossible.

@Robusto Why not? An AI could then inform you well in advance if you have any problems with your heart.

tchrist

01:44

> She went on to describe a mechanism that was hidden underneath these heavy wool outfits to keep the actors from overheating. “When we were shooting things in a hot country when they had all of those things, they had this pump,” she said. “This pump that had its own little generator that was attached into the costumes that used to pump cold water into these pipes and cool them all down. So they'd be underneath these huge [costumes] with this weird kind of cooling system.”

Robusto

@CowperKettle Yeah, I don't need that much information. I have enough things to worry about.

CowperKettle

The AI will worry.

Or you could even upload it to the government, so that it could worry instead.

Robusto

@CowperKettle I think it will be all over Facebook instead, and used to try to sell you drugs and vitamins and the like.

CowperKettle

Russia announced it will fund its own bloggers on RuTube, a state-sponsored alternative to YouTube.

Meanwhile it has been slapping bigger and bigger fines on foreign IT companies.

I wonder if Putin will have the guts to ban YouTube in the next three weeks.

Robusto

@CowperKettle Haha, I think the only ones who will watch it are civil servants looking to advance.

CowperKettle

01:48

It's three weeks to the election.

@Robusto Who knows? With a big amount of money, and if YouTube is banned..

Robusto

Yeah, you never know. But most savvy people will still be able to get YouTube, right?

CowperKettle

Yes, those who know how to set up a VPN link

Robusto

02:00

@CowperKettle Does he even worry about what people think? He's going to fix the election anyway, right?

Cerberus

02:15

One wonders about that.

I think massive street protests scare him the most.

Those happened in 2010, didn't they?

He is jealous of China.

Then again, China has seen tremendous economic growth, which makes such large protests much less likely.

CowperKettle

@Robusto Even Joseph Stalin worried a lot about that. At the height of repressions, we went out in public to state that the KGB were too zealous, after which the head of the KGB was dismissed and shot. And for a time the repressions were slackened. He was careful to stage the collectivization as coming not directly from him.

Nikolay Yezhov

Nikolai (Nikolay) Ivanovich Yezhov (Russian: Николай Иванович Ежов, IPA: [nʲɪkɐˈɫaj ɪˈvanəvʲɪt͡ɕ (j)ɪˈʐof]; 1 May 1895 – 4 February 1940) was a Soviet secret police official under Joseph Stalin who was head of the NKVD from 1936 to 1938, during the height of the Great Purge. Yezhov organized mass arrests, torture and executions during the Great Purge but fell from Stalin's favour and was arrested, confessing after torture to a range of anti-Soviet activity. He was executed in 1940 along with others, except Stalin, who were blamed for the Purge. == Early life and career == Yezhov was born either...

Yezhov carried out the most "dangerous" part of repressions, and was shot as being over-zealous.

To present Stalin in a better light.

tchrist

02:33

@CowperKettle Not sure that worked out all that well for him.

> The judge sent the prison a new inmate that afternoon.

CowperKettle

03:58

S.M.T

06:41

US departs from Afghanistan today.

On 28th , all internet + communication connections were cut down in panjhsir.

CowperKettle

Yes, that's bad. They are on their own.

CowperKettle

08:17

Squirrel king

A squirrel king is a collection of squirrels whose tails have tangled together, making them unable to separate themselves. It is similar to a phenomenon recorded in rats, the rat king, of rats with tails tangled together. A squirrel king starts as a litter of young in the same nest, whose tails become knotted together by nesting materials, and/or by tree sap gluing the tails together, particularly if the young squirrels have been gnawing bark of the tree that their nest is in, letting sap flow. If the squirrels are not separated, when they try to come out of their nest, they may fall to the ground...

CowperKettle

08:44

S.M.T

@CowperKettle Taliban has attacked panjshir Will full power

As US exits.

@CowperKettle Both sides have suffered injuries .

CowperKettle

Yes, it's very bad

SmokeDetector