On Fri, 19 Dec 2003 15:21, Philip Aker wrote (in response to Andrew Stiller):
I'm hard pressed to distinguish between Aussie and NZ dialects but NZ seems a little brighter and sharper in general. I met up with our list member Matthew Hindson (Aussie) a few months ago and we both remarked on each other's ixsense. According to my ears, given the same phrase, he would have pronounced as: "tykes sahm gitten yews tayeu". The "spicial" would have been very close as well: "spishul" where the "ul" is decidedly short. Also, I find some parallels between South African speech (whites) and the down unders. Most likely the Dutch influence. ----------- I can't let this pass. Despite their abilities as navigators in improbably small ships, the Dutch have had no influence on English accents in this part of the world. They may have sailed around the coastlines (some of in the case of Australia and most of in the case of New Zealand), but their legacy was not linguistic. The main wave of Dutch migration was after WW2 (as I can attest) unlike South Africa where the Dutch presence goes back to the 17th century. As a rule of thumb, to distinguish between the local variations on English pronunciation, listen for the vowels. Aussies and Kiwis pronounce "i" and "e" differently from each other, and South Africans pronounce "a" differently from both. Broad variations of the above turn vowels into diphthongs (shudder!). For those of us interested in the game of cricket and in linguistics, the current test series against India is a treat. Listen to the TV commentary and you can hear Australian and South African accents. Listen to the radio commentary and you can hear less broad Australian accents (this is the ABC after all) as well as English and Indian voices. Regards Rudi van Berkum _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
