Accents

Seriously, a “badgeuse” sold in France to a French company can’t handle French names. WTF.

Have I upset French readers yet :)

Those pesky accents are there because Latin had so few vowels. Once people started dropping final syllables, conservation of something-or-other meant the language had to have more of something else: nasalized vowels, for example. The Romans enlarged the alphabet they got from the Etruscans, the Anglo-Saxons enlarged the alphabet they got from the Romans, and the Normans promptly pruned it back again (when did you last see a yogh Mr Menzies?). English has a huge number of vowels, whose increase was probably driven by snobbery: the desire to indicate differences of locality or social status. There is only so much room in the mouth for them, so change one vowel and they all change, and hence the Great English Vowel Shift. It is a mercy that we gave up centuries ago trying to keep spelling phonetic.
Still ploughing through, coughing and hiccoughing!

the desire to indicate differences of locality or social status

All RP users please note the green stuff in the lawn has a pronunciation that rhymes with the beast of burden known as an ass, it does not rhyme with anything colloquially associated with the posterior of an animal or human.
“Batter” is in fact a floury paste that is cooked around a fillet of fish or similar, “butter” is the solid stuff made from processing milk fats. The two should not be confused by mispronunciation (otherwise known as RP)

With regard to a “desire to indicate differences of locality” I can say from experience that I’ve spent time in the Black Country where you can walk from one accent to another in about 15-20 minutes.

I was born in Sheffield(S6) – what Barnsley folk, among others, refer to as “DeeDar territory” but whilst I used the occasional thee or thou my cousin across town in Heeley(S2) used phrases like “Nah den dee”
That’s a distance of about 3.4 miles (plus up and down of about 300 feet) providing a major change.
I’m not sure what a “Yorkshire accent” is anymore than I could lump together all the Black Country accents as one.
Back in the day each village had an accent and linking them in a conurbation hasn’t yet changed that greatly.

the green stuff in the lawn […] does not rhyme with anything colloquially associated with the posterior of an animal or human

My Kiwi accent disagrees with you there! With that said, we do have regional differences; I remember getting told off on these forums for referring to the grass outside my house as the “yard” instead of the “garden”.

“Batter” is in fact a floury paste that is cooked around a fillet of fish or similar, “butter” is the solid stuff made from processing milk fats.

At least we’re on the same page with this one :)

Still ploughing through, coughing and hiccoughing!

Though, damn, it’s rough work.

Yeah. The “ough” ought to carry a sanity hazard sign.

All RP users please note the green stuff in the lawn

Ah, you mean “grAss”, not “grahhss”…

instead of the “garden”.

Ah, but the big question is… when you say the word “garden”, is there an ‘r’ present in it, or is it an elongated ‘a’ sound? [for my way of speaking, it’s like “gaaadun”]

Back in the day each village had an accent and linking them in a conurbation hasn’t yet changed that greatly.

I can spot a local accent here, as it’s usually incomprehensible mumbling. There also seems to be a tendency to add a “sh” sound to the end of words like “oui”. Not exactly “sh”, try saying “oui” (or “wee” if you don’t know French) and then attempt to make a “hhh” sound without moving your lips or tongue.

I sometimes wonder if the local accent appears, to Parisiens, like total hicksville. Think of an American movie with rednecks – is rural east Brittany the French equivalent? ;-)

I remember getting told off on these forums for referring to the grass outside my house as the “yard” instead of the “garden”.

In our family the distinction would have been that my cousin indeed had a back yard (in common use with the others in the row of terraced house) which only had grass poking from cracks at the periphery while our house had both a front and back garden with lawns and flower beds. I’ve been at house that were somewhere between. Other than an attempt to describe the visual spectacle the label isn’t of any great importance.

Ah, but the big question is… when you say the word “garden”, is there an ‘r’ present in it, or is it an elongated ‘a’ sound? [for my way of speaking, it’s like “gaaadun”]

An elongated A. That’s what an R is! 😛

English has a huge number of vowels

Err. Five is hardly huge, five and a half if you count y (as in rhythm).

I sometimes wonder if the local accent appears, to Parisiens, like total hicksville

Or a different country (France) since I’m told the majority of France doesn’t regard any Parisien as French.

An elongated A. That’s what an R is!

Standard ‘AP’? (Australian or Antipodean)

Err. Five is hardly huge, five and a half if you count y (as in rhythm).

I beg your pardon. I would have been clearer saying vowel sounds which is what I meant. I remember when I was young, a German girl who was visiting could not distinguish the first vowels in butter and batter. But then most English speakers cannot distinguish the first consonants in pin and pot . It seems that one of the functions of language-learning in infants is quantization: breaking up the continuum of sound into discrete chunks, and not distinguishing between different sounds within a given chunk. The trouble is, different languages quantize differently. I seem to have mislaid it, but there is a fascinating book that asserts that it is impossible properly to trace the development of the English language without taking into account that English, like most languages, is and always has been a spectrum of local dialects. The emergence of dictionaries and radio broadcasting has tended to obscure this.

English dialects tend to vary the vowel sounds but not the consonants. With Danish the consonants, particularly the dentals, can vary with the dialect, whereas, apart from glottal stops the vowels tend to be more stable. Another aspect of language is stress and tone, but because we have no denotations for this we are mostly unaware of it. But English is just as much a tonal language as Chinese; it is just that tone matters for the meaning of a whole phrase rather than of an individual word.

@Rick

There also seems to be a tendency to add a “sh” sound to the end of words like “oui”.

A professional linguist may shoot me down, but I am under the impression that oui came from oyez which came from Latin auditus (sum) , literally I have heard . So a final sibilant seems pretty reasonable.

I remember when I was young, a German girl who was visiting could not distinguish the first vowels in butter and batter.

Which would be down to the awful, predominantly southern, mispronunciation of butter that I referred to earlier.

from oyez which came from Latin auditus (sum), literally I have heard.

The origin of the opening words of a Town Crier I presume.
So the proper English version of that Oyez, Oyez would be Hear Thee, Hear Thee rather than the spoken version of the written Hear Ye, Hear Ye where the Y is actually mistakenly substituting for the lost Old English character.

Oyez (= listen) from audite and Oyez (= OK) from auditus perhaps? That is what you get by dropping endings – blurring of meaning. Some languages are supposed to be better than others at ambiguity. I had a Penguin book on Chinese, for the reader who does not want to learn it, with an example poem in it that could be interpreted in radically different ways.

Which would be down to the awful, predominantly southern, mispronunciation of butter that I referred to earlier.

At that time I lived at Lakeside, the southern end of lake Windermere, where the local dialect was Lancashire, and the pronunciation of butter was not southern at all. A book was a boook but at the north end of the lake, only twelve miles away, it was Westmorland dialect and a book was a beac .

At that time I lived at Lakeside, the southern end of lake Windermere, where the local dialect was Lancashire,

Oh, not southern but wrong side of Pennines :)
Funny things accents, some come and go. I was speaking in my current slight midlands accent, I thought, when the late “Stan Richards”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_Richards said “where’d thi’ accent go lad?” in full Seth Armstrong voice rather than his cultured(slightly plummy) Barnsley, then looked at me and said “DeeDar??”

Yeah accents are strange things, I’ve never worked out how both my Dad and Uncle grew up in a Lancashire village called Halsall, went to the same school, yet my Uncle has a very broad Lancashire accent and my Dad doesn’t!

I’ve never worked out how both my Dad and Uncle grew up in a Lancashire village called Halsall, went to the same school, yet my Uncle has a very broad Lancashire accent and my Dad doesn’t!

Peer group?
Did one go off to college and the other not?
One work with peers with accents, the other not?

There is only a couple of years between them, both went to the same school and they both worked on the family farm.

Standard ‘AP’? (Australian or Antipodean)

Don’t lump us in with the Aussies! They don’t even talk proper!

My Scottish cousin (thick accent) used to teach Italian business men English so they could do business with Americans!