Geek time...

[verastar99]

I suppose its only fitting in light of recent geeky topic discussions in the LJ... Last night I snuggled up to watch a special program on PBS (Public Broadcasting, for the foreigners)--a program which i had pencilled into my schedule roughly a week ago, thanks to my geekyness...*sigh*

rebness may remember me mentioning a particular favorite text of

Comments

[saffronlie]

I'm very interested in accents, which doesn't get to be quite the same thing as dialects but, you know, I think I come in somewhere in the range of prescriptive linguist. This is because of all the elocution-type study I've done on phonetics, which tend to proscribe that there is one way to form consonants and shape vowels; one way and one sound. What's interesting is that the same pure sound in one accent is unavoidably different in another accent. I find that really interesting. My short vowel 'a' would sound different to yours, yet we'd both be correct within our own accent region (well, I assume you would be, somehow I don't take you as one for sloppy speech!). Yet neither of us would be speaking the sounds of the Queen's English, which for so long was the benchmark for good speaking habits. I personally like that kind of standardised elocution-type speech, and I certainly wish there was more of it around -- there are so many untrained television and radio reporters whose speaking habits are dreadful. But I don't feel that kind of