On 27/10/24 22:43, Aidan Kehoe wrote:
>
> Ar an séú lá is fiche de mí Deireadh Fómhair, scríobh Peter Moylan:
>
>> [...] Pronunciation of the letter r seems to vary wildly between
>> languages. I can do both alveolar and uvular r in most positions in
>> a word, if I concentrate, and that covers a fair few languages, but
>> it does require concentration. Certainly I can pronounce Irish
>> dearg and déag so that they sound different. The difficulty for me
>> is more about hearing the difference.
>
> That’s a surprise to me. Can you pick up traces of an Irish accent
> among Australians? This fellow: https://jamohanlon.com/science/ , for
> example, was on Quirks and Quarks, a Canadian radio show I listen to
> via podcasts on long drives, and his Australian has a lot more more
> post-vocalic Rs together with the Northern Ireland [œʏ] for ; if
> you can pick that up, you can hear the difference.
> https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/this-spider-scientist-wants-us-to-appreciate-the-world-s-8-legged-wonders-1.7358310
for the full broadcast.
Interesting example. I would have picked the first person as having an
Irish accent strongly modified by North American influences, and I
didn't pick "Canadian" until I re-read what you wrote. The second
speaker has to be an Irish person who has lived for a long time in
Australia. Yes, I can hear post-vocalic R from someone speaking English.
When it's someone speaking Irish, an extra factor comes in: my
vocabulary is so limited, and my command of Irish spelling so poor, that
I'm struggling to understand anything at all. Under those conditions, I
can fail to distinguish two words even though their pronunciation is
different.
There's also the fact that recognising an accent does not imply being
able to analyse the features of the words being spoken. I used to live
in Melbourne, at a time when it had many recent immigrants, and when I
was in a crowd -- on a railway station, for example -- it amused me to
guess which languages people were speaking. I think those guesses would
have been very accurate. These were languages that I didn't speak or
understand, but I could pick them because different languages have
different rhythms and dominant sounds, and one can respond to that
without knowing what any of the words mean. A lot of what registers is
subconscious.
Here's another example. I once got lost in central Paris at midnight, so
I stopped a passer-by and asked for directions. He told me where to go,
I thanked him, and we went in our different directions. It wasn't until
I had walked a whole block more that it suddenly hit me that that man
had been speaking French with an Australian accent. The recognition was
in my head, but it hadn't come to the surface. And he, presumably,
hadn't noticed that I was an English speaker.
--
Peter Moylan peter@pmoylan.org http://www.pmoylan.org
Newcastle, NSW
|
|