From Acute To Grave

Accents. We don't do them so well in England. Just to clarify, I'm not talking about regional or national patterns of speech, but rather the written word and those funny little diacritics found above (and sometimes below) letters as a guide to accenting their pronunciation, as in: peut-être donné du pâté.

By the way, diacritic is my word of the week, fighting off tough competition from glyph. And  as I said, we don't use many in written English, unlike our continental cousins in France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Sweden with their acutes, angstroms, breves, cedillas, circumflexes, diaereses (aka umlauts), graves, macrons and tildes.

In fact, I could only find use of one diacritic in native English. That's the diaeresis, two dots above a letter where there's a double vowel, as in coöperative, daïs, naïve or reëlect, to make sure that both vowels are sounded independently, and even that is dying a rapid death in favour of the helpful hyphen (co-operative, re-elect) or of nothing at all (dais, naive). How to pronounce those last two without diacritic direction? 

The majority of words in common English usage employing accents have all been imported from our afore-mentioned neighbours. These are sometimes termed 'loan' words.  And even then, it seems to have been a matter of chance whether the accents they came with have survived the incorporation or not, with culinary words putting up the greatest resistance to having their diacritics lopped off.

Let me illustrate. We still write blasé, café, cliché, exposé, façade, fête, frappé, latté, piñata, résumé, rosé, soufflé, soupçon, über and Zoë - mostly with but admittedly sometimes without their accents - but a word like hotel (originally hôtel from the French) ditched its circumflex long ago, just like cote and rote have done; and when we inducted cañón (from the Spanish) we turned it into canyon. The prognosis for accents on words in English usage appears to be changing from acute to grave.😯

I didn't know whether I could follow that brief essay on accent and pronunciation with a poem of any substance, but as I didn't write one for last week's blog, I felt duty-bound to give it a go today. It's a sonnet of sorts to a rhyme-scheme of my own devising (ABBACDDCEFFEGG). It's also an exercise in the use of diacritics (at least one in every line). And each verse commences with a different personal pronoun. You'll decide, after all that, if it has any merit or not. 

Frappé

I clearly stated we were being naïve

to take his résumé at face value.

You felt it looked too clichéd to be true

but wouldn't back me up with Geneviève.

He was an émigré from some régime

for God's sake. How ingénue could Gen be?

She seemed blasé, her mind made up, so we

had no choice. This über would lead our team.

It wasn't too long before the soufflé

went splat. Coöperation is the rule

we live by - not a soupçon from the fool

fêted by our boss. Children died that day.

They were taking refuge in the café,

all blown away to his chilling olé!

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

Read More

Accent

In 2013 I was back in Birmingham for an event and my friends came up from London to help. They had never been to the second city before. Their son, aged about 21, went for a wander and came back to inform us that the Brummie accent was the sexiest he had ever heard.

At first I thought that needed a paragraph of its own without further comment. But research has found (e.g. Thorne in 2003) that overseas visitors find it lilting and melodious. And really when I come to think about it and remember that Shakespeare would have been using this dialect in his rhymes and vocabulary is it so surprising?

I’ll prove this later on as I have just used the words ‘accent’ and ‘dialect’ as though they were interchangeable and I need to clarify this first.

The word dialect comes from the Ancient Greek dialektos “discourse, language, dialect,” A dialect generally involves more than just pronunciation—it differs from another form of the language in at least some grammatical structures and vocabulary.

Accent goes back to Latin, where the root referred to the stress patterns in vocal music. (It's related to the words "cant" and "chant".) It has been used in English to refer to spoken words since at least the 10th century. As the term is used by linguists, everybody has an accent. It's the sum of the way you form your vowels, stress your syllables, lengthen your sounds, etc. There has to be an accent in the same way that every sound has a length (thank you to Joshua Engel for that explanation).

For example if you get a Preston newsreader, a BBC newsreader and Scottish newsreader to each read the same written script. And let’s say they are all perfect readers. All the words and grammar will be the same. The difference in what you hear will be accent.

But if they meet up for a cup of tea these 3 people’s speech will differ in vocabulary and in grammar, as well as in pronunciation. The totality of these differences are called a dialect

I once worked at a major London Teaching Hospital and one day a Consultant and two medical students were heading to the same lift I was waiting for. The two students were doing the “Yah, absolutely Sir” to the Consultant but when they got on the lift with me and their boss had carried on down the corridor the conversation changed to “What yowm doin tomorrer?”.

Shakespeare memorial room at Birmingham central library

I said above that to overseas folk the Birmingham accent is lilting and melodious. What do British people think?

YouGov said that the West Country accent is considered the most attractive to over-60s compared to only 22% of 18-24 year-olds. The opposite perception had developed for Northern Irish too, with most 18-24 year-olds seeing it as attractive, compared to only 37% of over-60s, and then the Geordie accent also had a greater appeal to older British people too.

Here’s the list in full. The Most Attractive Accents in the British Isles are:
Southern Irish
Received Pronunciation
Welsh
Yorkshire
West Country
Geordie
Northern Irish
Glaswegian
Cockney
Mancunian
Scouse
Brummie

I also said above that I would now prove that Shakespeare wrote in a Birmingham dialect and/or accent. Unfortunately, I have run out of space.

People sometimes mix up the Birmingham accent with the Black Country one. They are different but for this I don’t care as it’s a great poem by Liz Berry and anyway she now lives in Birmingham.

Homing

For years you kept your accent
in a box beneath the bed,
the lock rusted shut by hours of elocution
how now brown cow
the teacher’s ruler across your legs.

We heard it escape sometimes,
a guttural uh on the phone to your sister,
saft or blart to a taxi driver
unpacking your bags from his boot.
I loved its thick drawl, g’s that rang.

Clearing your house, the only thing
I wanted was that box, jemmied open
to let years of lost words spill out –
bibble, fittle, tay, wum,
vowels ferrous as nails, consonants

you could lick the coal from.
I wanted to swallow them all: the pits,
railways, factories thunking and clanging
the night shift, the red brick
back-to-back you were born in.

I wanted to forge your voice
in my mouth, a blacksmith’s furnace;
shout it from the roofs,
send your words, like pigeons,
fluttering for home.

                                           Liz Berry

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

Read More