On Saturday 29 August 2015 06:19:24 Lisi Reisz wrote: > On Saturday 29 August 2015 03:30:18 Gene Heskett wrote: > > I watched about half of it, but the eu accent made it pretty hard to > > understand. > > ;-) > > Now you know how we feel about American accents. ;-) Especially > Texan. > > Do you find an English accent hard to understand? Most Americans > don't. And to be fair, I don't have trouble with New England accents.
TBT it requires a great deal of concentration to get such short clipped speech "translated" on the fly. Texan is of course a whole nother language to many, but with the rapid fire stacatto gone, every word does get pronounced for a sufficient length of time there isn't much doubt about what was said. > And I can't understand all EU accents. I can't even understand the > various Irish accents. And as for Glaswegian.... Chuckle, we have some imports from Minnesota in northern Iowa where I was born & raised, that we have referred to as Iowegians. They personally are great folks, firm believers in the credo that if they don't feel like cleaning out the cow barn, they will not ask the hired man to do it either. But the "olde english" they speak with a Norwegian accent does at times need a translator. :) I am reminded of, I believe it was Winston Churchill who made the quote, "England and America, two great countries, separated by a common language." How true it is. Ironic that the same text when read, sounds so much different than it would if the writer read it. The text nature of the internet has served to greatly reduce the inter accent/language barriers immensely. We should give thanks for that. I also should say that as a single language speaker, I didn't go to school long enough to have taken one of the 3 languages offered, I give thanks that the defacto standard language for technical stuff, has over the last 50 years, turned into some form of English, primarily because its evolves with the technology at a faster rate than a really old language such as latin. But some of the manuals for stuff now made in China do suffer greatly when translated. We have for decades suffered thru the poor translations of Japanese we called Engrish, but I find the meanings are still hidden in the prose as if they were trying to draw a picture, requiring a second mental translation before a decent level of comprehension has been achieved. Its there, but I find I have to read that paragraph 4 or 5 times to figure out the real meaning. I think thats a natural thing because most dialects of Chinese and Japanese are in fact pictograph based, where "english" is not. > Lisi The bottom line is that we understand each other quite well in the written word, face to face over our favorite hot beverage is likely a different thing entirely. Cheers, Gene Heskett -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
