alan@sdcrdcf.UUCP (08/01/84)
< For a really incongruous experience, watch and listen as a beautiful woman speaks Switzerdeutch > I suppose that most everyone has noticed that English singers sing with a decidedly non-English accent. What is it about the English accent that doesn't lend it to song? When Englishmen sing, do they sound more like Americans, Canadians or Australians?
ashwin@uicsl.UUCP (08/06/84)
#R:fortune:-393000:uicsl:7700001:000:1358 uicsl!ashwin Aug 6 03:46:00 1984 <> Many English singers sing English songs with an English accent... I would even venture to say that most of them do. The quality of their music is none the worse for that. Well-known examples include the Beatles (Harrison, McCartney, Lennon), Jethro Tull (Ian Anderson), Pink Floyd (Wright, Mason, Gilmour, Waters), the Who (well, Townshend, anyway), the Monkees, the Kinks, the Rolling Stones (earlier albums), etc. Some of these and other singers Americanize their accents to some extent; most seem to revert back to their native accents in live concerts. Remember that saying "cant" instead of "c-ah-nt" and "fast" instead of "f-ah-st" does not make the accent American. The British accent can be distinguished in so many other ways... try "around", "got", "record" (n.), etc., which differ in the pronunciation of the vowels. Then there are differences in consonant sounds, as in "winter", "chatter", etc. Of course, there are differences in delivery too. The point is that the accents which sound American to some people are actually only Americanized to varying degrees. Some people also tend to associate the English accent with (only) the educated London area accent, forgetting that there are many different English accents just like there are different American accents, so that anything non-educated-London sounds non-English to them.
marcus@pyuxt.UUCP (M. G. Hand) (08/07/84)
At least the (supposedly) more sensible or easier American spellings make more sense than one state legislatures attempt to define pi as identical to 3 (because its too hard for the little kiddies in their sums)