For the Love of Language
Posted by knittymom at 4/7/2008 12:33 PM and is filed under uncategorized 
<Totally off topic -- not related to knitting or mothering....just something I was thinking about. By the way, today's word of the day is "fascinating". Please feel free to keep your own count.>
I love language. I think that a clever turn of phrase is pure talent. People who can clearly express ideas and emotions just amaze me. In addition to all the uber-techy math related stuff I studied in college, I minored in literature. Among others, I took every course on Shakespeare offered, several on Mark Twain and, inadvertently, one on the literature of the Cold War (Um, disturbing that one. I didn't sleep well that whole semester.). I also find the history of language and the mechanics of its development fascinating. I'm currently listening to a course on CDs about the history of English. I'm up to Beowulf now which is pretty much incomprehensible when read aloud in its original middle English. And it's interesting that Beowulf was written about five hundred years before Shakespeare and Shakespeare was written about 500 years ago. But people of Shakespeare's day would have found Beowulf just as incomprehensible as we do, yet we can read Shakespeare with relative ease. Fascinating. Has the written word slowed the evolution of our language? These are things I ponder. (Yes, I know.)
So I found myself thinking about regional differences in our language. I find it amazing that even in this age of universal media, there are still distinct regional differences. Normally, Rochester, NY has a fairly bland accent. We are far enough away from the Eastern seaboard to not have a trace of the NYC or Boston accent. Although we are not so far to the mid-west as to be able to anchor a network news broadcast. I'm not sure why, but Rochesterians will squish the heck out of a's. Don't think so. Just ask anyone who has grown up in the Rochester area to say this sentence.
"I like to wear tan pants to pick apples."
Honestly, it isn't pretty. The poor 'a' just gets a rather marked trip through the nasal passages. If I'm up in front of an audience giving a presentation or teaching, I generally mask this just by speaking slower but even then, if I lose concentration, I'll be rather unkind to my a's.
Even as close as Buffalo (about 70 miles) there are distinct difference from here. First, they don't seem to squish their a's quite as much. And here in Rochester, to give directions we would say "take 490 west to 390 north to get to the lake". In Buffalo, it would be "take the 290 to the 190 to get downtown." I'm not sure why we leave off the definite article "the", but it's gone.
Oh, here's another one! Ask someone from Rochester to read the following.
"It takes about 30 minutes to drive from the town of Avon to Charlotte Beach."
Avon is said with the short "a" sound found in "cat" and "Charlotte" is said with the accent on the second syllable rather than on the first like the woman's name. It's totally an oral phenomenon as you can't tell by just writing it how the pronunciation has changed. I just find these things endlessly fascinating. (Have I mentioned, I'm a geek. A happy geek, but a geek nonetheless.) It would be just fascinating (that's 4 if you're still counting) to go and travel around the British isles and just listen to variations in the mother tongue there.
And now for something complete different. My daughters' elementary school has a art show each year and one of the most anticipated categories involves making a yam into a favorite artist. The kids are so clever and talented all the entries make me smile. Here is my favorite for this year. (Yam as Freida. Awesome.)
Back to knitting: I'm almost done with my Big Sack sweater (rather inelegant title for a garment) so soon there will be pictures.
I love language. I think that a clever turn of phrase is pure talent. People who can clearly express ideas and emotions just amaze me. In addition to all the uber-techy math related stuff I studied in college, I minored in literature. Among others, I took every course on Shakespeare offered, several on Mark Twain and, inadvertently, one on the literature of the Cold War (Um, disturbing that one. I didn't sleep well that whole semester.). I also find the history of language and the mechanics of its development fascinating. I'm currently listening to a course on CDs about the history of English. I'm up to Beowulf now which is pretty much incomprehensible when read aloud in its original middle English. And it's interesting that Beowulf was written about five hundred years before Shakespeare and Shakespeare was written about 500 years ago. But people of Shakespeare's day would have found Beowulf just as incomprehensible as we do, yet we can read Shakespeare with relative ease. Fascinating. Has the written word slowed the evolution of our language? These are things I ponder. (Yes, I know.)
So I found myself thinking about regional differences in our language. I find it amazing that even in this age of universal media, there are still distinct regional differences. Normally, Rochester, NY has a fairly bland accent. We are far enough away from the Eastern seaboard to not have a trace of the NYC or Boston accent. Although we are not so far to the mid-west as to be able to anchor a network news broadcast. I'm not sure why, but Rochesterians will squish the heck out of a's. Don't think so. Just ask anyone who has grown up in the Rochester area to say this sentence.
"I like to wear tan pants to pick apples."
Honestly, it isn't pretty. The poor 'a' just gets a rather marked trip through the nasal passages. If I'm up in front of an audience giving a presentation or teaching, I generally mask this just by speaking slower but even then, if I lose concentration, I'll be rather unkind to my a's.
Even as close as Buffalo (about 70 miles) there are distinct difference from here. First, they don't seem to squish their a's quite as much. And here in Rochester, to give directions we would say "take 490 west to 390 north to get to the lake". In Buffalo, it would be "take the 290 to the 190 to get downtown." I'm not sure why we leave off the definite article "the", but it's gone.
Oh, here's another one! Ask someone from Rochester to read the following.
"It takes about 30 minutes to drive from the town of Avon to Charlotte Beach."
Avon is said with the short "a" sound found in "cat" and "Charlotte" is said with the accent on the second syllable rather than on the first like the woman's name. It's totally an oral phenomenon as you can't tell by just writing it how the pronunciation has changed. I just find these things endlessly fascinating. (Have I mentioned, I'm a geek. A happy geek, but a geek nonetheless.) It would be just fascinating (that's 4 if you're still counting) to go and travel around the British isles and just listen to variations in the mother tongue there.
And now for something complete different. My daughters' elementary school has a art show each year and one of the most anticipated categories involves making a yam into a favorite artist. The kids are so clever and talented all the entries make me smile. Here is my favorite for this year. (Yam as Freida. Awesome.)
Back to knitting: I'm almost done with my Big Sack sweater (rather inelegant title for a garment) so soon there will be pictures.
What's fascinating is that what we do to our vowels is part of a phenomenon which occurs all over the Great Lakes region called the Northern Cities Shift. Either google it or your tapes will, I assume, get there in a while.
And what we, in said Northern Cities, do with our vowels, fascinatingly, has nothing to do with nasality even though that's everyone's first impression. Fascinatingly, if you ask anyone from any region in the country what they think of another region's accent (ie: Ask Southerners about New Yorkers; ask New Yorkers about Bostonians; ask the Gullah about the Boston Brahmin dialect which,though nearly extinct, almost sounds British)and everyone's first justification for why the alien accent is ugly will be nasality. Southerners say it about New Yorkers, New Yorkers say it about Bostonians, the Gullah say it about the Creole--it doesn't matter. "They're so nasal." I've seen documentaries. Apparently, the thought of the nose being involved in speech is universally disgusting to human beings. Weird. And fascinating.
In reality, our Northern Cities vowels are less nasal than they're "supposed" to be--ask your local linguistic phonologist.
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