Accents in Am. English

[Bruce Dykes]

-----Original Message-----
From: Aaron E. Drews <aaron at LING.ED.AC.UK>
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Date: Wednesday, June 14, 2000 7:20 AM
Subject: Re: Accents in Am. English



>I wonder if it has something to so with not being in the U.S.  I would have
had the same answers as Lynne.  I think it's some of the pedantry I've
acquired being here.  :-)
>
>--Aaron


Amazingly excellent point. In the EU, residents are exposed to the native
forms regularly, and documents cross borders with casual abandon. You have a
very large variety of languages in a relatively small space, compared to the
US where foreign language inputs are filtered through time, and geographic
proximity, which should be an integrity maintenance factor (is there some
fancy pro term for that?) is pretty much limited to Spanish.

I also encountered another homophonic transition that I omitted from my
earlier missive:
"mother load"

bkd