Meaning of "accent"

[Joel S. Berson]

At 12/1/2006 04:04 PM, Dennis Preston wrote:
>"Accent" is usually the term among dialectologists reserved for the
>phonetic-phonological aspects of dialect or "dialect pronunciation."
>"Foreign accent" or the name of the L1 (e.g., "French accent")
>usually keeps this clear. I ain't real fond of it since 'accent' for
>stress is also around.

For someone else's understanding of what "accent"
means [copied from another list]:

[F]rom a book review in the SIAM Review, Vol 48,
Dec. 2006, pp. 794-795.

Postmodern Analysis. Third Edition.
By Jürgen Jost. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2005. $49.95.
xvi+371 pp., softcover, ISBN 3-540-25830-2.

>Jost outsourced the production of this book, and unfortunately the folks who
>converted his lecture notes into a finished product were not of his high
>caliber. The book was translated from German into English by someone whose
>native language is neither. The accented English

[This of course is where I balked.]

>is mostly understandable
>(evidently "we show the intermediate value theorem" on page 13 means "we
>prove the intermediate value theorem") but occasionally verges on
>unintelligible (as in "not for x = 0 only" on
>page 205). [Some comments on typography deleted here.]
>Alas, the once-proud publishing house of
>Springer-Verlag no longer copyedits advanced mathematics books; this one
>sorely needed the ministrations of an editor.

Yes indeed, and more than a copyeditor.
Joel

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