Heard on The Judges: a triviality

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Wed Nov 4 16:52:42 UTC 2009


A forty-ish Noo-Yawka points out that an Englishman still speaks
English with an English accent, though he - the Englishman - has lived
in the States for 47 years.

Something of a reverse-English <har! har!> case:

Jim Hurford, General Editor of Oxford Studies in the Evolution of
Language, was a professor of mine at UC Davis, years ago. He
eventually left Davis to go to the University of Lancaster. Now, to
any American ear, Jim spoke English with a very clear English accent,
including such oddities as pronouncing "equation" as [i kweI.Sn]
instead of as [i kwe:I.Zn]. Yet, once he was back in Old Blighty, Jim
found himself often addressed by the locals as "Oh. You're that new,
American bloke. I can tell by your accent!"

The irony!

-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain

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