Irish accents in English and the number 3 - what's the reason for the difference?

Blackjack Davy said:
Interdental fricative "th" consonant (there are two of them in english "th" as in "thin" and "th" and in "there") are rare in languages worldwide Irish gaelic does not have them and when they switched to English they didn't pick up on the consonents not present in their language so never learnt to use it anymore than English speakers learnt the welsh "Ll" consonant when pronouncing welsh names/places (as in Lloyd/Floyd both deriving from a welsh one one a transliteration of the spelling and the second an an attempt at the "Ll" consonant sound). There are other consonants that have no approximation in english like the click consonants in african languages such as the !Kung people speak (!) standing in for a click consonant.

That information enough for ya?!

n.b. if you really want me to go on I could say that "th" is ancient trait thats been mostly lost from other germanic languages english is rare in preserving it its not an easy consonant to learn and most children do not learn it until past 5 years of age I can remember at school being told its "th" and not "f" and practising "th..th...th..." can't have been more than 6 or 7 years old. The roman alphabet doesn't have letters for them as they're not present in latin so the two present in english used to be written using the runes "eth" and "thorn" when the printing press arrived they couldn't use those so switched to "Y" as an approximation hence "Ye olde shoppe" was never pronounced "ye" it was always "the" or "thee" at some point that switched to "th" instead.

Told you I could go on...
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Welsh has a "dd" sound which is the same as the "th" in "those". It also has the "th", as in "thin".

We need a conversation on the great vowel shift next. That's just weird.
 
eddiemcgarrigle said:
Why is it that a percentage of the English population think theirs is the Alpha accent and all others are inferior?
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Thats mostly an inferiority complex these days as regional accents are encouraged and even heard on the BBC historically it was different and received pronunciation (RP or "BBC English", "Posh speak") used to be the only one heard or at least promoted, americans still think of brits as RP speaking even almost none of us do presumably from BBC newscasts etc.

Theres also another factor at work and thats whats regarded as the prestige language or accent i.e. people will change their accent to make them fit in or to make them seem less provincial and in the past that included entire languages in the 17th and 18th centuries most Irish switched from gaelic to english as it was seen as the prestige language or the language to be getting ahead in the world with a similar thing happened with welsh and perhaps most quickly with Manx Gaelic at the beginning of the 19c most people spoke gaelic by the end almost no-one did it disappeared very rapidly from the island was regarded as something only the old folks spoke and even if you understood it you didn't speak it as it was seen as being backward but it existed until living memory the last native speaker died as recently as 1970.

Prestige language/speak happens everywhere the official language of France is the langue d'oil i.e. the regional version of french spoken around paris though there are other langauges/dialects still spoken if not officially recognised i.e. Occitan or even Breton.
 
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potatolord said:
Welsh has a "dd" sound which is the same as the "th" in "those". It also has the "th", as in "thin".

We need a conversation on the great vowel shift next. That's just weird.
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Blood, rhymes with mood. Obviously.

I have no idea why the great vowel shift happened. Does anybody know?
 
dirtychinchilla said:
turdy tree

I stumble upon a really interesting Youtube channel on linguistics. It's mainly focused on English, but might be interesting for you.
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The problem with those two accents is that they are very regionalised and not typical of the cumbrian or yorkshire dialects. You could argue that cumbrian is its own language and Yorkshire is such a big county that the definition of a typical yorkshire dialect is difficult to pin down.

Both Threlkeld and Muker are in the middle of nowhere with no accessability, over 100 years ago they may as well have been in a different country.

I am from West Yorkshire and I can pin down within a few minutes differences between Bradford, Leeds, Halifax, Keighley. Quite interesting though. And West Yorkshire, North Yorkshire and South Yorkshire have a completely different local dialect
 
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maybe if you have a 'regional accent' you take more notice of other regional accents?

ahm no exactly well travellt but dinnae find iht hard te decipher maest brihtish accents :p

sticking with the number three...in Edinburgh I've heard 'shree' before....in Glasgow one becomes 'huan', or maybe WAN
 
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Scottish accents sort of transition into how quite a few of them type as well, at least if twitter is anything to go by.
 
builder22 said:
maybe if you have a 'regional accent' you take more notice of other regional accents?

ahm no exactly well travellt but dinnae find iht hard te decipher maest brihtish accents :p

sticking with the number three...in Edinburgh I've heard 'shree' before....in Glasgow one becomes 'huan', or maybe WAN
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I had noticed in the past that some Glaswegians will say “one” as wan, it reminds me of my relatives in northern France saying oui as way, I heard it so much that I began to say it that way myself.
I often imagine that when I’m in Haute-Garonne, the aristos nudge each other, and say that I’m a Northern oik.
 
I read and enjoyed a series of historical fiction books in which the central character was a Roman living during the time of Augustus. The author did a good job of making it historically plausible, but it's wholly fictional with real historical events only as a backdrop. The central character is a low grade plebian who has the very sensible (for the time and place) policy of staying well out of politics. The books are mainly detective stories. The Falco series, by Lindsey Davis.

Anyway...the bit relevant to this thread. Part of the first book is set in the newly Roman province of Britannia. There's a passing comment from the central character about how one of the natives, from a tribe from another part of the province, spoke Latin with the most annoying accent he'd ever heard. In the audiobook version they gave that character a Birmingham accent.

EDIT: Man, I was tired when I posted that yesterday. The emperor in the books was Vespasian, not Augustus. A significantly different time. Although staying well out of politics would still have been a sound plan.
 
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Gerard said:
Scottish accents sort of transition into how quite a few of them type as well, at least if twitter is anything to go by.
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Not sure why we do that, I do it when talking to family/friends from home. Definitely helps with the humour on a lot of things though.
 
I think that accents will become less apparent as time rolls on.

Half of the population go to university and speak 'student' for a period of time, mixing in and out quirks of their dialect.

I wonder what linguists will make of how we speak in 150 years time - it may be unrecognisable like some of the recordings in this thread.
 
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