Re: [NTLK] OT - Do you speak BBC English?

On Sep 1, 2007, at 11:04 AM, dotline7 wrote:

> Talking about the ENGLISH language. English is not my mother
> tongue, I have
> learned English at school, the language one can call the "BBC
> English".
> Later, I strengthen my English at my work. Recently I stay in a
> very busy
> "tourist town". We have tourist from all the world and everyone speaks
> English. Any dialect of English: from East and West, South and
> North. Last
> week we had a celebration, about 50 persons, all of them from a
> different
> part of this Globe. At one of the tables 4 women were still speaking
> English: one from Eastland, One from Switzerland, one from Sweden,
> Germany
> etc... Everyone understood everyone. At some moment an other women
> came to
> join this group and of course started to speak English.
> Unfortunately none
> could understand her language. I pose a question: from which
> country she
> was? ... The answer is from... England. It is a paradox of our time.
> Distance between learned English and real British English is growing.
>
> Still I don't understand why BBC uses the language "nobody" speaks
> (with
> exception for some academics).
>
> Paradox of our time.

Personally I would guess this is more about the accents and sounds of
a british english speaker then the actual language.

I had the experience of sitting down the bar from a couple of guys
that are rattling away in some seemingly foreign language. I have a
lot of experience with foreign languages as my mom was a native pole
and my dad a native german. I also grew up in a home (US) where
visitors where frequent and from everywhere (german, swedish, swiss,
polish, israeli, african, etc.) . The kids in my neighborhood growing
up called our house the UN.

I became very curious as to what language the guys where speaking and
as I sidled closer to them, I realized they where englishmen from the
liverpool area. Didn't sound like any english I had ever heard from
a distance. Once I got up close, the words where the same, but the
rhythm and tones where quite different.

Marty

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Received on Sun Sep 2 13:23:52 2007