levitt.carl

Comment Threads

• dsgood commented on What are words worth?
  Couple of things to add: 1) Some varieties of US English use such constructions as "The car needs washed." As I understand it, this comes from Scots (and Ulster Scots), which got it from Gaelic. 2) I've heard a Dublin-area accent which sounded like RP -- except for having strong R's where RP has discarded them....
• David L commented on What are words worth?
  Trying to remember where it was that I was reading an article that proposed that the UK's working class populations had less economic leverage, so were more at the mercy of fate, so tended to speak more in present-tense phrase structures and of concrete phenomena rather than future-tense abstractions A friend who moved from the UK to the US talked about this. He became a seaman on UK cargo vessels as a teen and sailed around the world a bit till decided he had to do better. He said the key point was that most of the seamen talked in...
• David L commented on What are words worth?
  New York State has four dialect regions Heck NYC has more than that. And after 7 years in Pittsburgh I could usually tell what part of the area they were from within minutes. Anyone ever "rhet up their house"?...
• dsgood commented on What are words worth?
  I would say that New York City has multiple variations on the New York Metropolitan Dialect. Some varieties are local. Others are class-related. (For example, Beverly Sills speaks an upper class version -- though that's almost certainly not what she grew up with.) "Rhet up" is probably what I've seen in print as "redd up." I believe it comes from Scots....
• RDSouth commented on What are words worth?
  I'm curious about the various accents in Britain in that I'd like to know if there is pressure to adopt an appropriate one for one's actual status level rather than affecting something. I mean, I've known of American's who moved to GB and gradually took on accents appropriate to what they did for a living. Is it just that you gradually adopt the accent you hear a lot, or is there more? For instance, when I was growing up, having an authentic Texas accent was a prerogative of those actually with local roots, and thus presumably a claim on some...