Opera on 3 - Live from the Met

[marthe]

Flosshilde: "pahk the cah..." is a bit of a joke. Cabots, Lowells and Lodges sound nothing like Sloane Rangers and Hooray Henrys nor do they sound like JFK. The younger generation has lost the non-rhotic speech that is often imitated when Hollywood wants to do a Boston, or generic New England accent. I recently saw a film in which Minnie Driver puts on a thick Boston accent. The character she portrays doesn't speak that way in real life. Now Rodeyelin, where I live, is another story...

EA: the first settlers of New England were not Irish. Large-scale Irish immigration didn't begin in my area until the late 1820s. The division between Yankee Boston Brahmins (aka the Codfish Aristocracy, decendents of Puritans) and the Boston Irish (Roman Catholics) is the stuff of legend and literature. The Scots-Irish settled the back country of the Middle-Atlantic states and the south. Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Andrew Jackson were all of Scots-Irish descent. The prairie states were settled by Germans, Scandinavians, Bohemians among other groups. New York has its Dutch legacy. My maternal grandmother from the Bronx would always berl the kettle for a cup of tea with the goils.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

EA: the first settlers of New England were not Irish. Large-scale Irish immigration didn't begin in my area until the late 1820s. The division between Yankee Boston Brahmins (aka the Codfish Aristocracy, decendents of Puritans) and the Boston Irish (Roman Catholics) is the stuff of legend and literature. The Scots-Irish settled the back country of the Middle-Atlantic states and the south. Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Andrew Jackson were all of Scots-Irish descent. The prairie states were settled by Germans, Scandinavians, Bohemians among other groups. New York has its Dutch legacy. My maternal grandmother from the Bronx would always berl the kettle for a cup of tea with the goils.

That's fascinating. I always find this aspect of history to be be particularly interesting.

[marthe]

Thanks, EA. I was afraid I'd taken this thread way off topic. I'll have to put my soapbox in the very back of the cupboard!

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

marthe, I've never found your posts less than illuminating.

[marthe]

EA, you are a gentleman.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

[Eudaimonia]

Thanks, EA. I was afraid I'd taken this thread way off topic. I'll have to put my soapbox in the very back of the cupboard!

Don't pack up yet--this has to be one of the nicest and most worthwhile thread derails I've ever seen.

Curious, have you ever had reason to be self-conscious of your accent to the point that you did something to reduce or eliminate it? It was always such a huge issue for me...I remember being dragged to family reunions as a kid and swearing I was never, ever going to sound like those people as long as I lived. For some reason, my immediate family never had a strong accent, but after I left home, I worked HARD on obliterating any trace of it to avoid prejudice.

Here's one for the RP speakers: if RP didn't really come into its own until the 1950s, what was Leslie Howard-as-Henry Higgins teaching Eliza in Pygmalion in 1938? And precisely how dire is Wendy Hiller's fake cockney accent--and why?

PYGMALION (1938)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4l3idZqpbI

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

RP is a variable commodity. Estuary English has largely taken over - even the Royal family has moved in this direction. D'Oyly Carte was about as RP as it was possible to be ("thet men" = "that man", etc.) but even this holy relic has passed by.

My own prejudices are not based upon when you say "grass" or "grahss" (I say the former) but upon spelling, punctuation and grammar.

[marthe]

Euda: I've never consciously tried to eliminate my accent. My entire life I've been surrounded by people who have spoken "accented" English. My paternal grandparents spoke excellent British English but with a Belgian accent (nothing like David Suchet as Hercule Poirot.) My father and mother spent formative years in/near NYC so brought those accents with them to New England. English was actually Dad's third language which he learned after immigrating to the US from Belgium. He was young enough to pick it up without a trace of a foreign accent though his older sisters always spoke an accented English. My husband is from Lancashire but his mother was originally from East Prussia (she was a war bride) and she spoke an interesting combination of Lancs with a German accent. His accent has softened over the thirty-odd years we've lived in the States. We've many friends who are ex-pats from GB/Commonwealth and who represent a wide range of British-English accents. I'm not a linguist but find accents, vocabulary, and dialect very interesting.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

marthe, Lancashire accents fascinate me. I can generally identify which town people are from in Lancashire, Greater Manchester and Merseyside. I scored a real "coup" recently when I met someone who I recognised as coming from the Saddleworth area and correctly identified her as originating from Delph, a small village near Saddleworth.
You appear to be something of a true "world citizen".

[kernelbogey]

I consider myself reasonably familiar with US pronunciation, having both relatives and friends in the US. I find the American accents employed in BBC radio plays usually excruciatingly false. I believe this to be because Equity will not allow US actors to play these parts, so we get British actors faking a US accent. My explanation may be wrong but I find the result painful. Any comments from US listeners?

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I consider myself reasonably familiar with US pronunciation, having both relatives and friends in the US. I find the American accents employed in BBC radio plays usually excruciatingly false. I believe this to be because Equity will not allow US actors to play these parts, so we get British actors faking a US accent. My explanation may be wrong but I find the result painful.

Doesn't the same thing happen the other way round too? Renee Zellweger, Demi Moore, Jodie Foster, Meryl Streep and Gwyneth Paltrow all spring to mind. The worst ever were Charlton Heston as General Gordon in "Kartoum" and Dick Van Dyke in "Mary Poppins" and "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang".

[marthe]

Kernel Bogey: I have often wondered about the fake American accents in Radio 4 drama...now I know the answer. We used to play "spot the fake American accent" whenever we listened to BBC radio dramas! Of course that was more than 30 years ago and things may have improved! Yes they were and, presumably, still are "excruciatingly false." That being said, I recently watched Amistad, a movie that takes place in 1830s New England (and partly filmed in my home town!) in which British actors such as Anthony Hopkins, Peter Firth, and Jeremy Northam portray Americans of that time. Hopkins does a wonderful job of interpreting crusty old Bostonian John Quincy Adams. I suppose the idea was to find actors who could approximate the speech of the New Republic; think of Gone With the Wind with Vivian Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara and Leslie Howard as Ashley Wilkes. Their Civil War-era southern accents are more than plausible!

On the other hand, we have the Dick Van Dyke debacle in Mary Poppins.The ladies have tried hard and, to my ear, have done a creditable job with English accents. Many Americans go gaga over English accents as long as they conform to recognizable types. If it isn't English as spoken by Alistair Cooke, the Beatles, or (forgive me) Dick Van Dyke, they can't quite cope. My husband, with his now dilute Lancashire accent, is often asked if he is from Australia!

EA: you are kind...and would that I were a world citizen. I'm just lucky to be the daughter, wife, daughter-in-law, and sister-in-law of immigrants. Where I live, they joke about needing a passport to go over the bridge to mainland Rhode Island (we are in the "Rhode Island" part of the state.) So much for being a world citizen!

[kernelbogey]

Marthe - thank you. There are some younger actors who are excellent at American accents. In A Single Man, which stars Colin Firth as an ex-pat Brit, there is a student, Kenny who befriends him. I was astonished to discover that the actor Nicholas Hoult, is British, so convincing was his performance. There is also a young British woman actor who astonished me in the same way, but I can't recall her name or the movie at the moment. But on the other hand we had a trail on R3 recently for a play with awful 'southern' accents. I think it must be harder to maintain for a radio play probably recorded in long takes than for a film with its short takes.

[marthe]

Interesting point about radio plays vs. films. I'm sure production logistics make a difference. I'm glad to hear that younger British actors/actresses have mastered the American accent! The American accent is a moving target and has changed considerably since the golden days of Hollywood when the accent heard in films of the 30s and 40s was probably closer to a mid-Atlantic accent making it easier for British actors to sound American when necessary. We would be in good shape if Hollywood would just do a creditable job with US regional accents! Anyway, back to the beginning: Margaret and Ira are not going to change. If one doesn't like the live commentary from the Met, turn the volume off until the next act begins. I've listened to the quiz for many a year and am not about to give it up!