Regional accents- the last straw.

[teamsaint]

Really?

I love Chaucer

my little joke has made you sad ?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

my little joke has made you sad ?

No - I thought I was continuing it!

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

What do you mean by 'tokenism'?

I mean the selection of someone to do a job on the grounds of their accent. As long as they can be understood and speak grammatically (i.e. not Steph McGovern), the accept should not be a consideration.

[jean]

I mean the selection of someone to do a job on the grounds of their accent...

I thought the last time a non-RP speaker was selected to speak on the radio purely on account of their accent was when they got Wilfred Pickles to read the news on the Home Service!

[Barbirollians]

A great start to 2016:

Not music for a hangover though

[Beef Oven!]

I mean the selection of someone to do a job on the grounds of their accent. As long as they can be understood and speak grammatically (i.e. not Steph McGovern), the accept should not be a consideration.

Straw man argument.

[Barbirollians]

I assume the Stockhausen is replacing the New year's concert from Vienna .

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I assume the Stockhausen is replacing the New year's concert from Vienna .

[vinteuil]

.... High English was just a bit better than Middle English.

Really?

I love Chaucer

... when I were a nundergraduate, Chaucer, despite his early date, was deemed to be 'early modern English'. (Yes, this was Oxford in the 1970s... )

'Middle English' meant things like Sir Gawayn and þe Grene Knyȝt, the Ormulum, the Aȝenbite of Inwit, Gower, Langland (Piers Plowman), the Pearl poet. I found Middle English much less interesting than Old English ['Anglo-Saxon'] - tho' I did like Mandeville's Travels...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mandeville

EDIT - things seem to have moved on - Oxford now seems to regard Chaucer as Modern English -

http://public.oed.com/aspects-of-english/english-in-time/middle-english-an-overview/

.
Harrumph.

[MrGongGong]

I assumed that Beefy!! knew what he was talking about, and that High English was just a bit better than Middle English.

There's "high" and there's "high"

[french frank]

I thought the last time a non-RP speaker was selected to speak on the radio purely on account of their accent was when they got Wilfred Pickles to read the news on the Home Service!

Purely, yes, probably. But the BBC's 'diversity policies' have been in place for some years, and that has meant a broad 'range of voices', aka regional accents.

I'd have hoped we (the public) had moved beyond thinking about this, even if the BBC feels it has to fulfill its national remit by representing the different regions, and not being London-centric. In any case, the entire country is not insistent on cut-glass accents that we don't hear anywhere except on the BBC Well-enunciated words are those which are clearly understood, regardless of accent.

[gurnemanz]

Nor is it German.

The terms Hochdeutsch and Plattdeutsch are I think strictly geographhical in origin (gurnemanz will know) though I'm told the first has been commandeered by the linguistic snobs to mean something like Beefy's high English.

Brian Sewell, thou shouldst be living at this hour...

Flattered to be cited as an expert, if a rather shaky one ... but I'll rise to the bait. (We covered all this in exhaustive detail on my German BA course nearly 50 years ago). The High/Low distinction is based on geography in that between the third and fifth centuries a sound shift took place below a line on the map, creating High German. Low Germanic languages thus also include Dutch and English as well as Plattdeutsch, which is now a non-standard North German dialect. Info here.

The main consonant shifts are:

p>pf at the start of words: path/Pfad, pan/Pfanne, plant/Pflanze etc
p>f after vowels: pepper/Pfeffer, ship/Schiff, ape/Affe

t>ts (written "z"): ten/zehn, toll/Zoll, to/zu etc
t>s after vowels: eat/essen, water/Wasser, out/aus

k>ch after vowels: book, Buch, cook/Koch, break/brechen

Over the centuries High German took over even above the line in North Germany and became the standard and socially acceptable version. In Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann the middle class family of the title speak High German amongst themselves and their social ilk and Low German to their lower-class employees. Platt can still be heard a lot in Hamburg, Lübeck etc and even Berliners like to say "Wat is dat?" rather than the more respectable "Was ist das?"

[MrGongGong]

Why is this described as "the last straw" ?

and surely it should be "t'last straw"?

(But he's gone on to 'higher' things I guess and we will never know )

[Roehre]

Nor is it German.

The terms Hochdeutsch and Plattdeutsch are I think strictly geographhical in origin (gurnemanz will know) though I'm told the first has been commandeered by the linguistic snobs to mean something like Beefy's high English.

Brian Sewell, thou shouldst be living at this hour...

It's Hochdeutsch, Mitteldeutsch and Niederdeutsch as main regional German languages/dialects. Plattdeutsch is the generic name for rather local dialects, esopecially in the northern half of Germany.
Niederdeutsch and Nederlands (Netherlands' Dutch, hence Dutch [from Deutsch!]) have much more in common than Niederdeutsch and Hochdeutsch.

Hochdeutsch is standard German now, which is lingua franca in Germany, Austria and the german speaking parts of Belgium, Luxemburg and Switzerland [in the latter Schwytzertüütsch is used lingua franca as well], despite the fact that Bavarian, Swiss and Austrian dialects are hardly understandable for those people who are exclusively used to Hochdeutsch.

[Roehre]

.... Platt can still be heard a lot in Hamburg, Lübeck etc and even Berliners like to say "Wat is dat?" rather than the more respectable "Was ist das?"

"Wat is dat" will be perfectly understood as Dutch in Amsterdam