minstrel: Re: accents (was tricky scansion)

[Corrie Bergeron]

>>On a serious note, perhaps learning to sing the song well first - and I mean
>>really well - before attempting to change your pronunciation would be a good
>>idea.  People will happily listen to a song well sung in your local
>>accent..... however sung badly with a bad accent....hmmmmmm.

Ohh, yeah..!  In one of my first bardic competitions, a performance laurel
chided me for singing "with an Irish beer-hall accent."  

OTOH, as Woody Guthrie said, "If you can't sing well, sing loud!"

>Still, if one can try to assume an accent close to what the song might have
>been attempting to imitate, some odd pronunciations may become clear.  I
>found if I slipped into my Irish/Old English accent (which seems to sound a
>tad American with French overtones; hang on, isn't that Canadian??) some of
>the pronunciations changed and the scansion of other poems made more sense.

Two quick anecdotes on how accents can fool you:

I knew an old Scots piper in the mid-1980's - must have been in his 60's or
70's back then.  English had been his second language after Scots Gaelic.
He did not speak with a "Scottish brogue" at all, but rather a deep gutteral
accent that most folk originally took for German or Dutch.  Even when you
knew he was Scots, you'd never class his accent as "Scottish," though it was
unquestionably authentic.

I had to call a tech-support line a few weeks ago.  I was having a hard time
understanding the person on the other end; he sounded like he was from the
Caribbean or maybe West Africa.   I was really struggling with his accent,
then he said something (I forget what, perhaps a tiny bit of a rolled R)
that made a tiny light go on in my brain.  "Are you in Ireland?" I asked.
"Yes, Dublin."  From that instant, he was clear as a bell.  

For a not-entirely-serious examination of the history of English, including
the roots of consonant and vowel pronounciation and the economic reasons for
the Great Vowel Shift, see The Story of English,
http://www.itasca.net/~corrie/english.htm

Brendan O Corraidhe

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Corrie Bergeron			 	corrie at tro.com				
Senior PLATO Courseware Designer, TRO Learning	www.tro.com 
President, Intra-Active Designs			www.itasca.net/~corrie/iad.htm
All-around neat guy		corrie at itasca.net	www.itasca.net/~corrie 

"Short term memory don't mean a thing when you've lost your mind" - Ellis
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