Re: Is Unicode character a vowel?

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"Joseph M. Newcomer" <newcomer@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:0bc643pajbss9pjjv0out1s5cnhkq0ipu4@xxxxxxxxxx

A week teaching North of London and I'd already picked up a bit of a British accent. I
had to, to make myself understood to the locals!

Ah well that's London for you - I avoid the place.

Most of us are sufficiently expose to US accents that we have relatively problem deciphering them if the vocab is not too colloquial. However rehearsing once in a band with a visiting US conductor, I did have to translate for my colleagues: neither they nor the conductor seemed to know that an "eighth note" is really a "quaver". One has to do international software support for that :-)

We have a TV program here in which the British actor speaks with a very conscious American
accent...and I had no idea he was British (a friend heard him in an interview and didn't
believe it was the same person until he gave his American accent imitiation!)

Until recently I believed that it was much easier to do a US accent, than vice versa. But one or two examples the other way have given me some doubts: Gwyneth Paltrow, Meryl Streep, Renee Zellweger, are all very convincing. One problem is the very variable vowel sounds in British accents. They are not necessarily difficult but if someone picks up an inconsistent set - one vowel sound from one accent and another from another - then it's a dead give-away and sounds very odd.

[The read-headed guy in "Paint your Wagon" was truly dire. Dick Van Dike always had a Dick Van Dike accent - whatever he was doing :-) As they said of the Cary Grant imitation in "Some Like it Hot" .... "Nowbawdy tawks loik thaaaat!" ]

Dave
--
David Webber
Author of 'Mozart the Music Processor'
http://www.mozart.co.uk
For discussion/support see
http://www.mozart.co.uk/mzusers/mailinglist.htm

.

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