Accent Meme

[hells_half_acre]

 So, this has been going around, and I thought I'd jump in for fun...

This is the list of stuff I was supposed to say in the audio:

Your name and/or username
Where you're from
The following words: Aunt, Roof, Route, Wash, Oil, Theater, Iron, Salmon, Caramel, Fire, Water, Sure, Data, Ruin,
Crayon, Toilet, New Orleans, Pecan, Both, Again, Probably, Spitting Image, Alabama, Lawyer, Coupon, Mayonnaise, Syrup, Pajamas, Caught, Orange, Coffee, direction, naturally, aluminium and herbs
What is it called when you throw toilet paper on a house?
What is the bubbly carbonated drink called?
What do you call gym shoes?
What do you say to address a group of people?
What do you call the kind of spider that has an oval-shaped body and extremely long legs?
What do you call your grandparents?
What do you call the wheeled contraption in which you carry groceries at the supermarket?
What do you call it when rain falls while the sun is shining?
What is the thing you change the TV channel with?

Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.

If you do one too, let me know, I like accents. I think my accent is your fairly standard general Canadian one...boring! 

Oh, and another note about "addressing a group of people" - if it were a question or in a different context than a greeting, I would probably say "you guys" - such as, "Are you guys going to the party on Friday?" or "I told you guys not to eat that!"  (In S5 there's a point where Jared says "y'all guys" and it's my opinion that this is some weird hybrid between Texan and Canadian :-P)

Comments

[claudiapriscus.livejournal.com]

I think the aluminum/aluminium one is a silly one for the meme to include, since the difference is which spelling was adopted. They're both pronounced as they are written. It'd be silly to pronounce it when written as aluminum as aluminium (and vice versa).


I thought about giving this meme a try, but then realized I'd spend most of the time saying several things (aunt, route, caramel, data, etc) twice, because I don't tend to favor one pronunciation over the other and go back and forth all the time..

[hells-half-acre.livejournal.com]

Very true about the aluminum/aluminium thing. It also occurred to me afterwards that if they really wanted to catch the difference between Canadian and American, they should really have the words "about" and "sorry" in there.

And yeah, I had that problem with "herbs"...and I said "route" like I did because that's usually how I say it, except when I'm talking about a "router" and then I use the other pronunciation. So, you bus driver drives a route (root), but I use a router (raowter) for my internet.

[claudiapriscus.livejournal.com]

I really do switch it back and forth. I'd call it the scenic route (like rout). If I were reading a news article about a specific road aloud, I'd read it as 'root'. (though just speaking, I can't remember ever calling them anything but highways.)

Herbs is something I could never pronounce the 'h' with, even when living in the UK. My mother teased me gently but quite memorably about it when I was very little. ("Herb's what?")

[hells-half-acre.livejournal.com]

I call highways "highway" or whatever number they are...though, when I was very young and living in Ottawa, I thought all highways were called "the Queensway" because that's what the 417 through Ottawa is called.

In my elementary class we had a pot of Rosemary that I named Herb...which is why I switch back and forth on the name now. I don't know which ones a britishism and which ones and americanism. Spelling too is kind of either or...I used to always spell realized as "realised" and likewise with a lot of british spellings, but the automatic spellchecker on a lot of sites is for american english, so after a while to reduce the amount of red underlines I would see in any given post, I just switched to the american use of the letter Z.

[claudiapriscus.livejournal.com]

The 'z/s' thing still occasionally catches me. I'll write something long and it'll all be -ization and -ize and then I'll have ONE random word in there with -ise as a result of my time in the UK and...it'll look like I can't spell. At least if I used it more often it'd be more apparent what was going on.

Apparently, as I was informed on several occasions, in the UK 'herb' (the foodstuff) and Herb (the man's name) are pronounced the same, with no silent H.

In the US, it's definitely Herb (The man's name) and (h)erb, the foodstuff, with a silent h.

That doesn't exactly help you on the Canada question, because as far as I can tell, you Canadians are quite inconsistent on which system you use when it comes to american vs UK english. Pick a side already, sheesh! ;)

[hells-half-acre.livejournal.com]

Pick a side already, sheesh! ;)

Haha, I know! It drives me bonkers! :P

[mara-snh.livejournal.com]

Thanks for doing this. I enjoyed hearing you. You have such a lovely voice! Funny you didn't know about what to call "sun showers" when I was a child in Florida, where they are an almost daily phenomenon. I imagine they're pretty rare in your neck of the woods. I wish I could play, but I don't think I have a way to record into my computer.

[hells-half-acre.livejournal.com]

Thanks :) I usually don't like hearing myself talk, but it's not so bad here...maybe because I'm not laughing. Other people think my laugh is adorable, but I just think it's ridiculous.

And no, I've never heard of "sun showers" - I have seen them before, but I didn't know they had a name. In Ontario, you wait for the humidity to build and build and then you get a torrential downpour for a day without sun...and in Vancouver it's either cloudy and raining or it's sunny and clear. :P

[baruchan.livejournal.com]

I gakked the meme from you. (http://baruchan.livejournal.com/250628.html) I don't know if it's my computer's mic or the software I used to record, but my voice sounds way lower than it should be. Oh well.

[hells-half-acre.livejournal.com]

I thought my voice sounded lower too...but, who knows. I know my friend used to make fun of how low my voice was sometimes...so, maybe it just always sounds that way, and I don't realize!

[focaccina.livejournal.com]

Totally ganked this from you :)

[hells-half-acre.livejournal.com]

Fun!

I like that you had the same reaction to "rain falling when the sun shines" as I did :P

[focaccina.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it was more or less smooth sailing until I got to that question. Then I was just like...'Huh?'

Oh, I hope you won't mind me adding you? Your journal is just buckets of fun and I've been lurking here since chapter 3 or 4 of VVV :D So I'm finally uh... De-lurking?

[hells-half-acre.livejournal.com]

I don't mind you adding me at all. I just added you back. A lot of people added me just to get regular updates on VVV (because sn_crossovers was sometimes very slow in approving posts)...so while I was writing VVV I didn't really add people back when they added me, unless they specifically asked me to.

But now that that's over, I'm sort of only now seeing who is actually around and whatnot :P And anyone who thinks that I'm buckets of fun is a winner in my book ;)