firstly, to introduce myself, i've been "lurking" this list
for many moons now. one of the first posts i read contained
a reference to something called "mid-atlantic noise". i've
been promising myself ever since that if i ever overcame the
lurk-threshhold my first post would include a query about
this concept. does it ring any bells with anyone? for what
it's worth, i imagined it to be a pejorative term for a way
of speaking consisting of a mixture of european and american
englishes. unfortunately, all my attempts to relocate that
original mention have been in vain. in his post today, doug
wrote of:

>Europeanised American accents (snip) The Frenchified version
>is almost an accent on its own, with American regional
>colouration, of course.  And there's a British version too.

might there be a connection? i've been living in berlin for
around 5 years now, over which period i've observed that
people tend to lose their syntax long before their accents,
resulting in some perplexingly "un-genuine" idiom. my guess
is that the difference between english and french in terms
of sound is far greater than that between english and german,
while it's more the other way round in terms of word order.

on another connected issue: i'm currently preparing for the
imminent publication of a tape containing a collaborative
piece consisting of around 30 renditions of the short phrase
"i sort of thought  i might have been  an accent acrobat"
collected via answerphone in response to a request mailed to
a linguistically heterogeneous group of around 50 people.
this project was triggered by the realisation that no matter
how hard i try i cannot hold a single assumed accent over
the length of even a relatively short piece. i had hoped to
be able to do a glaswegian rendition of a poem by m.ondaatje
about frogs crossing roads in queensland australia. this
invariably resulted in a rambling medley of accents, none
of which lasted more than about two lines. i abandonned the
idea and did the collaborative piece instead. however, since
then, precisely this mish-mash of different cod, remembered
and bastardized accents has returned as the voice of a text
called "garlic boy meets garlic girl" which i've performed
on a number of occasions at slams, open stages and the like.
although this raises issues of legitimacy/appropriation, i
can't imagine reading the piece in any other way. i've made
a point of "apologizing in advance" to anyone present whose
accent (or an approximation thereof) gets mixed up in the
proceedings, but somehow i suspect this "isn't good enough".
in the process of considering a recording of "garlic boy
meets garlic girl" for inclusion on the aforementioned tape
i've been pondering the frivolity factor above all. all those
i've conferred with on this so far have confirmed that they
often feel the urge to speak with an assumed accent of one
kind or another, in much the same way one may feel inclined
to substitute absurd utterances for the expected ones at the
most serious of moments. although this is an integral part of
the canon of infantile humour, it also informs or at least
feeds many other genres. however, i cannot deny that something
that might be termed "accent-envy" also plays a role here.
having grown up in various locations across the south of england
and having spent something like 8 years abroad, i wouldn't call
my pronounciation an accent. in fact, i probably have more of
an accent when speaking other languages, depending on where
i learnt them.... in any case, i simply wanted to contribute
these thoughts to a thread which is proving such a timely source
of true-says on this matter, this by RC for instance:

>Try saying "A pint of beer, please" the same way twice...
>if you're a performer, you should be able to do it.

(yes, you guessed it, this is the part of the post where the
list-newbie all but succumbs to a powerful urge to bang
on about how great he thinks it is that there are people all
over the world swapping valuable information via networks.)

my apologies for any verbosity experienced

greetings

nick grindell




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