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Candice writes: > > I'm less annoyed than you are, I guess, by efforts to transliterate distinctive pronunciations, provided that they strike my ear accurately when I'm in any position to judge that. > > I wouldn't say I was annoyed. I thought Helen's poem was terrific, as a matter of fact. And I also think Tom Leonard's transliterations of Glaswegian are brilliant, though I'm never sure whether I admire them as poetry or just as a technical tour de force. But I think your implied point is accurate - you have to know the accent already to do the imaginative leap from the transliteration to the voice. And the politics of that process is often represented simplistically, whereas it's actually quite complicated. > > As a New Englander originally > > What a surprise! I always imagined you with a Southern drawl. I had a girlfriend from Portland once, with the result that the Maine accent is now the only American one I can do. (She taught me a joke about moose-turd pie, but no British people understand it.) But I have to admit I have trouble telling it from other New England accents, though she certainly didn't sound like JFK. Ta-tah is exactly how I would write the pronunciation, because for me that spelling seems to make a distinction between a short vowel and a long one. We had some Californian friends staying with us this summer, and they asked us how we pronounced the name of the city Bath. We said Bahth (long A). So the mother started pronouncing it that way. Then the son asked how we pronounce the kind of bath you get into. Same way. So he said see, that's not the name, it's just the way they speak. I haven't heard Steven Wright's Canadian. Hard to imagine him imitating anyone else's voice. Best wishes Matthew