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Mark, have you ever wondered what an almeans accent would be like if they were speaking English? An Uesti who spoke Ismaîn or Barakhinei or Verdurian as their mother tongue would speak English with an accent just like non-English speakers on Earth. What do you reckon their accents would compare to?

Ghost

Ghost wrote:Mark, have you ever wondered what an almeans accent would be like if they were speaking English? An Uesti who spoke Isma?n or Barakhinei or Verdurian as their mother tongue would speak English with an accent just like non-English speakers on Earth. What do you reckon their accents would compare to?

This came up once before, and I wrote out "Ozymandias" as a Verdurian might pronounce it... I can't find that now, though.

The vowels are usually the giveaway in accents, since English has more vowels than most languages. Verdurian lacks quite a few vowels English has, so as a first approximation a Verdurian would probably sound like a Spanish speaker. His r's would be tapped, he'd drop his h's, and he'd have trouble with the ng sound and the unvoiced th.

Barakhinei has a ten-vowel system, so that wouldn't offer as many clues-- though it lacks the vowel in 'put'. They'd get the syllabic consonants wrong, and have trouble with zh, j, ng, and initial v. Perhaps because of that, they'd sound a bit German. Women would have a distinctive pronunciation: palatalizing n and l before front vowels, pronouncing sh as an alveolo-palatal, and ch as ts.

Isma?n would be the most distinctive... at a rough guess I'd say an Isma?n accent would sound like a combination of French and Polish.

I thought Barakhinei ? was the vowel in "put"?

Ahribar wrote:I thought Barakhinei ? was the vowel in "put"?

Huh. Looks like I didn't specify. I'm pretty sure I intended it as the vowel in 'putt'.

In that case, I have to say your phonology diagram is most confusing. The vowel is given the IPA symbol for , and is shown as at the same height as [o]. Are you sure it isn't simply meant to be ?

D'oh, I wasn't looking at the IPA. Yeah, trust the diagram.

zompist wrote:

Ghost wrote:Isma?n would be the most distinctive... at a rough guess I'd say an Isma?n accent would sound like a combination of French and Polish.

Thanks!

*starts talking in a heavy Ismaîn accent*

Ghost

zompist wrote:They'd get the syllabic consonants wrong, and have trouble with zh, j, ng, and initial v. Perhaps because of that, they'd sound a bit German.

Wait, what? Assuming you mean j as /j/, no German would have a problem with any of those. Even if you mean "j" as /dZ/, that's only one sound they don't have. Of course, they very well might get syllabic consonants wrong, I never really thought about that.

GreenBowTie wrote:

zompist wrote:They'd get the syllabic consonants wrong, and have trouble with zh, j, ng, and initial v. Perhaps because of that, they'd sound a bit German.

Wait, what? Assuming you mean j as /j/, no German would have a problem with any of those. Even if you mean "j" as /dZ/, that's only one sound they don't have. Of course, they very well might get syllabic consonants wrong, I never really thought about that.

Unclear referent. I was thinking of the initial v, which for Germans wouldn't even be a phonetic problem, only an orthographic one.

German doesn't have zh though, does it?

GreenBowTie wrote:

zompist wrote:They'd get the syllabic consonants wrong, and have trouble with zh, j, ng, and initial v. Perhaps because of that, they'd sound a bit German.

Wait, what? Assuming you mean j as /j/, no German would have a problem with any of those. Even if you mean "j" as /dZ/, that's only one sound they don't have. Of course, they very well might get syllabic consonants wrong, I never really thought about that.

Well, he did say "a bit"; the devoicink of finals is one other think the two accents woult hafe in common. Ant the initial /v/ think would render it qvite distinctife.

It does in a lot of borrowed words. "Garage" /ga'ra:Z@/, "Genie" /Ze'ni:/ (which I think actually means "genius" rather than "genie"). I doubt if it has any in native words, but I don't think Germans have any trouble pronouncing these (a lot do have trouble with the nasalized vowels in French borrowings, though). Of course, it would be better to ask a native German-speaker, but this is my understanding of it.

So Haleza Grise wrote:

GreenBowTie wrote:

zompist wrote:They'd get the syllabic consonants wrong, and have trouble with zh, j, ng, and initial v. Perhaps because of that, they'd sound a bit German.

Wait, what? Assuming you mean j as /j/, no German would have a problem with any of those. Even if you mean "j" as /dZ/, that's only one sound they don't have. Of course, they very well might get syllabic consonants wrong, I never really thought about that.

Well, he did say "a bit"; the devoicink of finals is one other think the two accents woult hafe in common.

True. (Although no German would ever go "-ink" for "-ing".)

GreenBowTie wrote:"Genie" /Ze'ni:/ (which I think actually means "genius" rather than "genie").

True. On the other hand, the words aren't really different; both come from Latin genius with a bit of mix-up along the way:

the OED wrote:The word g?nie was adopted by the Fr. translators of the Arabian Nights as the rendering of the Arab. word which it resembled in sound and in sense. In Eng. genie has been commonly used in the sing. and genii in the plural.