naturalplastic wrote:
Trogluddite wrote:
naturalplastic wrote:
With half of the English speaking world you cant tell whether they are going to "the potty", or going to "the party"!
Interesting choice of example. In most British accents, the vowels of those two words would be very distinct, even when the pronunciation is non-rhotic. I was always jealous of my Grandad's rolled Rs, and his Scots accent generally, but my own idiolect is completely non-rhotic (I've managed to collect most English forms of glottal stop, though - laziness, I think; I can't resist eliding half the consonants in every sentence!)
WE...of the midwestern USA dialect, do it right! Lol!
But seriously... we DO do it probably like the Brits of Shakespeare's time did it.
We don't roll our r's like the Scotland folks do, and like some other regions of Britain do.
But we do actually pronounce the r, unlike upper class Brits, and unlike New Yorkers.
New Yorkers not only don't pronounce their r's they put r's where they don't belong: at the end of words that end with "a". They address ladies named "Lisa" as "Leezer". They talk about countries named "Chiner", and diseases called "sciatick-her".
There's actually a pretty complex pronunciation rule behind that called the "intrusive R" where a word ending a in vowel(usually the schwa sound) followed by a word beginning with a vowel sound it's connected with an R sound. This usually happens in non-rhotic accents like an English accent or a New Yorker accent.
Anyway...I'm pretty sure this wasn't a thread about who has the right accent(if something like this exists), I'm pretty sure someone wanted know how to deal with his interest not being taken very seriously.
Maybe this thread does show that there are a lot of people who care about grammar and the right way to speak English, so OP doesn't have to feel alone...except for that fact that there's even disagreement on what's supposed to be correct in the first place.
Boy this thread got complicated, haha!
But I guess it shows that there's a next level to just simple grammar as people are willing to talk about these things in the first place.
Welcome home, I guess ^^