Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 March 5

= March 5 =

General (universal) surprise
As opposed to a "big" surprise - meaning something that is very surprising, by a "general" (or a "universal") surprise - I mean: a surprise that surprises many people (Check French: "à la surprise générale "), or that has many impacts - on many domains - or on many aspects of life, and the like.

However, I doubt if the word "general" ("universal") is the most useful one in that context, and mainly whether it's the best one to use in that context. Any other suggestions (except for "general" and "universal")? 185.27.105.173 (talk) 07:52, 5 March 2018 (UTC)


 * "Widespread surprise" has numerous Google Books results. E.g. "Catherine's readiness to provoke a conflict in defence of Orthodoxy occasioned widespread surprise". After all, there are always going to be a few people who are not surprised by anything.  Alansplodge (talk) 12:50, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * I have read several novel's that simply use "To everyone's surprise" when meaning what "à la surprise générale" means in French. --Lgriot (talk) 20:39, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

Indefinite article for ʻokina
So the word ʻokina starts with a ʻokina, which represents a glottal stop, which is a consonant. From that I infer that it is correct to write a ʻokina rather than an ʻokina.

But I'm curious whether this is the standard scholarly usage, and whether it is thus codified in style guides (these are two separate questions). The ʻokina article seems to avoid the issue (by never using the word with an indefinite article), and I don't see any reference to it having been discussed on the talk page. --Trovatore (talk) 10:08, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * No, our article ʻOkina does contain the expression "an ʻokina". However, our article ʻotuhaka, uses the expression "a ʻotuhaka". 185.27.105.173 (talk) 10:23, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * I bet whoever wrote "a ʻotuhaka" would in real life in fact use the stressed [eɪ] pronunciation for "a" which would prove that they don't "really" think of that ʻokina as a "real" consonant, for all that they pretend they do. In any case that pronunciation would be just a bit of pedantry and in my opinion "an ʻokina", "an ʻotuhaka", etc. should be the preferred usage in English. Basemetal  10:59, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Why would you bet that, exactly? It seems to me the pronunciation should be /ʌ.ʔoʊˈkiːnə/.  Note that "an ʻokina", /ən.ʔoʊˈkiːnə/, is very hard to say.  It would flow much more naturally if you left out the glottal stop, but that would seem to kind of miss the point. --Trovatore (talk) 11:22, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Saying /ən.ʔoʊˈkiːnə/, is not harder than saying "an historic day" - the aitch being pronounced185.27.105.173 (talk) 12:05, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * I think it is harder. The [h] is just a voiceless vowel; you can slip it in there without too much trouble.  The [ʔ] is a consonant, which for me doesn't like to come after the n.  I can do it, but it feels very weird indeed.
 * In any case I don't see how "an historic" with a sounded h is relevant; it's a completely different sound. --Trovatore (talk) 19:30, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * What? Is the [h] just a voiceless vowel? To my ears, it's a voiceless consonant, and I can't notice any principal difference between, any (artificial) difficulty in pronouncing "an" before the voiceless consonant [h], and any (artificial) difficulty in pronouncing "an" before the voiced consonant [ʔ]. 185.46.77.11 (talk) 20:23, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * The English [h] is usually realized as a voiceless vowel &mdash; that is, it has the same value as the vowel that follows it, except without the voicing. I don't think there's such a thing as a voiced glottal stop.  At least, I can't figure out how to produce one. --Trovatore (talk) 20:47, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Who has written the following?
 * As far as I know, the glottal stop is used in all English accents, whenever an utterance commences with a vowel. We just don't write it down. Or say the line from Dickens, [t]he law is a ass, a idiot, and you'll be putting glottal stops in the appropriate place. Typical readers are struck by the error in that line, but they don't have any problem saying it..
 * HOTmag (talk) 20:36, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Well, that's a slightly odd question, given that the text appears below with my signature after it, and that's where you presumably found it. Why do you ask? --Trovatore (talk) 20:47, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * I ask because: On one hand, you've claimed that "the glottal stop is used in all English accents, whenever an utterance commences with a vowel", so "an apple" - which is very easy to say - is (in your view) pronounced like "an ʔapple", hence "an ʔapple" is (in your view) very easy to say; On the other hand, you've claimed that "/ən.ʔoʊˈkiːnə/, is very hard to say"... HOTmag (talk) 21:28, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * I said when an utterance commences with a vowel, not a word. I find it difficult to put a glottal stop between "an" and "apple".  The word "apple" is not the start of the utterance. --Trovatore (talk) 21:43, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * ... but anyone who says ""an historic day" and pronounces the "h" needs "an history lesson" on the reason for for using "an".  Dbfirs  12:40, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * I've heard an aspirated (pronounced) "h" in "an historic day", and almost never "an istoric day". The same is true for "an heroic achievement", "an hypnotic suggestion", "an heptagonal object", "an heraldic device", "an hospitable household", "an hereditary condition", "an historian", "an holistic approach", and so on for h-words that have their stress on the 2nd syllable and sound the 'h'. As soon as the stress moves to the 3rd syllable, the article becomes "a": "a horizontal alignment", "a hierarchical structure", etc. 185.27.105.173 (talk) 13:12, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Yes, I've heard some of those erroneous usages of "an", all based on a historic misunderstanding. Db<i style="color: #4fc;">f</i><i style="color: #6f6;">i</i><i style="color: #4e4;">r</i><i style="color: #4a4">s</i>  18:41, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Note: In Arabic no word can start with a vowel so all the Arabic words that to us look like they start with a vowel in fact start with either a hamza (أ), a glottal stop, or an ayin (ع), a voiced pharyngeal (an ayin: case in point), and yet I have absolutely no memory of a single example, even in scholarly works, of hearing or reading "a ayin". Now the sequence "an ayin" doesn't occur in WP (neither does "a ayin" of course) but I've found "an Alawite State" here. Alawite (علوية) starts with an ayin since it is derived from the name Ali (علي). Maybe you'll argue that in this case the word has been Anglicized, so I'll let other people look for even better examples, but I can promise you I've never seen in writing (or heard) the definite article "a" [ə] in hiatus with an Arabic word starting with hamza or ayin. I can't swear I haven't heard a stressed "a" [eɪ], but if I've heard it, it's gotta be extremely rare.  Basemetal  10:59, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * First of all, the Arabic letter is called ayn, unlike its Hebrew cognate which is ayin.
 * Now, ghits for "an ayn" vs. "a ayn" vs. "a 3ayn" vs. "an 3ayn" are distributed as 400 : 200 : 10 : 1; this is to show that, most people who write ayn down as a 3, treat it as a consonant, while most people who write it down as a funny punctuation mark, or omit it altogether, -- don't treat it as a consonant. --194.213.3.4 (talk) 13:07, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Excellent point and yes I was being influenced by Hebrew. Note (y'all) how the Arabic and Hebrew cognates are accented on the same syllable. Words ending in 2 consonants like ayn which cannot exist in Biblical Hebrew (except for one or two late examples such "nard" or "nerd", I forget, a kind of perfume; I'm not talking of modern Hebrew here of course, which has thousands of words ending in two consonants, borrowings from European languages in general) had acquired in Biblical Hebrew a vowel that separates the two final consonants but have not shifted the accent so that they become accented on the penultimate. Such words are called "milim segoliyot" (because there's often a "segol") even though there might be no actual "segol" in the word, as in ayin, for example. Besides designating the letter, the two words are the usual word for "eye" and "spring (of water)" in both languages. Basemetal  13:35, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * WP:WHAAOE: Segolate --194.213.3.4 (talk) 13:46, 5 March 2018 (UTC)


 * Trovatore -- the glottal stop is present as a kind of sub-phonemic or semi-phonemic sound in many English dialects (present in many forms of American English in words like "button", and in some forms of British English in words like "bottle", to start with), so it wouldn't be completely outlandish to use "a ʻokina" on that basis -- but "an ʻokina" would still be the form which applies English rules to English sounds, and so would always be acceptable for that reason.
 * Basemetal -- The voiced pharyngeal sound [ʕ] is simply not present in any form of quasi-standard English, so it's really not reasonable to expect English speakers to adjust "a"/"an" forms based on a sound which doesn't appear in the English language. Also, for the letter-name "ʕayn" / "ʕayin" it's unsurprising that Arabic and Hebrew have the same stress position, since the word in each language has a normal vowel and a weak vowel (i'rab in Arabic, epenthetic segolate in Hebrew), so of course the stress will be on the normal vowel.  But in general stress in Hebrew and Arabic are not particularly coordinated, and I don't think there was any proto-language stress rule which has come down to both Hebrew and Arabic. AnonMoos (talk) 14:24, 5 March 2018 (UTC)


 * As far as I know, the glottal stop is used in all English accents, whenever an utterance commences with a vowel. We just don't write it down.  Or say the line from Dickens, [t]he law is a ass, a idiot, and you'll be putting glottal stops in the appropriate place.  Typical readers are struck by the error in that line, but they don't have any problem saying it. --Trovatore (talk) 19:37, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Actually, Biblical Hebrew has loads of words ending in two consecutive consonants: Not only nerd as you've mentioned (Song of Songs 4 14), but also: qosht (Proverbs 22 21), yaft (Genesis 9 26), wattashq (Genesis 21 19), wayyashq (Genesis 29 10; Exodus: 2 17, 2 19, 32 20; Psalms 78 15), wattevk (Genesis 21 16; Judges: 11 38, 14 16, 14 17; Samuel 2: 12 21; Ester 8 3; Chronicles 2: 34 27), wayyevk (Genesis: 27 38, 29 11, 37 35, 42 24, 43 30, 45 14, 46 29, 50 1, 50 17; Samuel 1: 24 16; Samuel 2: 3 32, 19 1; Kings 2: 8 11, 13 14, 20 3; Isaiah 38 3), wayyesht (Genesis: 9 21, 25 34, 27 25; Judges 15 19; Samuel 2: 11 13, Kings 1: 13 18, 13 19, 19 6; Kings 2: 9 34; Ruth 3 7), waʻesht (Genesis 24 46), wattesht (Numbers 20 11, Kings 1: 13 22), wayyishb (Numbers 21 1), tosp (Proverbs 30 6), and also every standard verb (i.e. a verb of the Whole Verb category), in Second Person, Feminine Singular, whether in the Past tense, e.g. ʻamart (Judges 17 2), and rarely also in the Present tense, e.g. "yoladt" (Genesis 16 11; Judges: 13 5, 13 7). 185.27.105.173 (talk) 14:29, 5 March 2018 (UTC)


 * 185.27.105.173 -- Most of those are verb forms from a "lamed he" root (i.e. a triliteral consonantal root with a semi-vowel in the third position), which are subject to a very special process of deletion of a word-final unstressed vowel which applies only to those types of forms... AnonMoos (talk) 14:42, 5 March 2018 (UTC)


 * In Hebrew, whether Biblical or Modern, most of the verbs ending in two consecutive consonants belong to the Whole Verb category, as I've already pointed out in my previous post. Actually, every standard verb (i.e. a verb belonging to that category), in the Past tense, Second Person, Feminine Singular, ends in a cluster of two consonants.
 * BTW, it seems like your Hebrew is excellent. Have you ever talked with Hebrew speakers in Modern Hebrew? 185.46.77.11 (talk) 18:27, 5 March 2018 (UTC)


 * 185.27.105.173/185.46.77.11 -- Your remark of "14:29 5 March" as it now stands is a little bit different from how it was when I first replied to it. Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar (28th edition as revised by Kautzsch and translated by Cowley) has something on this in section §10i on page 54 (see https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Gesenius%27_Hebrew_Grammar/10, though I can't guarantee the accuracy of the on-line electronic text version). The usual English terms to refer to a verb with three consonants that do not undergo assimilation or create irregularities is "strong" or "regular" verbs. AnonMoos (talk) 02:18, 6 March 2018 (UTC)


 * Thank you for the reference to Gesenius.
 * As for "strong" or "regular" verb category, yes: that's what I meant by "whole verb category" (being the Hebrew name of that category).
 * This is how my remark of "14:29 5 March" looked like, when you first replied to it. So, what do you want to note about that old version (which is a little bit different from how it now stands)? 185.27.105.171 (talk) 08:01, 6 March 2018 (UTC)


 * Yes, ok, you're right. I was thinking mostly nouns. Most of your examples are, as AnonMoos noted, verbal forms of a special type. Any nouns in your examples except "nerd"? What is that "tosp" in Proverbs? And then of course there is "att" (you, fem.) with a final geminate, probably a unique example in Hebrew of a word ending in a geminate (nouns ending in a geminate are not uncommon in Arabic), unless 185.27.105.173 proves me wrong again, possibly with a verbal form.  Basemetal  15:20, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * As for what AnonMoos noted, please see my response to them above. As for other nouns except "nerd": Yes, there are some nouns, not only in Modern Hebrew, but also in Early post-Biblical Hebrew that have influenced Modern Hebrew, e.g. "neft" (meaning petroleum and deriving from Aramaic: "nefta"). As for "tosp" (in Proverbs 30 6), the full expression ibid. is "al tosp" meaning don't add, of which the regular form is "al tosif" the stress being on the last syllable, but in poetry such words may have penultimate accent, so "tosif" (with ultima accent) may become "tosef", which sometimes may become "tosp" because of the penultimate accent of "tosef". As for words ending with a geminate, I think "att" is really unique: The final dagesh in the word "wayyiħad" (Exodus 18 9) and in the word "yiħad" (Job 3 6) is a soft one. 185.46.77.11 (talk) 18:27, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * A soft dagesh? In that position? Who has decided that? Ben Asher? Any other example of a soft dagesh which is neither in the beginning of a word nor following a shva (nakh in principle)? Basemetal  18:53, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Not Bar asher, but rather linguistic considerations, as follows: The verb "wayyiħad" (Exodus 18 9) is analogous to the verb "wayyishb" (Numbers 21 1): Both of them are actually abbreviations of forms originally ending in the vowel /e/, so that the verb "wayyishb" is actually an abbreviation of "wayyishbe" (the root being sh.b.y., meaning to capture), whereas the verb "wayyiħad" is actually an abbreviation of "wayyiħde" (the root being ħ.d.y., meaning to rejoice, as it is in Aramaic as well). That said, just as the abbreviation of "wayyishbe" is "wayyishb" with a final soft dagesh (Numbers 21 1), so the abbreviation of "wayyiħde" should have been "wayyiħd" with a final soft dagesh, as it really was there in Ancient Hebrew (whether pre-Biblical or maybe even Biblical). As expected, the vowel /a/ was inserted (Exodus 18 9) after the /ħ/ of "wayyiħd" - because of the gutturality of the /ħ/, but the final soft dagesh of the /d/ unexpectedly remained (even though it shouldn't have remained). Please notice that this linguistic consideration is more probable than the assumption that the final dagesh in the verb "wayyiħad" is a geminate, because one cannot justify any geminate there, whereas a final soft dagesh in the verb "wayyiħad" is somehow justifiable, once one notices the final soft dagesh in the analogous verb "wayyishb" (Numbers 21 1). 185.46.77.11 (talk) 19:46, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * When is it estimated the insertion of that patakh inside the "hd" cluster "vayyihd" (to give "vayyihad") happened historically? As to the lenition of bgdkpt after a vowel, that, as far as I know, happened in the first centuries AD under the influence of Aramaic. Is that what you know too? Basemetal  20:41, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Usually, words like "paħd" (=fright) became "paħad", before words like "paħad" became "paħað". However, as far as the word "wayyiħad" is concerned, probably the insertion of pataħ after the /ħ/, only happened after words like "paħad" became "paħað". Please notice that the Hebrew Bible contains many words containing /ħ/ that is followed by a consonant rather than by a vowel.
 * BTW, besides nerd, there is another Biblical noun: qosht (Proverbs 22 21). 185.46.77.11 (talk) 21:15, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * I forgot to ask: modern linguistic considerations aside, did any Masorete say anything about that dalet dgousha at the end of "yihad" and "vayyihad"? Basemetal  21:29, 6 March 2018 (UTC)
 * The Massorah indicates that the /d/ has a dagesh with a shwa naħ. No Massoretic info. about what kind of dagesh it is. 185.46.78.131 (talk) 22:00, 6 March 2018 (UTC)


 * PS: In article Alawites there's a bunch of "īyy" in Arabic names. It's gotta be one or the other: either "īy" or "iyy" but not both. I've quickly corrected some I've noticed but there's a whole bunch of them, so if anyone has got nothing better to do they might enjoy going over that article and correct all of them. Basemetal  10:59, 5 March 2018 (UTC)


 * Basemetal -- that's the Semitic adjective suffix which is called the "gentilic" in traditional Christian Biblical scholarship and the nisba by Arabic grammarians. If there's a quote from a scholarly source, then the transcription conventions used in that source should be preserved; otherwise the conventions in Manual of Style/Arabic should be used... AnonMoos (talk) 14:58, 5 March 2018 (UTC)


 * I'm familiar with nisba, but īyy can only be an error. Watch: ī is already iy so that īyy would be iyyy (three y's). It doesn't seem most of those cases are transcribed from a source so they should be corrected. The WP manual of style seems to favor īy over iyy (on a cursory reading) but there certainly are places in WP, for example that nisba article, where the other convention is used. If the source itself has the erroneous combination īyy then what do you do? I guess you put the form in quotes with a note or at least a sic. Basemetal  16:47, 5 March 2018 (UTC)


 * If Google Scholar is a measure of standard scholarly usage then the answer is definitely an ʻokina.  --Antiquary (talk) 11:11, 5 March 2018 (UTC)


 * Trying to apply English rules to a non-English word is a bit strange. There is no ʻ in the English alphabet, and you'll probably find most native English speakers will say, inviting any preceding indefinite article to be "an". Bazza (talk) 14:15, 5 March 2018 (UTC)


 * Agreed, except that the alphabet is entirely irrelevant. The rule about 'a' vs 'an' is not and never has been about spelling (apart from the annoying glitch of "an historic" for some people): it's about sounds. /ʔ/ is not a phoneme in English; it does occur as an allophone of various phonemes in different dialects, but it has no status at the beginning of a word; so most English speakers, even if they know Hawaiian, will pronounce "ʻokina" with an initial vowel, and naturally select "an". --ColinFine (talk) 16:46, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * "Has no status at the beginning of the word" &mdash; you just mean it's not phonemic, right? It is definitely pronounced.  All English utterances that we think start with a vowel actually start with a glottal stop. --Trovatore (talk) 19:49, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Indeed, the rule for the use of "an" and "a" is more about sound than spelling, which is why people who pronounce "historic" without the initial "h" sound will tend to us "an"; also is the classic case of words like "use", as in "I have a use for this", which never rarely takes "an" in English. The deal with the ʻokina in English is that many English dialects already use an (unspelled) glottal stop between neighboring vowels to deal with diaresis, so English speakers tend to treat the glottal stop as a phonological variation of the vowel itself rather than as a distinct consonant on its own.  Given that it is a loanword anyways, and likely to be modified by standard English phonology, there's likely no standard way to deal with it as either "a ʻokina" or "an ʻokina".  Each is as likely to be acceptable as the other, so just be consistent in the same work.  -- Jayron <b style="color:#090">32</b> 17:43, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * "What are the objects of an useful American education? Classical knowledge, modern languages, chiefly French, Spanish, and Italian: Mathematics, Natural philosophy, Natural history, Civil history, and Ethics." - Thomas Jefferson to J. Bannister Jr. 1785 Naraht (talk) 20:41, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Yes, and 1785 is not today. -- Jayron <b style="color:#090">32</b> 20:45, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * I'm curious though how Jefferson pronounced "useful": was it like "ooze-ful" or "yews-ful"? Basemetal  20:55, 5 March 2018 (UTC)


 * The sound in English before modern "yoo" (IPA [juː]) was "ü" as in German (IPA [yː]). Thomas Jefferson lived too late to have [yː] in his pronunciation, but any oddity in his use of "a"/"an" is more likely to go back to that time than to reflect an [uː] pronunciation, as far as I can tell... AnonMoos (talk) 02:33, 6 March 2018 (UTC)


 * The alphabet is quite relevant to the question, as it was about whether to write a ʻokina rather than an ʻokina. My point is that the word itself is not written using the English alphabet, and it's there is therefore going to be no rule about how to handle this (or any other words using non-English-alphabet characters). Bazza (talk) 19:50, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Yeah, but the point is that the a/an rule in English is not about the alphabet in terms of which written character starts a word, it's about the phonemes (spoken sounds) that start a word. That's why you get usages like "an historic event" and "a useless thing"; the use of a/an is determined by the anticipated sound that starts the next word.  English has glottal stops, it just doesn't assign them phonemic value, so that's why it has no way to decide what to do with them.  The alphabet (orthography) has nothing to do with it really.  Hawaiʻian has a glottal stop that carries phonemic value; the written character doesn't mean much to the discussion.  It doesn't matter what you represent it with on paper; the a/an rule is based on spoken language.  -- Jayron <b style="color:#090">32</b> 20:42, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

Accents
Can anyone here answer what are the particular traits of an accent from Tipperary in Ireland? <span style="font-family:'Arial',cursive"> Miss Bono  [hello, hello!]  13:40, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * The Wikipedia article titled Hiberno-English has sections on various regional dialects. -- Jayron <b style="color:#090">32</b> 13:42, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Was looking for something more specific, but thanks loads. <span style="font-family:'Arial',cursive"> Miss Bono  [hello, hello!]  20:37, 6 March 2018 (UTC)

What British accent is the closest to Australian accent?
What regional British accent is the closest to Australian accent, if any at all? Has the UK exported enough people from some specific region to make a difference? --Hofhof (talk) 18:00, 5 March 2018 (UTC)


 * "The basis of our accent is Southern British. Americans, in particular, often confuse us. They think the Cockney accent is the Australian accent." Professor John Hajeck, University of Melbourne
 * "Since no observer has yet been able to produce more than a few resemblances between the Australian and the Cockney accents, the allegation that Australians talk like Cockneys must be regarded as one of the popular myths to which we, as a young nation, are susceptible. Probably the best words ever spoken on behalf of the anti-Cockney theory were by Thomas Wood in "Cobbers" (1934) : 'Australians don't [talk Cockney]. People who say they do know nothing of accents and nothing of voices. They judge by vowels and inexpertly then. They disregard intonation, inflexion and quality. Are the Cockney and the Australian voices alike in these ? They are not.'" The Australian language: an examination of the English language and English speech as used in Australia, from convict days to the present (p. 453) Sidney John Baker (1966).
 * Alansplodge (talk) 18:41, 5 March 2018 (UTC)


 * To American ears, all British accents and dialects sound alike and may even remind the listener of fairy-tale language. You know the type of fancy accents used in fairy-tale movies? They all sound British. It may be royalty British or pirate British, but they all sound British. 140.254.70.33 (talk) 20:38, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * I think you meant to say "To my ears..." You really shouldn't start a statement applying to 300,000,000 people and then follow it up with a purely personal experience.  -- Jayron <b style="color:#090">32</b> 20:43, 5 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Besides the obvious fact that the distinct Scottish accent is well-known, even if people can't discern between different Scottish accents, and consider the Edinburgh accent to be the most typical. Hofhof (talk) 20:48, 5 March 2018 (UTC)


 * The Australian English article seems to indicate that the accent is a mix of (predominantly) accents from South-East England and Ireland. Wymspen (talk) 20:56, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

Ever since I visited the UK, Australian accents have always sounded like working-class London accents to me (though I would NOT use the term "Cockney", which is a highly-loaded and nowadays almost semi-obsolete word). AnonMoos (talk) 02:39, 6 March 2018 (UTC)


 * What leads you to describe the term as "highly loaded", ? As the son of a Cockney (except by the most narrow definition, but nevertheless born in Leytonstone to parents from Leyton and Bow) and a UK citizen and resident, I'm not aware of such, nor would I have described it as ""almost semi-obsolete", whatever that means. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.211.131.202 (talk) 08:53, 7 March 2018 (UTC)


 * It's highly-loaded because it brings to mind a large amount of clichéd stereotypes and inaccurate popular-culture depictions from decades past. It's almost semi-obsolete because classic Cockney dialect is in many cases giving way to "Estuary English" etc., and because the area around St. Mary-le-Bow church, Cheapside, which was the traditional heart of Cockneydom, is now mainly a business offices district, with few working-class residents.  I'm sure there are still some who proudly maintain Cockney traditions, but for reasons such as the above I would avoid using the word to describe Australian English... AnonMoos (talk) 13:52, 7 March 2018 (UTC)

The Americans you speak on behalf of, have clearly never met a Geordie, a Scouser, someone from Yorkshire, a Brummie, someone from the West Country or someone who speaks Estuary English. And I've not mentioned any examples of British accents outside of England. This video is a fairly decent (personally I thought her Brummie was weak but hey-ho) guide to many of our regional accents that even the most isolationist American wouldn't perceive to be "alike".

To my ears, none of these sound anything like any stripe of Strine that I've ever encountered, and as a cricket fan, I've heard a lot of Australians talking over the years. Annoyingly, they've often been rather too happy for my liking.

Anecdotal note to finish. During WWII, my father was in the RAF. One person in his unit was from Aberdeen. That can be a very strong accent. Apparently, hardly anyone in the (all-British) unit could understand him, so the commanding officer thought hard about what he could do that didn't require verbal communication. They made him camp postman (mailman). --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 16:53, 6 March 2018 (UTC)

Hofhof, there's a book called The Origins of the Southern Hemisphere Accents of English by Charles Fritz Juengling which would clearly bear some studying, but unluckily Google Books only gives a snippet view. I did find this in it: "Actually it is from the rustic folk of Oxfordshire and Berkshire, and from tradesmen and college scouts in Oxford itself; that I have heard the English speech which bears the closest resemblance to that of Australians." --Antiquary (talk) 10:50, 7 March 2018 (UTC)