- also known as accent reduction consultants. Watching with keen interest a discovery documentary about the work of Linguists as they divide N. America into linguistic areas. I counted 4 major divisions and 12 minor ones, and intermingled with the minor ones further tiny areas. Aspects of this hour long documentary I have summarized below:
1. The North tend towards a long 'O' vowel,
2. The Midland's vowels tend to flatten more,
3. Cities along the great lakes have a vowel midway between 'O' and 'A',
4. The Boston area has 5 differing accents but this diversity is explained as being a gateway for immigrants in the early years,
5. Parental Dialects of immigrant children are, generally speaking, not retained by the children but the children aquire them from their playmates, (and this is eactly what has happend to my two guys),
6. Before the civil war there was no such thing as a southern accent (this was brand new news to me), it developed as a direct consequence of a desire to be seperated from the north, to be different, to be known as distinct and to psychologically be seen as not part of the North,
7. There is an island off the east coast called Ocracoke island where the inhabitants speak a form of English very close to what must have been spoken 300 years ago. (I had to work hard to understand it, really hard, and they spoke quite fast),
8. A general trend and desire regarding the television media throughout America is to try and standardize pronounciations, they attempt to bring in some consistency known as General American English. Consultants and language experts are employed by many high end and important industries, especially in finance and sales and global transactions, to standardize the way things are spoken to create a better impression in business and general international transactions and communication, even in spelling. (this immediately reminded me of the desire to standardize the biblically written consonants due to the spread of the Jewish people beyond the borders of Israel now that they had no homeland so to speak and were scattered).
As a non-American it is amusing to see all those different words you have for the same thing, such as coke, pop and tonic - these 3 words were interchangeable as memebers of the public were confronted on the streets, not to mention you guys must be the only people on earth where a liquid is known as a gas
I am referring of course to the fact that we English do indeed pronounce it correctly - Petrol!Pronounciation of Cot and Caught (as in he got caught) - Bus and Boss was another one. There were so many examples, and imagine having to put vowels to all these consonants; if you were a masorete and only had the two consonants such as a 'C' and 'T', which way to point it? What about 'B' and 'S' and then double the last letter or not? And what if a masorete was confronted with the populace on the island of Ocracote, and perhaps just one or two words they used were still understood in amongst the general population and the masorete pointed it this way due to it being a more accurate representation of the original?
In considering all this, it certainly strengthens my belief that the chaps who started to standardize the pronounciation of the Biblically written consonants would have confronted the same issues, though to a much much lesser degree, there would have been sloppy pronounciations, dialectical pronounciations and even incorrect forms spoken, so standardisation did begin around the turn of the century AD. (Scholars agree on this as I have been reading textual criticism papers that agree that standardisation certainly must have begun this early and was gradually built upon over the course of the first 600 years).
For example I have always been curious about the pronounciation of 'Jerusalem', about 25 times with a tsere ending (long vowel in a closed syllable?), the rest with either a dual ending or a chamatz ending. Now how did they know when and why to point it in three different ways? Something must certainly have been handed down to them and certainly the dual ending is the most recent. Why did they insert the impossible grammatically unorthodox pointing of a dual ending, knowing that there never was a yod between the mem and the lamed?
So why have I posted this? No idea really, except that now one can physically touch the reality confronted by the Asher family and their ancestors and I do wonder at times whether a disagreement over the way something is pointed because it changes the meaning slightly, has more to do with pronouncing it rather than changing it semantically. Even though a different pointing would render a different meaning, does this necessarily imply that the pointing is always wrong every time? Just a question, I do not know enough to be able to answer this question.
KInd regards
Chris
