Is Mayonnaise Still a Word?

Not About Food
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This is what I like about HO, Chowhound would have shut this thread down. :crazy_face:

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While not fluent in Spanish by any means I can carry on a conversation with two of my neighbors and an apartment maintenance man none of whom speak English. They seem to appreciate my sometime bumbling attempt at speaking their language.

Houston is heavily Hispanic and it helps to have a working knowledge of Spanish at the tiendas, carnicerias, etc.

Then again some eschew these places because they are too ethnic. I, second generation Pole goes pretty much everywhere.

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= “hasn’t had a chance to forget that everyone is ethnic”

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It depends on what you consider a long way, compared with the average length of a human alimentary canal. :slight_smile:

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In California too. I moved here from New York where I knew enough to see families in the emergency rooms and clinics (families because I needed the kids help), and at the time it was a Puerto Rican version that was different from some of what I heard in California. I work regularly with interpreters, and even they sometimes struggle a bit.

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Upthread this discussion mentions all the different accents observed in the UK. I’ve recently been watching the Danish TV series Borgen on Netflix in the ‘English’ version obviously dubbed in the UK. The number of varied accents is very interesting and takes a bit of getting used to at first for an American. I don’t know for sure but I doubt there is that diversity of accent within Denmark. I’m curious as to whether people in other countries find this issue with films dubbed in the US. I get the impression that there’s a more ‘vanilla’ accent used by voice-over actors here.

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I haven’t seen the show, but does it seem as if they’ve deliberately made use of accents to emphasize differences between characters? It would be possible to add that even if it wasn’t used in the original.

Denmark certainly has different accents, but I don’t know whether the diversity is comparable to the UK. I’m with you in doubting it, because of the UK’s history of classism and the emphasis that was put on accents as part of that. I guess accents everywhere have some kind of local pride and local recognition attached, but I think the UK “embraced and extended” that to a pretty high degree.
Plus Denmark didn’t used to be several countries speaking different languages, at least not in the same way. And is anti-classist (I don’t know if it has been that way for a long time, but I get the impression that it has.)

If American actors from Boston, Raleigh, and El Paso are doing voice-over together, are they always expected to hide their accents? Or does it sometimes not matter?

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I don’t think so but I could be wrong as I don’t know that much about what those differences might suggest. I just find it a little odd to have a character in the Danish government talking with a Scottish accent while another is decidedly Liverpudlian and others what I think is ‘basic’ upper-class London (if that’s a real thing).

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Ah
 They’ve just confused Hamlet with Macbeth. :slight_smile:

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I’ve recently watched a Danish/Swedish cop show called, in English, “The Bridge”. The concept is that the Danish city of Copenhagen and the Swedish city of Malmo are only a few miles apart and linked by the said bridge. Crimes get committed which have links between the two, and the cops from both countries have to work together.

Danish and Swedish (and other Nordic languages) are very similar but have different pronunciations and (presumably) accents, which can make it a bit difficult for one to udnerstand the other. That point is made in the very first episode when the Danish cop is being introduced the Swedish team who, initially, don’t follow him and he has to repeat. And, periodically, one of the cops will be interviewing soemone from the other nationality and will ask if s/he understands their Danish/Swedish. One of the early sub-plots takes some time to solve as the bad guy is actually bi-lingual.

Of course, I’m watching this with English sub-titles so don’t get the nuances. But, for just a minor example, the main Swedish cop character is a woman called Saga. Pronounced by characters from one country as “Sar-ga” and from the other as “Say-ga”. Oh, and you suddenly hear lines which seem to be in almost perfect English, which makes me appreciate where much of my language comes from.

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(Which, being Canadian, I will misinterpret as a West Country “Sarrr-ga”, but I know exactly what you mean.) :slight_smile:

There should be by-law officers whose job it is to remind people that “by-law” is a Danish word (or at least began as one). :smile:

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