Reports on Restaurants Need One More Thing


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I cannot recall going out for restaurant meals when I was a child. Part of that will have been my parents’ financial circumstances but most of it will simply be that families just didnt do it then. Restaurants were for adults. Then, in early adulthood, Mrs H & I started to go out for dinner - but only for celebration meals, like birthdays. And we’d only go to casual chain places. Anyone interested in the development of British eating out culture from the 70s onwards should start by looking at the history of Berni Inns - that was where people like us went to celebrate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berni_Inn)

It’s only from middle age that we started to eat out more regularly for entertainment - and then it’s only since 2007 that I’ve started to keep notes of those meals. And I consider us to be very fortunate in life - we are the only members of our family who do eat out regularly - most relatives simply cannot afford to do so.

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So what exactly is a British accent? 4 nations in the UK and a lot of variation within the nations. Harters is from the north. I’ve imagined he sounds like Wallace. Probably not. Those long O sounds. On the other hand a colleague of mine is from York and maybe it’s more like that. On even another hand I have a friend from Northumbria. Americans always ask if he is Scottish and that just makes him drop his shoulders and sigh. Though probably in many Americans minds a British accent sounds like what a person named Piers would talk like. I guess saying someone has a British accent is like saying someone has an American accent whether that person comes from Nantucket or New Orleans or Oklahoma or Oswego.

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Actually my statement was just a light-hearted reference to comments on another thread. I know . . .I should know better than to cross thread boundaries.

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It’s possible to overthink these things. Of course, every single country in the world has any number of different accents within its borders. . Having said that, any British accent is easily distinguishable from, say, an American accent, or NZ, or Oz.

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Fortunately I don’t have an accent. But some day I hope to figure out how people know I’m from Philadelphia after speaking to me for only a minute or two.

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Ahahahahaha. That’s funny. Americans always try to guess what part of the US I’m from - I’ve gotten New Jersey (oops), California, Chicago, and Minnesota (the latter from a Mexican dude at a Brooklyn bodega, so I’ll forgive him that). Never the South, of course.

But like clockwork, people who previously just assumed I was a US native suddenly “notice” a tiny German accent
 only after I tell them I’m from Germany, of course. FWIW, I can do any number of foreign accents in both German and English, but no proper German accent in English. It sounds absotively, posilutely fake. Worse than the sprockets :wink:

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And when in NY, people have guessed I’m from the South. I guess, geographically they are correct.

And when I went to grad school in the midwest, I was actually a subject for a project for a regional language class. Imagine the confusion when I insisted “merry,” “Mary” and “marry” had definite distinctive pronunciations :exploding_head:

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Of course the three M*ry words are all pronounced differently. And aunt does not sound like a crawly insect. I speak New Englandish.

Agreed on the “m” words, but an aunt most certainly sounds like the insect.

Correct. Wallace’s accent is as a Yorkshireman (although he lives in Wigan - a town in my metro area, on the western side of the Pennines. I’m a proud Cestrian.

British accents can be very localised. My metro area is Greater Manchester but I don’t have the same Manchester accent as, say, the Gallagher brothers from Oasis (as was). They have a working class accent from the north and east of the city, while mine is middle class from the southern suburbs. I used to work in town about 10 miles away from home - they have a different accent again. And, to the north of the metro area, yet another accent - My Kentuckian pal Paul has a friend who lives there. Paul says that he can understand me, so long as I don’t speak too fast, but he really struggles to follow the other guy. And, of course, we are only 35 miles from Liverpool with its distinctive and very different accent.

Im one of the few Americans who has yet to have a serious issue understanding any of the “oop norf” accents. I had a friend who is a Geordie, and even the muddiest Merseyside or chewy Glaswegian still dont befuddle my ears.

Rather oddly, the one native English speaker who left me shaking my head, unable to underatand a single word waa in rural Arkansas.

Lingua, take a look at this one
I used it as a teaching aid when I was in Europe
irs not perfect, but she nails most of them.

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The only one I can judge is Brooklyn, and no.

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We’re pretty much plain, non-regional, American English speaking by where we were raised.

We’ve also with great delight watched all sorts of across the Pond English language television starting well before today’s streaming delivery – Monty Python, of course (“Parking offence, SCHMARKING offence”). Although we turn on streaming subtitles, we have little problem making out audio of shows from Northern Ireland (Hope Street), Geordie [?] (Inspector Lewis), Scottish (Where Do We Go From Here), Welsh (Gavin and Stacey), assuming those are representative of the region in the shows’ settings . . .

Yah, I’ve seen that one. I very much enjoyed the Spanish version of this (sorta).

This one’s fun, too. Helps that it’s set to music.

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Ive played it for people feom many od the places she’s trying to emulate (she did it as an audition tape for an acting gig)
most of them said shes pretty close.

It sounds like a parody of a Brooklyn accent. The “woo-aw-ker” and “foive” is a dead giveaway. Another giveaway is that she doesn’t even attempt a Boston accent, 'cause those folks will come AT you. Which is not to say she isn’t talented. You only need to fool a small subset of the world population, after all.

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My wife is from Boston though she doesn’t really sound like it. But my in-laws speak with a pronounced Boston accent. My son used to play a game with his cousin when they were little. He would ask her to say certain words like horse. At first she would say something like hawse. My wicked little son would just giggle intensely. After a while when he did it again, she would pause and very carefully say horse. They talk about this now and both chuckle as she has moved to NYC and begun to try to lose the accent.

Ah, the Bastan accent. Reminds me of a question I saw in the local paper long ago when I was studying at a small Ivy League university near Boston. It referred to a hockey player, famous at that time: Bobby Orr. The question: Is “Orr” pronounced like “oar” or do you pronounce the “R”?

Ive already told you about the guy I knew from Boston who worked for Union Fork & Hoe. They ended up sending him to accent reduction classes. (But oh was it funny while it lasted)

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