[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by NatCh

The biggest things for affecting accents are knowing what your own voice can and can't do -- it's like learning an instrument, to some degree -- and paying attention to how things sound. Most folks just listen to grasp what the words being said mean, rather than also paying attention to how the sound.

yes, that's true. in my defense, i can say that i do already speak *two* languages (french and english) with little or no accent (well, let's say no *foreign* accent, since "everyone has an accent" !), even if i can't really switch back and forth really quickly without starting to make sentences that are half and half (so i also would make a very poor interpreter). although i notice that speaking english increasingly needs a warm-up or transition time for me to lose any traces of accent, and also that i have a hard time controlling the verbal "tics" that i have in french, and that tend to slip through in english sometimes. swearing and counting also is usually in french.

I find Russian and Scottish the most fun to play with. Though I haven't been around Russian accents nearly enough to distinguish the various flavors of them.

i wish i could do a scottish accent !! it's my favorite accent of all, i wish i could go to scotland and just sit in a pub all day listening to people talk. although i susect i wouldn't be able to *understand* half of it. once i was watching an episode of Inspector Morse, and there was a scottish character in it ; he didn't have many lines, but they were my favorite. when he said "yon Morse" i got a little thrill. i wish i could start saying "yon such-and-such" when i mean "that such-and-such over there" but i think i would probably get beaten up if i tried.

as for russian, i have a russian friend who tried to teach me russian words sometimes (when i make him), and it's very frustrating because i can *hear* the sounds quite well but then i can hear myself massacring them !! this drives me completely loony because i grew up with my polish-speaking grandparents and could speak some polish when i was a child, but now i have forgotten it and the polish accent (like the russian one) is very hard to do, even though i think it *should* come naturally.

Well, if you want to get into word misuse pet peeves, my biggest are imply and infer -- folks can't seem to get them straight. For those who don't know: imply is what the speaker does, infer is what the listener does.

The one I've been running into recently is misuse of juxtapose. Again for the uninitiate: it is not a stronger way to say "oppose." That's the way I keep hearing it misused: "So and so is totally juxtaposed to such and such." To those who know the word means "placed side by side," the speaker sounds like a doofus, because what he's saying is the exact opposite of what he means to say.

thank god i haven't heard anyone use "juxtapose" that way in french, i would probably have an aneurism. another argument to make everyone study latin at school !!!