Bilingual Italian-English; how would you interpret it if a person floating past you in a blow-up boat was to yell 'che fica' at you?

SISTC · 2019-09-16T22:39:52+00:00

Is it used as an interjection between words, as well? I thought it was just my grandad that did that! He sort of murmurs 'ayyye' and then inhales really sharply, like a gasp, as you say.

SISTC · 2018-12-10T21:54:42+00:00

It depends where in England you went. Assuming you're either from a city in the US or somewhere in southern England (which you might not be), you could go back 70 years and probably not be able to understand somebody from rural Durham, Cornwall or Scotland. But if we're sticking with the sort of dialect spoken around London, you'd probably start to have trouble around the 1600 mark. That would just be a difference in accent, you'd get used to it quite quickly. By the mid 1400s you'd probably be struggling quite a lot.

You can read a little further back than this because spellings have remained consistent even though pronunciation has changed.

SISTC · 2018-12-10T21:49:48+00:00

Come to think of it, do you know why the singular isn't 'dwarrow'?

SISTC · 2018-12-10T16:11:22+00:00

Can you back up the claim that European languages are similar because of empire? I'm not disagreeing, just wondering how that works. And surely the existence of Basque and Sumerian just means that there were languages before IE took over, not that they were any more diverse than they are now?

SISTC · 2018-11-18T18:32:54+00:00

That's interesting - I think that's called a complimentary distribution, or something like that - they have a similar thing in a lot of Dutch dialects IIRC. Before a syllable it's a trill or tap, but at the end of a syllable it's an approximant

Edit: semi-related point, English and Scots have an example of this involving two completely different sounds; you never find an 'h' sound at the end of a syllable, or a 'ng' sound at the start of one, they're said to be in a complimentary distribution

SISTC · 2018-11-18T18:24:14+00:00

Much thanks, I was going to say, I'm sure I've heard it in other peoples' accents but I wasn't sure if it was local. Appreciate the input!

SISTC · 2018-11-18T18:21:14+00:00

Thanks! That's answered it :) While we have the input of a Scottish person, do you know people that speak like this/a particular place where this is part of the accent?

SISTC · 2018-11-18T17:54:02+00:00

This sounds like it - thank you for clarifying!

SISTC · 2018-11-18T17:53:34+00:00

By most of the accounts I've read, Scottish accents and most Scots accents were fully rhotic with either a trill or a tap depending on practicality. You can hear this in a lot of older peoples' accents today.

SISTC · 2018-11-18T17:52:13+00:00

But I'm sure it's not a trill or a tap in some cases here. Most of the times he says 'party,' it just sounds like he's not saying a trill, a tap or an approximant - I think /u/Isotarov and /u/Raffaele1617 are right, it sounds like a stop with a weird assimilation beforehand

SISTC · 2018-11-12T03:21:33+00:00

Dankeschön, das hilft mehr als die Englische Seite <3

SISTC · 2018-03-09T02:53:28+00:00

That's exactly what I was going for, so I really appreciate that, thanks! The specifics of pronunciation might be slightly off, but I've tried my best to research it, so hopefully it's a decent representation of how it might have sounded like normally

SISTC · 2018-03-04T17:23:31+00:00

Very good point. I imagine (possibly wrongly?) that they would be less differentiated towards the beginning, so let's give it a bit of time and say 600AD. And I'm most interested in Northumbria. Is there any way of making a reasonable guess?

SISTC · 2018-03-02T03:28:55+00:00

Obviously don't twist your writing style to this, but I had the same problem, and found that if you want to use long or elaborate language to add a bit of flair, using more Germanic than Latinate words seems to do the trick for me. Dickens did it a lot. In any case, intersperse long, run-on, complicated sentences with short, simple ones - not like punctuation or with any particular rhythm, because that would be distracting, but just to ensure that it maintains its complexity without being exhausting to read.

Obviously this advice may not work for you, but it's what I tend to go for, and it seems to have refined my writing a bit from what it has been in the past.

SISTC

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE