9.3.09

^^ Accent Accent

I'm sure you know what an accent is. In this context, it's that funny-sounding rendition you make of a foreign language when you attempt to speak it, or conversely, the skewed version of English foreigners speak. What I am going to explore today is, how do these exactly come about?
Basically, an accent appears whenever you pronounce a given syllable in a foreign language wrongly. Take, for example, the word "rendezvous". In English pronunciation, that would be "ran-dez-vuhs", but in its actual French roots, it is "ron-dei-voo". This disparity in spelling and phoenetics comes because the English language takes many foreign words, but attempts to preserve the spelling, which is bad.
Foreign languages often have vastly different syllabic alphabets, and Romanization only attempts to synch the sounds with the best possible letters or sets of letters. Unfortunately, the Roman alphabet is heavily limited and these efforts usually end in pain for everyone involved. Accents appear here because the foreigner to the language is attempting to pronounce the syllables inherent with his own language's syllables. Only a very good understanding of the language and phoenetics can allow one to avoid producing an accent (or to purposely produce an accent, as in performing arts) and this is why accents occur.
Thus lie the failings of the Latin alphabet. It fails to take into account all of the potential sounds that a foreign alphabet can make, and increasing the confusion, its own pronunciation system is inherently flawed. In fact, for some languages it actually adds dïáçrîtìcs and иⅇw ϟϒµβøζs, adding to the confusion. If someone were to radically redesign our current linguistic system and invent a new lingua franca to replace English, these problems would be solved. ¡Hasta la revolución lingüística!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sprache...? Na ja. Du findest sprache gut, ja?

chinkeeyong said...

Ja. Ich bin froh, dass Sie verstehen.

Anonymous said...

Er, did you use a translater or something?

chinkeeyong said...

Offensichtlich.

Anonymous said...

-_-