Hi Folks,
I just finished reading Mary and David’s post on Chinese accent. Our forum friends in China must think that everyone in North America speaks impeccable English
with a uniform North American accent, well, think again. The two USB ports in my laptop recently failed without any reasons, I phoned and talked to two tech support people in Dell Canada’s head office in Toronto, and Man, let me tell you,
they have such a strong accent I couldn’t grasp a third of what they were saying, especially when they mumbled and stuttered those hardware names! One fellow
was actually quite upset at me because I kept on asking him to repeat what he just said. I also had an opportunity to phone and talk to a President’s Choice banking representative in Halifax, the office clerks from Super 8 Motel in Los Angeles, from Budget rent a car in San Francisco, from the Tourist Bureau in San Diego, and they all seem to have various non standard English accents. I can instantly tell from their English that they are not native born Canadians or Americans. The whole demographics in North America is shifting as the entire baby boomer
population is aging en mass. There are thousands of immigrants flooding into the North American continent each year, and they bring with them various accents from far and wide. A spoken language fraught with accents is becoming a reality for the new Canadian cultural mosaic. I think the native residents are gradually
coming to terms with this new reality, and less people seem to frown at it because for the next decade or so, until the second generation are fully grown and joining the work force, accents will just be ubiquitous and can be heard in all sectors across the board. Last week I took my wife to the Peter Lougheed hospital
for a routine check up and even some Caucasian doctor and nurse spoke with a funny accent. I discovered later that one came from Russia and the other from Bulgaria. Although my English is more standard than theirs, I had to ask them for help with some strange looking medical terms. I think you can hear a lot more accents when you live in large cities like Toronto and Vancouver, but if you travel to smaller towns, such as Drumheller or Brooks, then you can hear all the folks speak without any accent. From where I live, accents just become a fact of life,
unless you only listen to the radio or TV, you’re bound to hear accents every
time you turn around. The good thing is, new immigrants can feel a lot less uncomfortable when they open their mouths because just about everyone else speaks with a certain degree of accent nowadays.
Since I embarked on the English word-learning journey over a year ago, I’ve been constantly gaining ground, but I’m also stunned to learn from time to time how illogical the language can be. There are just too many irregularities to cope
with. Take the two words “omnipotent” and “omnipresent” for instance, why in
the world does ‘omni’ pronounce differently between the two words? The first
word pronounces ‘om-nip’ while the second word pronounces ‘om-ni’! I’m completely baffled and frazzled! My native-speaking colleagues told me to just swallow my frustration and get on with the learning, because however illogical this language may be, it’s the proverbial universal language and I just have to accept it as that! “If you can’t beat them, join them” that’s my thought.
Today I brought a funny looking wrench with a little handle on the side from my
garage to my work place, to try to find out how to use it and what it is called.
I asked the cook, the bar manager and the office clerk, to no avail. It wasn’t
until I talked to the operations manager that I discovered it is called a vise
grip. I can understand why the word grip is used because this tool has a handle,
but it has nothing to do with the meaning of the word vise, and your guess is as good as mine as to why it was named as such! I’m just glad I learned a new word: “vise grip”, and now know how to use the darn thing! When I have too much
free time on my hand to know what to do with, I will google out the story behind
the name, but that’s another story for another day.
So my suggestion is, just try to learn the language and accept it as it is, without trying too hard to figure out whether is makes sense or not. English came into being through the meandering tunnels of time, and fortuitously evolved into the most powerful and versatile language on the planet, who are we to demand that
it has to individually make sense to us? Treat it like a lady, and it will serve you well into the distant future. We just have to have faith that history makes no mistakes, and it’s no exception with this proverbial universal language in
our era.
Neil
