Yearly Archives: 2005

A-E-I-O-Accent

This is one of the most inter­est­ing things I’ve ever come across. People from around the world are asked to read the same para­graph in English. The para­graph has been designed to include most of the con­so­nants, vow­els, and clus­ters found in stan­dard American English, so that one can real­ly get a sense of all the vari­a­tions in an accent.

I love the gen­tle­ness of Lebanese Arabic (per­haps I asso­ciate it with the charm­ing, well-edu­cat­ed, vel­vet-voiced Lenanese gen­tle­man at work). The inter­est­ing thing is that it sounds com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent from Palestinian Arabic. As a small exam­ple, the for­mer has a more exag­ger­at­ed “ee” sound, while the lat­ter has a windi­er “r” sound.

I hate the painful sound­ing Cantonese accents. Somehow, each one is so unique­ly bad that it’s passed humourous­ly bad, and gone back to unique­ly bad again. None of them can prop­er­ly pro­nounce “pl“s, “th“s and “ll“s, and the con­so­nants are harsh to the ear. There are also very sub­tle dif­fer­ences between these Cantonese speak­ers from Hong Kong, and a Cantonese speak­er from China. One can hear the slight­ly more del­i­cate let­ter com­bi­na­tions from a per­son sur­round­ed by Mandarin speak­ers on the main­land.

For me, the most inter­est­ing com­par­isons are between native English speak­ers. I let Shirley lis­ten to the Glasgow ver­sion, and she could­n’t get over how hot it is. Of course, the most neu­tral accent to me is from Toronto, see­ing as how I grew up there. I hear this accent the most, and always find it amus­ing when for­eign­ers can pull off a fake accent (I’ve been told we sound very bland). Jackie had the most adorable New Jersey accent, and at one point Angie admit­ted that she had some­what of a Southern drawl.

Perhaps my fas­ci­na­tion with (and attrac­tion of) things speech relat­ed stems from an ear­ly study of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. One of the scenes in My Fair Lady that real­ly stuck out in my mind was the abil­i­ty of the pro­tag­o­nist (whom Shaw describes as an “ener­getic pho­net­ic enthu­si­ast”) to dis­tin­guish 130 vow­el sounds from a sim­ple, short record­ing of a voice going through A–E–I–O–U in one flu­id motion with no con­so­nants.

Usually I can rec­og­nize some­one from a voice and accent, some­times bet­ter than I can from a face.

It Was Raining This Morning

I stepped out­side, and the street­lights were on. To the west the clouds were clear­ing, while the sun was fight­ing the brood­ing sky in the east. Everything felt a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. As I walked to work, zipped up in my light wind­break­er, sweat­ing from the suf­fo­cat­ing mate­r­i­al, the rain slowed then stopped.

Taking Care Of Chaos

Thumbnail: Chaos looks

Took care of Chaos over the week­end. Karen’s off in Toronto for a month, and Aaron went to vis­it Greg (who joined the reserves). Chaos is get­ting a lot big­ger, and even though he’s not quite an adult yet, he’s get­ting more and more dif­fi­cult to lift.

Thumbnail: Chaos sniffs

I’ve been think­ing about a sec­ond cat, ever since Shirley sus­pect­ed that her cats were giv­ing her chil­dren aller­gies. We were play­ing around with the idea of me adopt­ing one of them (the younger male), and she already told her kids that one of the cats may be going. Unfortunately, she found a bald spot on him, and needs to get him checked out first. If the vet vis­it goes alright, then we may do a one-month tri­al, to make sure that he gets along with both Dolly and Nala. I’m still not sure if I’m up for the com­mit­ment though. Dolly is enough of a hand­ful already, and I seem to be get­ting busier every day.

Resonance

(This took four months to write)

I was kick­ing back on the couch with ____
with the lights out and the music on.

Wut wut.

Anyway, we were stoned out of our skulls and it was Naked As We Came by Iron And Wine. We sat there, lis­ten­ing to the dul­cet notes of a lone gui­tar lead into Sam Beam’s sug­ary voice, soon to be gen­tly round­ed off by his sis­ter, Sara, as the har­mo­ny. A sum­mer-morn­ing-dur­ing-har­vest song, or danc­ing in the mid­dle of a cool rain­fall.

She says ‘If I leave before you dar­ling
don’t you waste me in the ground’
I lay smil­ing like our sleep­ing chil­dren
one of us will die inside these arms

Eyes wide open
naked as we came
one will spread our
ash­es round the yard

And we sat there, lis­ten­ing, remark­ing to each oth­er about how mor­bid it all was, yet so beau­ti­ful.

How two peo­ple can be so inti­mate with each oth­er as to be com­fort­able enough to casu­al­ly talk about the dis­pos­al of remains. They were plan­ning it like an ado­les­cent cou­ple decid­ing the num­ber of garages or chil­dren they’re going to have.

Even John was moved, but how could he not be? One of them would die but there was solice in the fact that it would be in the embrace of the oth­er, as if nei­ther one would want to die any oth­er way, doing any­thing else.

And it felt like, for the first time in my life, John could under­stand a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent side of me.