coming back to the subject of accents here's an interesting article:
********************************************************Accents Speak louder than Words-
Rahul PhondkeGlobal communication has indeed become extremely sophisticated today. Anyone can pick up the phone and describe the latest state of his haemorrhoids in an extremely loud irritating tone to his cousin in Honduras provided he is in the middle of an interesting twist of the movie. This was not possible earlier. Earlier , People would have got up and made sure that the aforementioned person was rolled up to the size of Reader’s Digest ( March 1997 issue) and flushed down, had ever anyone crinkled his popcorn wrapper during Amitabh’s soliloquy in Deewar. In the good old days, movies were serious business. Alas, what price progress.
However today despite fabulous advances in communications, which has also made it possible for teenagers to move their thumbs around like a possesed part of their body, which is acting completely on their own to send SMSs, formidable barriers still remain. These are called accents.
Every region has it’s particular accent. Accents can tell you a lot about a person i.e. his ethnic origin, his social strata, his bad breath etc. Being in Singapore, I hear a lot of accents and by now I must have heard "Get lost , will you" in about 40 different accents. The major reason that accents can change is the cultural difference and beer. This was evident by my recent meeting with Shashank Patil ("Shank Patson") who on his trip back "...to Baam-bay fraam Nu Yaak wuz ..Well You knaw really draaing aout his As end rrrolin his aaRs.." all of which ceased after 300 ml of lager. Accents also have had a major role to play in history. The most
significant contribution was to hear my history teacher Ms Cherian narrate the "yentare Eeendian hizdi" in a mallu accent. This used to be so damn interesting that the subsequent guffaws in the class could be picked up on Uranus and ofcourse by Ms Cherian, who did not quite see them in the proper perspective. This myopic vision of hers used to result in stinging palms. Believe me .....Accents do speak louder than words.
In Singapore, staying on the subject, the English that is spoken is a mix of local patois and English, which is referred to as Singlish and unless one is stone deaf the English that is heard is also the same. As a result tourists have a difficult time initially understanding the accent, a problem which they hope will disappear by repeating their questions in a tone which is loud enough to be the basis of an entirely new stream of science as in
Tourist - Do you Have a Chicken Sandwich ?
Waiter -Sandich, don't have
Tourist - DO YOU HAVE A CHICKEN SANDWICH ?
Waiter - Told you already
Tourist (relieved) - ok , turkey is fine.
Chinese accents are distinct too. Chinese is a mono “syllabylic” language, i.e. A word will comprise of 2 syllables at most, hence while speaking english they try to break the words in a similar fashion which sort of makes them go blue in the face when pronouncing “compartmentalisation”. In fact if you ever find yourself as a kidnap victim in China, you can safely tell them that your name is
Venkatachalapathy Sivasubramaniam. That is sure to finish them off by apoxia when they try to call your folks for ransom.
Teenagers too have an accent of their own. One of my cousins is a teenager (Teenager – Noun V,ir, T,-s- A life form which thinks anyone below 13 and above 19 is wasting his/her time and their oxygen on this planet). Our conversations have to be carried through an interpreter i.e. His mom, who has given up trying to convince her son to wear jeans which do not have enough space to store emergency rations for a herd of pregnant elephants. Kids, these days.
But despite these “barriers”, accents are what make Life interesting. Variety , I guess indeed is the spice of Life.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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Rahul Phondke has been a prolific writer of humour ever since his childhood days, which ended sometime last year. A mechanical engineer by training and an IT consultant by profession, he turned to writing humour as a means of finding some meaning to the angst of life.
Thankfully he found it almost immediately after his first two cans of beer. An alumnus of IIM, Ahmedabad (he passed out in 1995 much to his relief and the institute's), he recently moved to Germany after seven years in Singapore....a place where people still miss him, especially the Police who are still looking for him.
He plays the Guitar inspite of the numerous death threats by his neighbours and also nurtures a strong passion for acting when his boss passes by his cubicle. He can be contacted at
rphondke@iitiim.com. He regularly reads and replies to all mails. Just to make sure that he reads, include the tagline "HOT WILD GIRLS" in the mail subject!!