"1. What precisely does the Birmingham accent sound like? According to Harry Enfield, who is supposed to be a comedian, it often consists of putting the letter "O" front of the letter "I" and replacing each "U" with a "W", with hilarious consequences. For example: "Oi am considerably richer than yow." Very amusing Harry. Ha, ha, hah. But in fact Enfield is so wide of the mark it isn't even funny. See point 2 for an explanation.
2. So what is Brummie, then, if you're so clever? Good question. It is not an accent, nor a dialect, nor even a kind of vernacular. It is more of a syllable. Let's see if you can say it. Repeat after me: "Ar". No, that's not quite right. Try again, and this time try to sound more adenoidally depressed: "Ar." Better. You see "Ar" means everything in the second city: "Yes", "No", "Goodbye", "The antidisestablishment movement surely prefigures the looming schism in the Anglican church." It's like "Bof!" in French - you can use it everywhere and in any situation and everybody will think you're fluent. Nobody says anything else. Trust me.
3. Actually, that's not quite true. Brummies also say: "Tara-a-bit" which means "Au revoir, moite" - or "Au revoir, mate," as you non-Brummies would say."
The Guardian does not explain why anyone should care.
In addition, here is a disquisition on the most frequently used nouns:
"The time has come to examine the nouns that the average person uses most in a day, a year, or even perhaps a whole life. The Oxford University Press furnished a list yesterday which showed that "time" is the commonest, "person" comes second, with "year" in third place and "day" in fifth, well ahead of "life", which comes ninth. Day is pushed out of fourth place by "way"; but "way" is a bit of a cheat, since the Oxford experts say it has 18 separate meanings...
Yesterday's list of nouns has a tang about it of "how we live now". "Man", as the Oxford team notes, comes seventh, "child" 12th and "woman" only 14th. "Work" is 16th, but "rest" and "play" don't make the top 20 - a reminder, perhaps, that "time" is what most people complain they are always short of. "War" is 49th; "peace" doesn't make the top 100. Among body parts, "part" is 11th, "hand" (10th) beats "eye" (13th), and both leave "heart" trailing. The OUP's project manager, Angus Stevenson, thinks words score well if they occur, as "time" does, in familiar phrases: perhaps "case" (18th) and "point" (19th) are cases in point."
It seems odd (or perhaps not) that nouns of temporality ('time', 'year', 'day', perhaps even 'life') should come out so highly. What does this say about the human condition?
No comments:
Post a Comment