I really enjoyed this post :) And I very much agree with you on 'youse' - coming from West Lancs (and having been schooled in merseyside from age 11), and so being familiar with Scouse, it's always seemed natural to me.
I had a Lancashire accent when I was young (and I still do, depending who I'm speaking to), but before Cambridge I had to attend a summer school (for learning classical Greek) and came across a load of posh public school boys who very much gave me the impression (in a not-very-pleasant way!) that my accent was non standard (which, interestingly, hadn't occurred to me before). So I ended up toning it right down and incorporating lots more RP features into my accent, and now I think I sound weird :)
I know Latin and Greek, but they still never feel quite alive - like I read them but don't speak them. I studied Spanish at school through to A level and am rusty but can get it back if I need to, and I did a wee bit of German but really only enough to help me in a classificatory way (e.g. I can recognise cases, constructions, etc so can get to a point where I can read it OK, but conversation is a big no at the moment). I never did French at school but I read a lot of French for work, so again I'm in a weird position because I don't really know the conversation basics but I can read a complex article on ancient writing systems no problem.
I can read Italian and modern Greek but only with a lot of effort and the help of a dictionary. Italian I don't think I'll ever be able to speak because I know Spanish and they're so similar and yet so different that I feel they're mutually exclusive. Italian has also made some of the weirdest sound changes out of the Romance languages! With modern Greek I find that it's done some crazy semantic shifts so knowing ancient Greek helps less than I feel it should...
I feel I should make more of an effort with Celtic languages (by blood I'm about half Irish and maybe a quarter Welsh), but I haven't had a chance to put in the effort really. Incidentally, Celtic and Italic are very closely linked (sufficient to refer to them as an Italo-Celtic group). For "four" I would have said PIE *kwetr- > Proto-Italo-Celtic ??? > Lat. quattuor, Ir. ceathair.
I'd really like to learn Chinese and Japanese but no time!
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Date: 2014-12-20 09:31 am (UTC)I had a Lancashire accent when I was young (and I still do, depending who I'm speaking to), but before Cambridge I had to attend a summer school (for learning classical Greek) and came across a load of posh public school boys who very much gave me the impression (in a not-very-pleasant way!) that my accent was non standard (which, interestingly, hadn't occurred to me before). So I ended up toning it right down and incorporating lots more RP features into my accent, and now I think I sound weird :)
I know Latin and Greek, but they still never feel quite alive - like I read them but don't speak them. I studied Spanish at school through to A level and am rusty but can get it back if I need to, and I did a wee bit of German but really only enough to help me in a classificatory way (e.g. I can recognise cases, constructions, etc so can get to a point where I can read it OK, but conversation is a big no at the moment). I never did French at school but I read a lot of French for work, so again I'm in a weird position because I don't really know the conversation basics but I can read a complex article on ancient writing systems no problem.
I can read Italian and modern Greek but only with a lot of effort and the help of a dictionary. Italian I don't think I'll ever be able to speak because I know Spanish and they're so similar and yet so different that I feel they're mutually exclusive. Italian has also made some of the weirdest sound changes out of the Romance languages! With modern Greek I find that it's done some crazy semantic shifts so knowing ancient Greek helps less than I feel it should...
I feel I should make more of an effort with Celtic languages (by blood I'm about half Irish and maybe a quarter Welsh), but I haven't had a chance to put in the effort really. Incidentally, Celtic and Italic are very closely linked (sufficient to refer to them as an Italo-Celtic group). For "four" I would have said PIE *kwetr- > Proto-Italo-Celtic ??? > Lat. quattuor, Ir. ceathair.
I'd really like to learn Chinese and Japanese but no time!