Re: This week on Dancing with the Stars Re: The Business Memoir - the ``whom'' question


Ruud Harmsen wrote:
27 Oct 2006 10:01:09 -0700: "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx>: in sci.lang:

27 Oct 2006 05:59:52 -0700: "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx>: in sci.lang:
Surely even in Britain it's still illegal to record the voices of
people (entire communities would be needed to get a feel for local
variation) without their knowledge or permission, let alone publish
that speech for distribution.

This was about an actor speaking with the express purpose of having
his acting filmed and his speech recorded. How can that be illegal?

An actor attempting to imitate an accent is absolutely, utterly
worthless as linguistic data.

If he imitates it, he does an awfully good job. What made you
think/where did I say he imitates the accent?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Nesbitt

I know you have a Wikipedia-inhibited browser, so I'll quote it for
you:

Why? He's an actor, he's playing a character, for whom he devised a
particular voice. It's not his own voice.

Even if a terribly unprofessional actor got a job where he used his own
voice, it would be altered by the exigencies of acting for the theater
or for the microphone. The whole air supply system is handled
differently in those situations. Have you ever had vocal (singing)
training? Have you ever acted on a stage? Have you ever wondered why
karaoke usually sounds so lousy (even if the performer isn't drunk)?
Because the karaoke-ist has no reason to know about using the diaphragm
(and everything else that goes into voice projection).

He also has this typical "how" vowel (Reverend Paisly and Gerry Adams
have it too) which is so strangely similar to the Australian "so"
vowel. Such things are rather hard to imitate if you haven't learnt it
from the cradle.

Of course they're not. Any English dialectologist can do it, and if I
were in those communities for a few days, I could do it.

(It can tell us what the prejudices of his "dialect coach" are, but it
can tell us nothing about the people who actually speak the dialect in
question. I have no need to cite anything other than the risible
attempts of English TV actors to do American accents on Britcoms.)

Quite possible, but irrelevant for the case at hand, because James
Nesbitt really is from NI. Again, what made you believe that he isn't?

It doesn't matter where he is from. His character's voice is not the
same as his own voice.

It is an actor with a very marked Northern Irish accent, in tens if
not hundreds of eposides. He plays someone from Northern Ireland (one
episode expressly goes into his background, his friends then go there
too), who lives in Manchester. One character speaks with a Manchester
accent (or Northern English at least; I can't hear the difference
between cities there, although I know they exist), one with a London
accent, one or two speak posh RP, and one is probably from London.
Many such British drama series include people from all over the isles.

Absolutely, utterly useless.

What on earth are you talking about? What is the meaning of such
senseless remarks? Do you think you can convince anyone by things like
this?

Hugh Laurie's General American is impeccable in *House*, and Joely
Richardson's General American is impeccable in *Nip/Tuck*, and
whatsizname's General American was impeccable in *The O.C.* and is
impeccable in *Ugly Betty*, but that doesn't make their characters
legitimate sources of data about how Americans speak.

I know how Americans speak, I've heard more than enough. In British tv
series, they use real actors, not accent impersonators.

Then you haven't seen the British series that are shown on American TV.

Actors BY DEFINITION are acting with their voice. A linguist CANNOT use
"acting," i.e. deliberately considered, voices as data.

Utter, utter nonsense.

Sheer ignorance.

Even a
Malkovitch or a Franz, schooled in Pinteresque or Mametesque or
Altmanesque or Leonardesque "natural" dialogue, is ARTIFICIALLY
IMITATING natural dialogue.

British actors don't. They know how to play AND make it sound natural.
Please listen to some actual material before venting you uninformed
opinions.

You really have no idea what you're talking about! Have you ever seen a
classic Olivier or Gielgud movie? Nothing could be more artificial!

[When I was typing the "sheer ignorance" line, a finger accidentally
hit some key and everything flipped to flush left with the punctuation
on the wrong side of the sentence. It will be interesting to see how
this comes out.]

.

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