Re: Harry Potter's English

"wellsoberlin" <wellsoberlin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Evidently, British young people, even educated ones, speak quite
differently from their parents and grandparents. This is not just my
experience: linguists have noticed it, for example the phonetician
John Wells here

http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/blog0608.htm

(for 29 August). That site provides a clip of a young member of the
aristocracy speaking. I can't understand her either.

Her mother isn't particularly easy to understand either. When the girl was named there was a quip that 'Zara' was actually a misunderstanding of 'Sarah'!

By the way, you can't trust everything on that blog page. The sequence of tone letters displays properly in Deerpark, which has been around for some time and should now have been superseded by Firefox 2.0. The Doulos SIL font, the second choice of font according to the web page's style***, combines them properly if it is rendered using Graphite rather than Uniscribe. I don't know whether the font holds the requisite information for Uniscribe to display the combination properly. The source of information, Peter Constable, moved from SIL (developers of Graphite) to Microsoft (developers of Uniscribe) some time ago.

Richard.

.