Unknown English Accents

We all know the classical American or British accents. Some are even familiar with a Scottish one or an Australian one. However, these are not the only possible English accents out there, so I decided to put together a little list of the lesser known accents that deserve to be talked about more.

1. Singapore/Malasya

Singaporeans speak really fast, really fast. Sometimes they also cut certain word like ‘the’ or ‘a’. They often end their sentences with ‘la’, for no particular reason. Some words are simplified like the word ‘want’ becomes ‘one’, the word ‘three’ becomes ‘tree’ and ‘or not’ becomes ‘anot’.

2. South African

The ‘i’ is pronounced more like an ‘oi’ in oil, but flatter. They also roll their ‘r’, almost the way the French pronounce it, except they don’t hold it for quite so long. The consonants are also pronounce very harshly, like they were just spat out. The ‘a’ like in ‘man’ is also pronounced more like ‘e’, as if you had it in plural.

3. Geordie

This accent comes from a region in the North East England. They pronounce the ‘e’ like in ‘eight’ more like ‘ijght’, almost as if there were two sounds. The ‘o’ in words like ‘town’ becomes more like the word ‘u’ in ‘dug’.  The –er at the end of the word becomes wider. The ‘t’ in words like ‘water’ is replaced with a glottal stop, as if you’d get a hiccup mid-word.

4. Honk Kong

If you try to do a Hong Kong accent you have to say your sentence in a very flat, monotonous way before going down right on the end of the sentence. There is also no difference between the ‘f’ and the ‘th’ sound, or the ‘l’ and the ‘r’. The ‘r’ is also prolonged. You can also finish your sentence by adding ‘ah’ or ‘won’.

Why do we hate our voice?

The biggest problem with trying to correct your accent is that you are supposed to record yourself and listen to yourself talk.  That is the most demoralizing thing you can eve experience.  Not because you usually talk slightly worse than you think, but because you have to listen to yourself, specifically your voice. Many, if not most people hate the sound of their voice when it’s played back to them. They say it’s usually higher pitched, just rougher all together.

Why do we hate it?

That is because when you talk, you hear your voice in a number of ways. Of course, you still hear it with your ears like any other person, but you also hear it with your bones. The bones also transfer the waves to your brain, making your voice sound deeper and smoother than it really is.

What can we do about it?

Well, you can’t really change your voice, but you can learn how to use it better. If you record yourself often enough, you’ll eventually be able to pin-point specific things that bother you and you can work on changing that. Some yourtubers say that they basically change the way they speak over the years, specifically because they had to listen to themselves so many times.

I think it’s also very helpful to take a rhetoric or acting class. Starting off alone can be difficult and they will probably inform you of the things you have to pay attention to. It’s also less soul-crushing than hearing your terrible, terrible voice being played back to you over and over.

If that’s out of your budget or you simply don’t have time, youtube videos are also helpful. My personal favorite is Videojug’s Gareth Jameson. His videos are a good starting point, specifically if you want to do an accent.

English on Words!

This year at my university we have been ask to reflect on how we learn English, specifically how we add words to our vocabulary. Most of the time this includes making lists that you have to repeat several times, which can get a little tedious or grating over time. When that happens, you can lose track of why you became so passionate about the language in the first place and you need to renew it. 

For me, the best way is to go and look for completely obscure parts of the language, those special tiny places that most people don’t notice and are not even particularly relevant to anything you might be currently doing, but are just interesting and funny.

So I decided to celebrate the passion for words by listing my top 10 obscure words of the English language, the definition, and a little bit of what I think of them. So here it goes:

1. Defenestration (def.: the act of throwing someone or something out of a window)

Want to sound threatening yet sophisticated? This is the word for you! Just the fact that this words exist says something about our society. I’m not sure what, but it certainly does!  Nevertheless, this is still a great word to know. Not because you could use it every day, but because when something like that does happen, you’ll know exactly how to describe it. The only sad thing about this is that it’s doesn’t appear in political reports often enough.

2. Pulchritudinous (def.: used of persons only; having great physical beauty)

What demon from hell thought this was a good idea? Telling someone they’re pretty hard enough without having to twist your tongue in a butterfly knot. If you really want to convince someone you’re good at French kissing there are surely more practical ways to do it so they won’t wonder if they have a serious medical condition.

3. Lackadaisical (def.: idle or indolent especially in a dreamy way)

I haven’t learned this word soon enough! This should be in the active vocabulary of any chronic daydreamer. It’s the perfect word to use as a retort when someone accuses you of not paying enough attention. It’s correct, yet it also makes you sound smart enough not to be labeled as lazy. It’s a win-win situation… but your mom will still want you to do the dishes.

4. Arachibutyrophobia (def.: the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of one's mouth )

I’m sure that this is a serious issue for some people, but that doesn’t make it any more obscure. It’s just such an oddly specific fear to have. Still, I also think that it must be one of the easiest fears to avoid, given you’re not a peanut butter addict.

5. Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia (def.: the fear of long words)

Also great evidence that the people devising the English language are all secretly sadists (as if the spelling didn’t give it away). Well, to be fair it derives mostly from Latin, but you’d think that the language that turned ‘ananas’ into ‘pineapple’ wouldn’t have issue with taking artistic liberties every once in a while. How do people with this phobia even name their condition? Part of me imagines them going to a therapist and saying: “I have… I have… I have that which must not be named…”

6. O-O (def.: a honeyeater (bird) found in Hawaii, now probably extinct, which had a thin curved bill and climbed about on tree trunks.)

This probably has roots in the old Hawaiian language, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t crack jokes at it. Did God get drunk one night, made this bird and then went ‘oh-oh’? Were the people that first saw this bird so awe-struck that they could only name it after the face they made (O-O)? Did they name it that because someone who killed the last one just went ‘oh-oh’? Too soon?

7. Pre-loved (def.: second-hand)

I’m not including this word because it would be so obscure, but just because it’s so… perfect. What an incredibly adorable way to say your dress or your teddy bear were owned by other people before you. Still, I wouldn’t really use it when it comes to other things like kitchen appliances. “So you got a new dishwasher?” “No, it’s pre-loved.”

8. Petcock (def.: a small valve positioned in the pipe of a steam boiler or cylinder of a steam engine for drainage or testing)

Nope, this word doesn’t describe a pet rooster or a very specific kink. It’s also one of the words that illustrate the need for interlingual translators the most.  Would you trust a 18-year-old intern to properly translate this?

9. Callipygian (def.: having well-shaped buttocks)

Now, here’s a word that is not what the language deserves, but what it needs! Commenting on someone’s back-side has never sounded more intellectual.  Granted, most people probably won’t understand what you mean, but that makes it even better. Let’s face it; who doesn’t appreciate a nice set of buns? It really does deserve a word of its own.

10. Criticaster (def.: a minor or inferior critic)

I guess today this would be known as a ‘hater’, but this word is evidence that they probably existed way back in the 17th century. 

Summary

Before:

Summary of Crisis of Credit visualized

John Jarvis’s video Crisis of Credit visualized presents the origin of the credit crisis and its effects.

It started due to the 9/11 dot.com that caused 1% interest rates. The investors refused to buy treasury bills from the Federal Reserve and looked for other options while banks could cheaply borrow money. This caused them to expand due to leverage.

Because of investment interest, the banks decided to link the investors to the homeowners by selling mortgages. A house-wanting family would contact a broker, who contacted a lender. They bought a housing mortgage, which the lender sold to an investment banker. The banks then organized their mortgages into safe, okay and risky slices called collateral debt obligation. They sold them to other investors. If homeowners defaulted on their debt, the investor got the house; it was profitable due to rising prices.

The turnaround came when lenders started giving mortgages to irresponsible homeowners who defaulted on their debt. More houses became vacant, which caused housing prices to drop, ending in investors owning worthless houses. They refused to buy more mortgages, which cause the economy to freeze and result in bankruptcy. Homeowner investment plummeted too, leading to a collapse of the economic system.

After

Summary of Crisis of Credit visualized

Jonathan Jarvis’s video “Crisis of Credit Visualized” presents the origin of the credit crisis and its effects.

It started due to the 9/11 and dot.com that caused 1% interest rates. Those were passed to keep the economy strong. Investors refused to buy treasury bills from the Federal Reserve and looked for other options while banks could cheaply borrow money. This caused them to expand due to leverage.

Because of investment interest, the banks decided to link investors to homeowners by selling mortgages. A family seeking a house would contact a broker, who contacted a lender. They bought a house using a mortgage, which the lender sold to an investment banker. The banks then organized their mortgages into safe, okay and risky slices called Collateral Debt Obligations. They sold them to other investors. If homeowners defaulted on their debt, the investor got the house; which was also profitable due to rising prices.

The turnaround came when lenders started giving mortgages to irresponsible homeowners who defaulted on their debt. More houses became vacant, which caused housing prices to drop, ending in investors owning worthless houses. They refused to buy more mortgages, which caused the economy to freeze and result in bankruptcy. Homeowner investment plummeted too, leading to a collapse of the economic system.

Vocab Learning Strategies

My preferred method of learning vocabulary is doing the exercises on Vocabulary.com, primarily the Porter lists. I also use thesaurus.com and sticky notes, but I generally avoid corpora. I would like to use more dictionary apps, but most require internet access which I don’t have all the time.

I like using Vocabulary. com for several reasons. Firstly, I like being able to store the words I want to learn and sort them the way I prefer, be it alphabetically or according to my learning progress. Secondly, the generated vocabulary quizzes I can make myself are by far the most entertaining and satisfactory way to learn vocabulary. They test you on different meanings of the word, set it in different contexts, make you find their antonyms or synonyms and, of course, check your spelling of it. Even if studying online does get a little tedious at times, the site tries to keep you interested and motivated through achievements, classes and leader boards. If you’ve answered correctly five times in a row, you get an achievement. You mastered a word, also achievement. You managed to rake up an impressive amount of points- you get a higher class.

Along with Vocabulary.com, I also find thesaurus.com to be extremely useful. It is a site where you can search for synonyms. It’s very easy to use and the result filters are extremely useful. You can sort them by length or complexity, making academic words easy to spot. Nevertheless, I usually double check this on Vocabulary.

Sometimes I also use a more old-fashioned approach; sticky notes. I write down the word I want to learn on a sticky note and stick it somewhere I can see it every day. This method is mostly reserved for words that are really hard to memorize or are impossible to spell.

I generally don’t use corpora. I don’t know exactly why, but somehow I just find them annoying to use. You usually already have to know a word in order to look it up. However, unlike the dictionary, the corpus does not provide a clear definition. It does show words in different contexts, but these results are usually not sorted by word meanings. Since most learners’ dictionaries provide at least one or two examples for every meaning anyway, it’s not like you’re left completely in the dark.