Re: First BBC Broadcast (14/11/1922)

On 2024-11-15 16:19:28 +0000, Adam Funk said:

On 2024-11-15, Aidan Kehoe wrote:
 

 Ar an cúigiú lá déag de mí na Samhain, scríobh Adam Funk:
 

On 2024-11-15, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
 

On 2024-11-15 10:20:14 +0000, Ross Clark said:

...

So the RP accent became known as "BBC English". The Advisory Committee
on Spoken English was set up in 1926 to provide approved pronunciations
for new words and foreign names, and as an authority to support news
readers against the inevitable complaints. A fascinating body in which
both Daniel Jones and George Bernard Shaw were involved.

 My recollection is that John Reith spoke as you'd expect a Scottish
Calvinist to speak, but he insisted that people who spoke on the
wireless ("radio" was lower class) should speak RP.

 I know Scottish accents vary regionally, but by religion? Or are
Calvinists, Episcopalians, & Roman Catholics very unevenly distributed
geographically?

 I read Athel’s phrasing as describing someone with a) a Scottish accent who b)
may occasionally be wrong but is never uncertain. (As the adage puts it about
surgeons.)

 Aha! That makes more sense than my interpretation.
 

There are some Church of Ireland accents in the Republic of Ireland; Leo
Varadkar, the former taoiseach, has one of them, from his time in a Church of
Ireland secondary school.
 I assert that there are some people native to rural areas of the west of
Northern Ireland where I can hear much more Irish in their prosody and pitch
than is usual for NI, and those people have Irish surnames and are usually of
Catholic religious identity, but to my knowledge that hasn’t been studied.
 In NI for most people, most of the time, you can’t tell from their speech
unless the name of the letter H comes up.
 I can’t comment on corresponding variation within Scotland.

Sorry, the following got sent before completing and proofreading it:
I was once in a room of about ten people, and someone referred to a "Scottish accent". I pointed out that there were two Scots in the room, and their speech (one Dundee, one Inverness*) were about as different from one another as one could imagine. That is possibly an extreme example, but Edinburgh is very different from Glasgow, and indeed the upper-class Edinburgh accent (think of The Prime of Miss Jean Brody) is very different from what you'd hear in the poorer parts of Edinburgh.
*Inverness is sometimes claimed to be the place where the purest English is spoken (but if any linguistician is reading this bear in mind that I'm not the one claiming it).
--
Athel cb