Originally posted by Marcus Green:
"Araind abait a thaisand painds" => "Around about a thousand pounds"
Planet royalty or what!
Commentary From the Sidelines of history
"No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as the dog does."
We will use the term accent for varieties of a language distinguished by pronunciation, opposing it to dialect,which applies to varieties distinguished by grammaror vocabulary. The most important accent distinction in English concerns the sound we represent as /r/.Most speakers in the BrE family of dialects have a non-rhotic accent: here /r/ occurs in pre-vocalic position, i.e. when immediately preceding a vowel, as in run or area, but not in post-vocalic position, after the vowel of a syllable. For example, in a non-rhotic accent there is no /r/ in any of the words in [1] (as pronounced in isolation):
The words in [i] all end in a vowel sound, while those in [ii] end in a vowel followed by just one consonant sound; note that the letter e at the end of the words in [ib] and of torque in [iia], and also that before the d in [iib] are ‘silent’ – i.e. there is no vowel in this position in the spoken form. In many of the non-rhotic accents such pairs of words as mar and ma, floor and flaw, or torque and talk are pronounced the same. A non-rhotic accent is thus one which lacks post-vocalic /r/.
Most speakers in the AmE family of dialects, by contrast, have a rhotic accent, where there is no such restriction on the distribution of /r/: all the words in [1] are pronounced with an /r/ sound after the (final) vowel, or (in the case of stir and term) with a rhotacised (‘r -coloured’ vowel sound, a coalescence of /r/ with the vowel.
The English spelling systemreflects the pronunciation of rhotic accents: in non-rhotic
accents post-vocalic /r/ has been lost as a result of a historical change that took place after the writing system became standardised.
"The Cambridge Grammar of The English Language", Chapter 1, pp. 13-14.
Uncontrolled vocabularies
"I try my best to make *all* my posts nice, even when I feel upset" -- Philippe Maquet