Posted by Ed Kiser on August 29, 2011 at 08:59:48 user Kisered.
In Reply to: Pronunciation posted by MikeB on August 27, 2011 at 06:30:36:
Perhaps if someone having access to some AUDIO version of these stories could let us know how that reader interpreted the GIBBER name. I seem to think there are more than one version available. Wonder how these several readers agree... or differ...
The GA is named Maria. Is that "i" pronounced like "rye" or like the vowel sound of "whee"?
How do we pronounce these words in KENTUCKY? Doesn't matter... We don't do it the UK way that's for sure.
When watching the Harry Potter movies, I cannot go to the movie theater to view them as they don't have English subtitles, so I wait for the DVD version so I can get the subtitles to explain what they are saying. So much gets lost in the translation sometimes, at least in the version my ears report as compared to the written subtitles. This is especially helpful and needed with something like Harry Potter because of the vocabulary has a lot of made up buzz-words that aren't in the dictionary anyway.
What is amazing about all this is, we think here (Kentucky) that we are speaking English, and, so do the folks in the UK (that's United Kingdom, not University of Kentucky, which is what UK means around here.) But it is hardly the same thing.
Reading is one thing; listening to the spoken word is so much a different thing. The "local area flavor" keeps the sound changing from area to area.
Too bad both sides of The Pond don't speak the same English. Would be nice.
"Not this yin." (Jacky in PM) Wonder if that sound is understood when heard by someone from East Side London. And both of them are on the same side of The Pond.
But maybe these subtile differences even in the written word is what makes it interesting to read Ransome. Where else would I have met words like "fells", "beck", "tarn", "Duffers", "Despatches", "nobbut" and that list keeps growing, but I'll stop there...
Ed Kiser, Kaintuck (that is the way "Kentucky" sounds here...)