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From: Athel Cornish-Bowden <me@yahoo.com>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: First BBC Broadcast (14/11/1922)
Date: Sat, 16 Nov 2024 15:15:52 +0100
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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