Sweeden is better because they get naked.

[nuduke]

[font=]I'm certain nothing like that happens in Britain. [/font]

[font=]On no, no,no,no,no...never!  Well, hardly ever....well all the time actually! [/font]

[font=]I concur with everything in ric's last post.  Dialects are dying out because of modern intercommunication and the belief that a broadly accent-less and dialect-less pronunciation (i.e. a certain standard pronunciation which has no regional origin ...but where did it come from in the first place!?) maximises intelligibility to the greater number.  Happily there is still a considerable divergence of accent across our little island although again less than it used to be, as ric observes.[/font]

[font=]see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_English[/font]

[font=]John[/font]

[nuduke]

I just tried to modify the previous post to remove all the tedious extraneous font changes which I often experience and I got an error 403 message that I was forbidden to post.  Anybody know why that happens?

John

PS this PS is a modification to see

if it happens again!

PPS Nope it's fine now!  Odd interlude!

PPPS Nope nope - it still won't let me modify that particular message.  Odd.  maybe it's something to do with the hyperlink.

The error message is

Forbidden[/font] [/color]

You don't have permission to access /forum/index.php on this server.[/font]
 [/color]

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.[/font][/color]

[BlueTrain]

Languages are living things. Some die, the rest evolve and change. English (and Americanish) is one of the few languages that lacks an academy of learned men (of course it would be men) who tell everyone how something should be pronounced, spelled and used. Mind you, everyone goes about speaking their language however they please, so they may as well not have any of those academies. It is true that there are attempts to make everyone speak more or less the same language, with varying degrees of success, usually based on the number of speakers but not always. In China, Mandarin is the officially preferred language; in the U.S., English is the dominant language, though not officially so; in Latin America, it's Spanish, except in Brazil. It is remarkable that many people in Latin America learn Spanish in school, not at home. It is complicated because language gets caught up in culture and nationalism.

But none of that has anything to do with getting naked. Or nude.

[Peter S]

John ND, surely it’s obvious where our accent homogenisation came from? Our old friends at the BBC! Their early insistence on “posh” accents, and radio presenters sitting in blank studios wearing evening dress set the tone for decades. Even now people see fit to comment if anything resembling a regional accent sullies the airwaves. Such a national influence on everything people listened to, later watched, for so many years was bound to weed out much of the regionality, and dispersal of the working population took care of the rest.

[ric]

There's definitely a lot more population movement now. When I was a kid in the 60s in rural Somerset it was normal to expect school leavers to get employment within a 20 mile radius of home.  There were people about who'd never been more than 20 miles away in their life..... Indeed they reckoned some of the old boys had never been out the parish.

My daughter,s just spent 18months in Holland.  Youngest son is intending to do a year at a Spanish University next year. 
The ability to home study other languages via the Internet is also having an effect.

[Davie]

I think we are also more international in our outlook. My parents had no friends outside the UK apart from three elderly sisters who were distant relatives in the US. With increased travel opportunities and the internet we have friends in Germany, France India, New Zealand and the US. My wife was born less than five miles from where we live whilst I was born in North Wales I now live in Brum. My son is in Scotland and my daughter in the west country, local compared to where many offspring end up

Davie 

[BlueTrain]

I'm on the internet a lot; in fact I am right now. Anyway, I don't think I have any friends anywhere, much less on the internet. It is true that I have exchanged personal messages with a few people on the internet on limited subjects, all nudity-related, and even met and had lunch with one of them, but I don't count them as friends, merely virtual acquaintances.

Americans have generally always been more mobile than people in the old country, as Europe, the Middle East and the British Isles are generally referred to. That's the East Coast. The West Coast had immigrants from Asia, too, but I don't know if they say "the old country." That's how the country was populated. We're all immigrants, in a sense. Oh, there were already people living in the New World but we either killed them, made them move or, in Latin America, made them peons. But there have been pockets of people who basically lived on what we called the frontier who were bypassed while others kept going, all the way to California and Oregon. One writer, referring to those living in the Southern Appalachians (mountain range) as "our contemporary ancestors." Eventually, I suppose the migration slowed down and fewer people moved around so much. Even so, our so lives in California (we live in Virginia) and our daughter lives about a hundred miles away in another state, so I guess the general theory still holds. The running joke in the family is that some of the children want to move as far away from their parents as possible. One even made it to Hawaii. Another lives in, of all places, Kabul, Afghanistan. He's the footloose one in the family; even married someone from Serbia. He still wouldn't settle down and they divorced.

[jbeegoode]

Spanish in South America is Castilliano. Castilian. Some of it still very pure being isolated for centuries. Scholars go there to study it because it is more pure than in Spain. Still, I would travel in South Am. in the 70's from town to town. I'd just get the jist of the local language and then, in the next little place down the road, I'd have to tune my ear all over again, it was so different. Not everyone there had TV and not in small towns.

We would watch TV in Bogota which played a lot of Mexican TV shows. I was surrounded by proper Paisas (White, urban "people of the country"). The quick succinct Castilian was contrasted by the Mexican drawl like night and day.The Mexican Spanish that I grew up around soon sounded so slow, sloppy, nearly slurred.

Hey, I've been shanghi'd again. This ain't about NAKED!

NUDITY IN SOUTH AMERICA IN THE 1970'S AND 80'S:

So, nudity in those travels... Those people were not nudist. Proper Roman Catholic, racist, privileged by class. Their dating system was actually Medieval, protecting their daughters and sisters from other classes. These poor young women would be kept as pale white as possible to show their Piasa purity. They could only speak to me because I had been screened and had Mama approved of my blue eyes and lighter colored hair. And I was adopted by the huge extended family.They were not sun taners. They were proper and wouldn't be seen naked by lowers naked.

After years they began to lighten up (not the skin). The pale daughters who didn't get married stopped giving a sh.t and loosened up in their later twenties. They understood the different cultures and when graveling here, would do as the Romans. I was stunned to see a visiting Colombian woman get naked in mixed company and soak in my jaccuzzi one night.

The only nudity skinny dipping was with German and American friends under waterfalls, and remote river spots.
I did have a Bolivian girlfriend in La Paz who liked to go to the gym and share showers and wander around a bit in the coed areas.
South America from Colombia to Bolivia all along the Inca trail was not Naturist territory, unless you bathed in the river and was a gringo. No one seemed to complain. Otherwise, nudity was nudey bars, and prostitution. Male dominance and exploitation was norm. The non-white peasants, kept their place. A girl had a reputation to maintain.

Once in Oaxaca City, when I brought a local college girl to hang out in my room, one of my roommates answered the door nude. When she saw the other woman naked, she adapted to our culture. When in Rome....
Jbee

[BlueTrain]

One of my brothers-in-law grew up in Santiago, Chile, his father (who was from Baltimore) being stationed there for a while. He speaks fluent Spanish. He told me the Spanish in Spain sounds funny, such is the difference between Spanish Spanish and New World Spanish. Companies that teach languages recognize the difference and have different courses. I also understand that the relations between the races, along with all the accompanying words, can be quite different from county to country. Most of those countries also have and have had immigrants from places other than Spain and Portugal.

In the American Southwest, there was at one time something of a cultural shock between the three different cultures that met in that area, namely Americans from the East (the Anglos), Latin Americans of European stock (Spanish, then Mexican) and the native Indians. The differences were most striking in the treatment and position of girls and women. It seems that the Spanish youth were the most protected, as you said.

And speaking of accents, the British actor Michael Caine remarked that English words, spoken in the U.K. is like soldiers on parade, all standing up straight, whereas in American English, the words all lean on one another. I have no idea what he's talking about.

[jbeegoode]

I think I understand what he is saying. The American might be more melodic and slimmed up, and the Proper English movie voice would then sound more enunciated, more precise.

I wouldn't consider Michael Caine's accent the proper solder type. He's to relaxed and has spent too much time hanging out in Holiywood and he started out with something that doesn't sound like upper crust or whatever.

Hum, that reminds me. Its about time I watched the "Man Who Would be King" again. My all time favorite. Rudyard Kipling, the craft, scams and all that, what.
Jbee

[BlueTrain]

I don't think Michael Caine's comment about British English had anything to do with soldiers per se, but he is one of the few actors who served in the armed forces and saw combat. He was in the Royal Fusiliers (City of London Regiment). He was born in London.

[Greenbare Woods]

One of my brothers-in-law grew up in Santiago, Chile, his father (who was from Baltimore) being stationed there for a while. He speaks fluent Spanish. He told me the Spanish in Spain sounds funny, such is the difference between Spanish Spanish and New World Spanish. Companies that teach languages recognize the difference and have different courses. I also understand that the relations between the races, along with all the accompanying words, can be quite different from county to country. Most of those countries also have and have had immigrants from places other than Spain and Portugal.

Isolated Languages drift.  My co-worker in New Mexico grew up in a Spanish speaking family.   Around age 30 she moved to California and it took her 6 months to learn to speak California Spanish.  New Mexico Spanish has a lot more English influence and is sometimes called "Spanglish." 

When I was in college a teacher of Spanish Literature from Spain used the wrong friendly greeting for some Mexican students.  They started a small riot and demanded he be expelled from the teaching position.  My roommate who was studying Spanish Literature opined that the whole dust up was over differences between Castilian Spanish and Mexican Spanish. 

Internet and TV/YouTube tends to homogenize the language.  If a Welshman wants to watch BBC he needs to understand London speak. 

Americans deliberately changed some wordings and pronunciations around 1800 to distance ourselves from the English.   Chicago speak is used as a standard rather than a New York or Boston dialect. 

[BlueTrain]

I used to work with three people from New York, Brooklyn specifically, then Long Island. They could turn their accents on and off at will--within a certain degree, something I can do, too. Only I'm from West Virginia. There are a lot of YouTube (DuTube in German!) videos featuring people speaking in various accents. Ah! But there are even a few videos of people hiking naked and several about nudist subjects (plus a number that are really porn), some of which are from overseas. I don't recall if any are from Sweden.

[jbeegoode]

I don't think Michael Caine's comment about British English had anything to do with soldiers per se, but he is one of the few actors who served in the armed forces and saw combat. He was in the Royal Fusiliers (City of London Regiment). He was born in London.

Straight, tight and uniform, unison, well rehearsed. Michael CAine's English is not like that, but I've seen him try in certain roles in movies.

[BlueTrain]

In one movie, he managed a pretty good Southern American accent.