Posts by linger
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He doesn’t already have one?
Still, it figures that he’s just here for a pierce-op. -
Hard News: About Occupy Wall Street, in reply to Sacha,
The last time I looked into the topic, the findings available were that the observed frequencies of features such as “eh” or high-rise terminal intonation were higher in NZ conversation & interview samples (e.g. Porirua) than in similar Australian samples (e.g. Sydney) and therefore we tentatively concluded that these were NZE features introduced to Australia, rather than vice versa. Nor are they limited to Auckland, though they are more common in conversations from Māori than Pākehā, or from working-class than middle-class. (“eh” is assumed to be a borrowing of the conversational particle ne from Māori.)
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Hard News: The Politics of Absence, in reply to Tamsin6,
Maybe Craig’s objecting to the implication that National couldn’t possibly be causing offense to anyone :-)
... nah, more likely to the idea that National is secretly enforcing conformity to their perfect vision of society.
'Cause we know they don't really have a vision :-) -
Hard News: The Politics of Absence, in reply to Emma Hart,
That physical pain would be a groin strain?
(It’s official: Dan Carter’s groin is now Emma’s column. Pwned!) -
There's always the Julia Sweeney approach.
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Re: the growth chart on the door frame
Others have suggested using something more portable from the outset; but since you are where you are now, why not simply transfer the markings & labels to a measuring stick that you can bring back with you (and then continue to update it)? -
Yeah, the accents that are preserved in TV & radio (& music) recordings are a mixture of:
(i) people’s genuine (untutored, unaffected) accents – which were still quite a mixture: bear in mind, in the early 1970s, something over 20% of NZ adults (and a higher proportion of the middle-class NZ adults more often represented in broadcast media) were either born or educated in the UK, and many others had spent some years there on OE;
(ii) interviewees’ approximations to what they identified as a “formal” style associated with broadcast events. There are two things that may have changed over time in this regard.
The first is what (most) NZers identify as an appropriate “formal” spoken style, which, as noted in the “New Zild” documentary mentioned upthread, has shifted from something approximating RP to something more local. (This idea is supported by the results of several studies playing NZers recordings of voices using different accents and asking them to judge the speakers on scales such as sense of humour, friendliness, income, education, and authority. Over the past 30 years the RP accent has lost some ground to a “cultivated NZ” accent on the “perceived power/status” scales.) (A subpoint here, though, is that you can only have a style in your repertoire, and so accurately shift to it, if you have been exposed to it -- and over the past century there has also been some change in the mixture of styles and accents that NZers have had regular exposure to.)
The second is the extent to which style shifting is associated with broadcast events. Such style shifting could be considerably reduced now that TV & radio interviews are more or less taken for granted. (As such, probably we shouldn’t equate 1990s-2000s interviews stylistically with 1960s-70s interviews; and also, we shouldn’t necessarily treat the broadcast recordings as preserving “natural” speech. On the other hand, much of the research into the origins of the NZE accent depends on assuming that the effect of broadcast style on accent is negligible for interviews asking individuals to tell their own personal stories – as a purely practical matter, since that’s the only type of data that’s available.
I’d be interested to hear Jen’s take on this.)(iii) locals’ attempts to emulate desired “foreign” accents, in what Allan Bell calls “referee design” (i.e., trying to sound like a “type” of person recognised by the speaker and their audience. For such language use, the accuracy of the portrayal doesn’t matter as long as the intended referee is recognised). One small-scale research report at VUW compared the pronunciation of /t/ in NZ punk songs with UK punk songs, and noted the variable adoption of glottal pronunciations in the NZ recordings. (Could take me a while to track down the reference; I think it was either in Te Reo or in the Wellington Working Papers , ca. 1990.)
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I tried listing my Mac machines, and was shocked to realise I still have ten of them. (Almost all were second-hand; I'm a late adopter.)
There's the SE I started writing my thesis on, and the Centris I finished it on, both still in working order (for decades-old definitions of "working");
a black PowerBook running System 7.5 - the last surviving of three (the software was OK, but the hardware was quite another thing -- one of its forerunners went through 3 screens in as many months, and the case on this one cracks when looked at in the wrong way);
two Wall Street model G3 laptops, which do not appreciate the yearly temperature range in Tokyo -- it's a lottery whether or not the OS will be found on startup. (They're only a year and one OS9 version apart but, irritatingly, nothing is interchangeable except the power trains);
a G4 desktop (which shipped, in 1999, with OS9.0 and only 64MB RAM);
a G3 iBook (ca. 2003) -- still my favourite laptop, despite mild hard-drive damage that has impaired some functions and threatens to curtail future use (the drive cannot be reformatted, the OS cannot be reinstalled, so any further damage will be fatal);
a G4 iBook (ca.2005) -- too big and heavy to be a truly convenient portable;
an iMac desktop in my office;
and finally, a MacBook I got last year (solely for conference presentations, where I have to pretend to be technologically up-to-date). -
I thought after Key's catwalk appearance it was "Prime Mincer"?
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One reason this year has felt a little odd.
