Oh, dear, more crank linguistics from the Beeb. What will they say over at the Language Log? The article is about how the South Asian accent of English is the “same”. The biggest laguh though is at the end of the article:
Ms Mathur’s own research on basic words, such as the numbers one to 10, found that many were similar—seven, for example, is saith in Welsh, saat in Hindi.
“These kind of things really struck me,” she said.
“When I reached number nine they were exactly the same—it’s naw and I thought there had to be more to it than sheer coincidence.”
She later spoke to professor Colin Williams of Cardiff University’s School Of Welsh, who specialises in comparative languages.
He suggested that the similarities are because they come from the same mother language—the proto-European language.
“It was basically the mother language to Celtic, Latin, and Sanskrit,” Ms Mathur added.
“So basically that’s where this link originates from.”
And this is news to some folks? The BBC could’ve done their homework and looked at a copy of the Encyclopædia Britannica. During my time in Wales, I never heard anything approaching an Indian accent.
Posted by jim at March 22, 2005 07:08 PMWhile the rest of the article sounds like rubbish, I have heard it said that Welsh actors, blacked up, used to be employed in variety to play Indians because of their similarly sing-song intonation.
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"During my time in Wales, I never heard anything approaching an Indian accent."
I have. Having lived both in Birmingham (very mulitcultural city, with many Hindi speakers) and West Wales, I've clocked a similarity in accent a few times. Only in certain individual words though - I've yet to hear someone's entire speech sound like they're a native speaker of the 'other' language.
Hello btw - thanks for the link :)
Posted by: Cat on March 25, 2005 04:38 PMYes, I agree with you, Trevor.
Cat, welcome to the blog! In hindsight, I think what the article was comparing was prosodic elements over entire sentences, rather than phonemes, which is what I think of in comparing "accents". Take care.
Posted by: jim on March 25, 2005 08:11 PM