Knowing the 'existence' of uztranslations I'm still searching for a book which would contain the most detailed information concerning northern and central British accents, it can also include an overall picture of accents across England, so as it follows what book would you suggest (if you know)?
Please exclude wikipedia as a resource in this topic.
Thanks in advance.
p.s. forgot to add the criteria:
grammar, lexis, pronunciation and word order if they are different of one in RP. RP could be a model for a comparison.
Цитата: Aleksey от августа 27, 2009, 12:27
grammar, lexis, pronunciation and word order if they are different of one in RP. RP could be a model for a comparison.
An accent is a matter of pronunciation. Accents and RP have nothing to do with grammar and words etc.
You probably want to know about dialects.
Well yes, I'm not well acquainted with basic terminology that well :( (shame on me)
All the books I have ever seen on sale in the UK on the subject of British accents and dialects have been very superficial indeed. It might be surprising, given the prominence of the English language, that a good book, with IPA annotation, on the various accents and dialects is not available, but it seems it is true. You could go to http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/ to hear some accents and to read very brief discussions of the variations. The nearest you would get to a good textbook would be the 3 volume Accents of English by John Wells (http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_ss?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=John+Wells+Accents&x=0&y=0), but the discussion of each regional accent is general and superficial - nothing like the detail that is available, eg on dialects of the Irish language (the Irish of West Muskerry etc).
As a Russian learning English, your first "port of call" is probably to study the difference between Received Pronunciation (spoken by 3% of the population and almost none of the young) and Estuary English (the normal English of Southern England). There are many resources at http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/. But you specifically asked about the north.
John Wells is a retired academic who is an expert on English accents, and if you go to http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/x202info.htm, you can click on the links to his course material, taken from the materials he handed out during the time he taught at university. The links on Cockney (=the East End of London) and Scouse (= Liverpool) should be interesting.
Цитироватьgrammar, lexis, pronunciation and word order if they are different of one in RP.
This should be: grammar, lexis, pronunciation and word order, if they are different FROM THAT of RP.
[but RP relates only to pronunciation--the other aspects are features of the Southern British Standard]
Thank you very much for your help and for correcting that mistake :)