American Pronunciation?

Calacatranis: You were right on the money (spot on ;-)regarding actors using poor imitations of accents. You'd think that with at the money invested in these movies they could afford actors who had mastered them.

I (American) do believe that British actors, and for that matter Australian, seem to do better at adopting an American accent than visa versa. Even I can hear how terrible Witherspoon and Zellweger sound but rarely have trouble with Brit/Aussie actors with American accents. In fact it is often a surprise to find that an actor is not American eg. Jonathan LaPaglia, Nicole Kidman, Sam Neill.

Many years ago I attended a performance at Wimbledon Theater of Rocky Horror Show with two British actors playing the American leads. It wasn't until well into the second half that I was finally convinced that they were, in fact, Brits. Impressive.


ETO: Americans (generally) pronounce it "kill-LOM-eter". The only time you might hear "killOMitta" is from the Bostonians who drop the "r" and save them for use in words ending in "a" such as "Cuba" and "Jamaica" ;-)

Not that anything you said has much to do with what I said, but I do have three questions:

How much time have you spent in New York that allows you to determine the strength of your friend's accent? From which borough does the accent come?

Is North London not in England?

And a comment:

As far as I know, none of the British actors that were in Band of Brothers are "L.A.-based," but every one of them were required to play American soldiers, and they all sounded a little funny. Are Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes "L.A.-based"? My info says Neeson lives in New York and Fiennes lives in London. I have to admit that I have no idea what L.A. has to do with it.

My post was a comment about an Englishman speaking with an English accent that some other know-it-all Englishman said he spoke with an American accent. Why do you have to try to turn this into an issue of how Americans do English accents? Is it because you are anti-American like the person who made the original comment and you need to find some way of creating an issue out of nothing also?

Well, I guess that turned into six questions. No need to answer any of them. If you want to have a problem with American actors doing bad British accents, that's your prerogative, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with my original post.

Calacatranis wrote:

"Being a well-spoken Englishman, I get very irritated by American actors doing bad English accents"

How do you feel about British actors doing bad German accents?

Have a look at the Periodic Table - the preferred spelling is AlumINIum NOT ALUminum.

I found this little tid-bit in reference to the difference in spelling (after all, British English has been around a hell of a lot longer than American English).

"Americans adopted -ium for most of the nineteenth century, with aluminium appearing in Webster's Dictionary of 1828. In 1892, however, Charles Martin Hall used the -um spelling in an advertising handbill for his new electrolytic method of producing the metal, despite his constant use of the -ium spelling in all the patents he filed between 1886 and 1903. It has consequently been suggested that the spelling reflects an easier to pronounce word with one fewer syllable, or that the spelling on the flier was a spelling mistake. Hall's domination of production of the metal ensured that the spelling aluminum became the standard in North America; the Webster Unabridged Dictionary of 1913, though, continued to use the -ium version."

You guys love removing vowels from words - colour, flavour, savour become color, favor and savor. I'm surprised that "your" hasn't become "yor" (lol).

As for the "blame-America-first-crowd", as you put it - well, we don't have much choice since America is the one throwing the *beep* at the fan; the rest of us just have to wear it. What do you expect when you elect a chimpanzee for President not once but TWICE!! That just about sums up the American intellect right there.

BTW, thank him for the "War on Terror" - what a great gift you have given the world!! War on Liberty more like. The Governement & their cronies must have thought all their Christmases had come at once when September 11 happened. They had been trying to find a way into Iraq for years and this gave them the distraction they needed. As bad as Saddam was, no dictator on earth wants to share his strangle hold he has over his country with anyone, let alone terrorists or religous extremists (after all, in their eyes THEY are god). Oh, they ARE there NOW, thanks to the gold ol' US sparking off a Civil War in the country - they just weren't there before 2003. What a mess!! Ask any Iraqi what they think of the "freedom" you have brought? You lot are very selective when it comes to deposing dictators & freeing the people. Wouldn't have anything to do with all the oil in the Middle East & the US's pro-Israel position would it? Nah! That's just being realistic (oops, I mean cynical).

If this is way off-topic just remember that you wrote the cheque (or, so you can understand what I mean, I should Am-spell that "check") so I cashed it.



"In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act." & "If you're not outraged then you're not paying attention."

Holy moly, a lot of keyboard warriors here squabbling about a war in which they never even fought. As for kilometer and its pronunciation, I, as a US citizen, have heard the word pronounced a lot of different ways because we're a lot of different people from a lot of different countries and we travel a lot. England is about the size of one of our States so it's impossible to say "Americans do/say/are....". If those are the Rules then I can easily say that English men are really lousy in bed and are even worse arrogant bores when they're out of it.

For the record, pronounce words however you please but in english, "you're" means 'you are', "your" is a possessive pronoun.

It's a fairly decent drama series and educational in its own way. I really don't think you'd find many Americans who would have allowed a take-over, though, and certainly wouldn't have had a drink with the Germans or allowed them in our homes without some major resistance. We'd rather die first and, like it or not, would have had heavy, personal arsenal and used it without a moment's hesitation or fear.