By Accents, Tenses

There's some truth in that article. My parents, for instance, used to speak in Sardinian (not a dialect, but recognised as an endangered language by the UNESCO) when talking to each other or to their relatives, but they would only speak Italian with my brother and me. I grew up monolingual,...

Oh my, I'm so surprised! I would never have thought you said it yourself! By the way, you said "If I'd have known", and not "If I'd known" (which can't mean "If I would have known", because you would be leaving out a syllable...).Anyway, I'll tell...

I think they're using would instead of will because it's in the context of a past tense. had an accent / saw a girl CJ

Anonymous wrote: Could you please, check if all the sentences below are correct ? a) In the end of the week, my friend returned home; b) After the visit, my friends told me that my country impressed them most; c) The sport classes take me lots of time! (or:...take lots of my time) ?; d) ...

Dear all, All passages below are from “Crazy English” – by Richard Lederer, POCKET BOOKS. (I tried to find an Internet link, but failed. So please pardon me for the length of the text, which I believe would be very informative). “HETERONYMS – words with same spelling as other words but...

Thank you Amy! I was going to rebut the point that Kooyeen made. You have saved me from having to do that. Just another minor point I like to make…. In reference to the IBM sentence, whether he is still working for IBM is irrelevant. However, the tense offers an impression that he is no...

CalifJim wrote:Rhyming friend to stand sounds peculiar to me, and somewhat Texan, perhaps. It's definitely not standard. Thanks.Well, I'm not an expert on accents... but did you listen to the audio clip? Would you say pronouncing "again" that way sounds southern? I think I've heard that...

... I noticed that all reduced sounds are not reduced to a fixed and definite sound, but they can take infinite kinds of schwas (schwas that tend e as in in bed, or that tend to i like in bid, or tend to u like in put...). Yup. Infinite sounds about right. ... This means that the set of...

>> It's just that those vowels are on two different levels of intonation (=pitch) <<?? How so?>> But I tend to use long vowels where I shouldn't use them. <<Well, since it's allophonic, it really makes no difference. It might add to the impression of a foreign accent, but...

Marvin A. wrote:Then I guess it is the tense-lax neutralization thing that occurs in my dialect. I honestly can't hear the difference. To me, they sound exactly identical (the vowel in beer and bit), and if I were to write it fauxnetically, I would probably write bir. I think it is because we...