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[Opinions] Re: The American softening of T's
Lots of names don't sound nearly as good in an Australian accent as they do in other accents. I don't have a strong Australian accent as I have spent time living overseas and I was raised in a family where very few relatives have an Aussie accent- but most Australians are terribly sloppy with their vowels. Even mine leave a lot to be desired compared to most Northern US accents or British accents. I hate it!I can't think of a specific name that annoys me in an Australian accent right now off the top of my head so I might edit one in later when I have some time :)
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Wouldn't an Australian pronounce names like Georgiana as jor-jee-ANN-uh intead of jor-jee-AHN-a? That's the one thing I've noticed that bothers me. Otherwise I really like the Australian accent. I especially like how you pronounce the word "skull" lol, which I think also is slang for what we'd call "chugging" a drink. I think it sounds really cool.
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Nope . . .Some might, some might not . . . that depends more on the level of education and cultural background, than on the Australian accent itself. I'd always say it AHN.An Australian accent tends to turn more vowels into schwas than other languages, and they're very short schwas, so Jacob, in which the 'o' is a schwa, ends up sounding something like JAY-k'b. The schwa is barely even pronounced. This makes some names that sound lovely in one's head come out as ugly and clipped.
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When I was in an English phonology class (NAE), I said that in words that end in -er, -el, and sometimes -en, I can't hear the schwa either. I know that in Czech there are words that don't have vowels, so maybe in my region with Slavic heritage, we lost some of the schwas. Also, in some words with 2 schwas in a row, we drop one of them and make the word one syllable shorter.
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I'd also pronounce Jacob that way. We like our schwas here too.And I pronounce Georgiana with ANN and think that would be most common. Maybe not. Though I like to smush it together so it sounds more like jor-JAYN-a.

This message was edited 5/10/2009, 4:20 AM

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I sound like you.
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Nope...I have only ever heard it pronounced jor-jee-AHN-a here. I am sure there are some that do pronounce it jor-jee-ANN-uh though. It is a bit like any of those -ana names- you will always have people that will use one pronunciation over the other for no reason at all.Hehe, yeah we say to scull a drink. Some people say chug as well, or 'downing' the drink, but generally the chanting that happens when someone is drinking the drink is 'SCULL SCULL SCULL'
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Nope...I have only ever heard it pronounced jor-jee-AHN-a here. I am sure there are some that do pronounce it jor-jee-ANN-uh though. It is a bit like any of those -ana names- you will always have people that will use one pronunciation over the other for no reason at all.Hehe, yeah we say to scull a drink. Some people say chug as well, or 'downing' the drink, but generally the chanting that happens when someone is drinking the drink is 'SCULL SCULL SCULL'
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