Say "AHHHHHHH!!!!!"
You didn't really say it, did you? Really, you couldn't have humored me & just said "ahhhh!"
Asshole.
Anyway, Joe Knight graduated from the same college I did & hardly any of you know him. I only mention it because it just popped into my mind & I'm about to write a little about my college. Joe Knight has absolutely no relevancy to anything.
At least I think he doesn't. He might actually be rather good with accents, at which point he would have a lot to say about this post.
But yeah. Nope. Accents. I Cannot do them.
My Swedish accent sounds kinda like Bobby Kennedy. So, you know, I can do a Kennedy accent, sort of...if I try to sound Swedish.
But yeah. Where I went to college if you were a white Christian, you were either Joe Knight or myself, or an immigrant. Those were like your three options.
Your other ones are Jewish, African-American, Latino, or Other.
That "Other" was largely immigrant.
Seriously, I went to the same school that Muhammed al-Ahari, Nguyen Phuc Buu Chanh, Luis V. Gutiérrez, & Tim McIlrath graduated from.
OK, Tim McIlrath is NOT an immigrant, but we are very proud to have him as an alumni.
Anyway you learn a lot about other cultures & people just by attending that university. They are sort of forced on you. If you aren't open to minorities & foreigners than you aren't talking to anyone because being a white American makes you a serious minority there.
It also means you learn a lot of different words that you don't pick up at the day-to-day almost anywhere else in America.
For instance, you learn about words like "Banjaxed," which is one of my favorite NEIU words because I can be an asshole & pretend that it means something about computers.
"Craig" is another great NEIU word & it's pronounced "Crack" & it means "Good"...because crack is great & it will get you real high.
Those words are spoken by people like Ethel, who also says "Oggs" when she means "Eggs" & comes from the country in a country called "Oil-Land" that is not in the Middle East or Oklahoma, has a population about as big as the City of Chicago & none of them know how to pronounce a vowel.
They are not unlike the British as in this is the start of that time when you talk to them through Skype, Facebook, or the greater Couch-Surfing network, that they mention how jealous they are that you are living in Chicago with such good weather.
...eye roll...
Thank you Hollywood.
They don't seem to understand that our weather here actively tries to kill us...unless they have been here when it's brutally hot & humid or, you know, an average winter. They also don't understand that the entirety of the United States does not have the same weather as Southern California & from time-to-time they will treat you to an attempt at an American accent.
And that attempt is the point of this post...sort of.
When they do an American accent they lower their voice & add emphasis on their "R's" They have an odd rhotacism thing going on & it gives you the impression that they all think we are super tough, 300-hundred pound retards.
But that is not all of them. Sometimes you come across an theater major that knows exactly what they are doing.
In this case their "A's" become so hard that you can cut a diamond with them. Their "T's" all become "D's" & words that are different to them start to merge.
For instance, "Metal" & "Medal" become the same word & you instantly hate them because, yeah, they have you pegged & you sort of have to hate the people that can really imitate you.
My last job had a cockney security guard that did the retarded American accent when he made fun of me & insisted that, no the US has more accents than the UK & I think he might be mistaken.
For the record, the British are right.
This:
Is a totally different thing from this:
But pronounced exactly the same as this:
But we Americans only really notice the difference when they throw it in our faces.
Still, how the hell did that happen? It's the same language, right?
Well....I don't know. We in America speak one more language in our English than the English do in their English.
For instance in American this is a patio:
And this is a deck because it is elevated:
But up until American started to seep into English, they were the exact same thing in the UK because they speak far less Spanish in their English that we do in ours.
And we can trace things like that to this:
It's a simple Biblical Prayer book & it is in a museum in Israel & all it has written in it is the Lord's Prayer....over & over & over & over again.
Matthew 6:9-13
And Latin is a wonderful language because you sort of have to pronounce every letter in the word for anyone to be able to understand you. A lot of languages don't do that.
Huevo!
Through!
You get the point...now try pronouncing "through" with all the letters.
Fun isn't it?
My favorite is "receipt." Give it a shot. R-E-C-E-I-P-T it's a hell of a lot of fun to say when you actually pronounce every letter in the word. We get that from the Latin "Recepta" which isn't as much fun to say when you pronounce every letter & yet another reason that Dan Brown is full of shit...That picture below this is another reason.
...moving on...
All of that red was Rome...
...Until it fell.
But before it fell & the barbarians came steaming in to parcel off their land, they became Catholic & their language was about as strictly monitored as French is today...because the French are under the false illusion that they are only speaking a single language.
Shortly after it fell, however, the Pope sent out a little Italian priest to go from town to town all across barbarian occupied previously-Rome to make sure that they were saying the Lord's Prayer correctly.
This was about a century after the fall.
And he recorded the prayers in the book that you can see if you scroll up a little...a lot.
The thing is, he recorded the prayers phonetically & what would be Italy today was still speaking pretty strict Latin...in the North. In Spain the Latin had a little Germanic in it & in France it had a LOT of Germanic in it & the closer he got to Constantinople, the more Greek & Mongolian had worked its way into the language.
The Lord's Prayer was the same, but they were already pronouncing their Latin a lot differently than actual Latin. The words were the same but the sounds were different.
That prayer book is important because it marks how several new languages were born, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, & Modern Greek.
The more those former Roman territories got conquered & settled by barbarians, the more Latin turned to French. The more Latin turned to Italian. The more Latin turned to Spanish.
You get the picture.
But how does that explain the difference between English:
And American:
Well, if you listen to Curious City you probably already know.
The first US settlers came from the East, surprise, surprise, surprise, western expansion. But they were also French & we sort of pushed that language straight down South & were left with, well, a sort of Bostonian accent.
Bostonian for that time.
But the thing is that, well, some people call Chicago "little Warsaw," & that has a lot to do with it, because, despite what the Republican party will tell you, America really is a melting pot & it wasn't until recently that we started to close our gates & make immigration to the United States super hard & not super easy.
Once upon a time there was an island.
It was called Ellis Island & more people than just the Irish & English used it. In fact it was open for a pretty long time & we weren't exactly cool with all the immigrants because we put "NINA" signs in our shop windows &, well, you've already seen Gangs of New York, so I'm just going to point out a better movie:
The thing is, Italians & Germans & Polish & Russians & lots & lots of people from all over Europe came through that island & some of them breezed past New York & came to settle in Chicago.
So now our fair city has a lot of German & Polish & other Eastern European immigrants living in it & despite what some people would tell you the first generation didn't speak English, at all, let alone fluently.
Some of them learned, but like the Mexican immigrants today, they were largely uneducated & it wasn't until the second generation came along that those immigrants started to speak English.
That little boy in the picture, he spoke English for the entire family, & did all of the translations.
But the thing is that he learned how to speak English as a second language because he was surrounded by the Easterners that already lived there & employed him & his family at the local sweatshop. So when he started to speak English, he did it with a pretty heavy accent.
The accent gradually faded, but from there it's just, well, it's just statistics & numbers. It doesn't take a linguist to realize that eventually the accents sort of merge to make the Chicago Accent...as we know it today.
It happened the same way that Latin in France became French.
And with the accent we started using words & slang that came from Eastern Europe that the people on the East Coast didn't use & they were using the occasional word that people in England didn't use.
But he sounds Black.
No, it's NOT a racist statement, there is actually a Black accent...if you are living in certain Midwestern states & unfortunately the Black Chicago accent is on its way out.
You see back in the day America was divided & there were slave states & there were free states & most of the Black people were slaves & lived in the south.
But then we fought a war...it was between the North & the South...& the North won & when we won we also freed all the slaves, even the slaves in the slave states that sided with the North.
But the people in the South were not happy & they had a series of Jim Crow laws that oppressed the Black people & in some cases, made them work as slaves again...by twisting the laws & we have the Historic Library District in Kenosha as well as a few other places in Chicago that were built with bricks made by Black slaves after the Civil War...when they were free...sort of.
The Black people really didn't like that at all...for the obvious reasons.
Thankfully...no,accuracy...shamefully industrialization hit America & the Northern states took to it & they opened up more sweatshops than ever before.
And they paid their workers in scrip & not in real money. That scrip could only be used in factory stores where a $1.00 loaf of bread cost $5.00 & that insured that the white immigrant workers were in some serious debt & couldn't leave their jobs with the horrible working conditions & it also meant that their children were stuck working for the same factories to pay off their parent's debt.
The thing is nearly all of those factory workers were Europeans that had come here for a better life only to discover that it was worse than their lives were in Europe where they were peasants & still treated a lot better than they were in sweatshops.
So they organized themselves into Labor Unions & went on strike to demand things like an 8 hour work day, safe working conditions, an end to child labor, workman's compensation, a minimum wage & all those other things that conservatives hate because it means that they can't have the sweatshops that they want in America...& now they are called "regulations" & people think that they are evil & not good.
So yeah, the white immigrants might want to be treated like human beings & not wage slaves, but there are a lot of Black people in the South that are poor & very nearly slaves & would think that working in a sweatshop & getting paid in scrip & living in debt is a lot better than being a sharecropper & not really getting paid at all.
But that didn't work & it largely didn't work because of a report in Pittsburgh that called for MORE immigrants because they had lost the combined number of causalities of the Confederate & Union soldiers at the battle of Gettysburg in a single year, due to sweatshop related deaths & the government decided to start to intervene....moving on....
So the factory owners start paying to move the Black population from the South to the North to stop all the strikes & leave the white people that are fighting to end wage slavery unemployed & thus preserve the horrible working conditions, low pay, & child labor that are making them even richer than they would be if they weren't exploiting people.
But all of those Black people came from the South & they brought a Southern accent with them. Even though they were living in the North racism still existed & the factory owners didn't want their new Black workers to live in the shitty tenement houses that they made for their white wage slaves, so they forced them all to build entirely new & very segregated neighborhoods.
You know, they would let the Blacks work for them, but they were still so racist that they wouldn't let them live anywhere near their factories.
Racism isn't just a southern thing.
So the Southern accent stayed, for a while, & started to slowly merge with the Chicago accent that everyone else was speaking & we had the Black accent.
But that accent didn't have the staying power as the Chicago accent, so instead of merging with what we have today, because of the segregation, it started to die out & now we only really hear it in our elders.
But wait, there is more & this more is ground breaking.
The Latinos have arrived &, for the same reasons that the factory owners imported the Blacks from the South, there is a fight to keep the Latino's out of America?
What?
You don't have to pay an illegal immigrant minimum wage. They are illegal & you can now pay sweatshop wages to the people that cook your food, harvest your food, & make what few products we still make in America. If we had an open immigration policy, like we used to, the corporations would have to pay them the same minimum wage as everyone else.
So we are encouraging them to come to America out of one side of our mouths, while we tell them to stay in Mexico out of the other.
Even though a lot of them aren't Mexican but you know, everything South of the Rio Grande is Mexico if you are American.
They are coming in greater numbers than the Irish did following Black '47 & with them American is separating itself further from English.
We are picking up words that aren't really in English English...yet.
Americans are adding more Spanish to their English than ever before, but an odd thing is happening. Something that has never happened before in the history of language & migration.
You see there is something that America still does better than anyone else in the entire world. Something that makes American culture reign supreme across the globe.
So now, unlike the past, what is happening is that the new Latino immigrants are teaching American English speakers new words & we are turning around & placing those words in our movies & now those words are almost instantly jumping the Atlantic & now the English are using words like "Patio," which is Spanish & they didn't use it until they started watching a shit ton of American movies.
You don't believe me? Ask a German, of a Frenchman, or a Brazilian, or a whatever where they learned to speak English, chances are they will give you the same answer:
Because unlike American's, they don't understand that the real great American television show from the '90s was certainly not friends.
I'll leave you with this...ALL of this:
School spirit & all.
Asshole.
Anyway, Joe Knight graduated from the same college I did & hardly any of you know him. I only mention it because it just popped into my mind & I'm about to write a little about my college. Joe Knight has absolutely no relevancy to anything.
At least I think he doesn't. He might actually be rather good with accents, at which point he would have a lot to say about this post.
But yeah. Nope. Accents. I Cannot do them.
My Swedish accent sounds kinda like Bobby Kennedy. So, you know, I can do a Kennedy accent, sort of...if I try to sound Swedish.
But yeah. Where I went to college if you were a white Christian, you were either Joe Knight or myself, or an immigrant. Those were like your three options.
That "Other" was largely immigrant.
Seriously, I went to the same school that Muhammed al-Ahari, Nguyen Phuc Buu Chanh, Luis V. Gutiérrez, & Tim McIlrath graduated from.
It also means you learn a lot of different words that you don't pick up at the day-to-day almost anywhere else in America.
For instance, you learn about words like "Banjaxed," which is one of my favorite NEIU words because I can be an asshole & pretend that it means something about computers.
"Craig" is another great NEIU word & it's pronounced "Crack" & it means "Good"...because crack is great & it will get you real high.
Those words are spoken by people like Ethel, who also says "Oggs" when she means "Eggs" & comes from the country in a country called "Oil-Land" that is not in the Middle East or Oklahoma, has a population about as big as the City of Chicago & none of them know how to pronounce a vowel.
...eye roll...
Thank you Hollywood.
They don't seem to understand that our weather here actively tries to kill us...unless they have been here when it's brutally hot & humid or, you know, an average winter. They also don't understand that the entirety of the United States does not have the same weather as Southern California & from time-to-time they will treat you to an attempt at an American accent.
And that attempt is the point of this post...sort of.
When they do an American accent they lower their voice & add emphasis on their "R's" They have an odd rhotacism thing going on & it gives you the impression that they all think we are super tough, 300-hundred pound retards.
But that is not all of them. Sometimes you come across an theater major that knows exactly what they are doing.
In this case their "A's" become so hard that you can cut a diamond with them. Their "T's" all become "D's" & words that are different to them start to merge.
For instance, "Metal" & "Medal" become the same word & you instantly hate them because, yeah, they have you pegged & you sort of have to hate the people that can really imitate you.
My last job had a cockney security guard that did the retarded American accent when he made fun of me & insisted that, no the US has more accents than the UK & I think he might be mistaken.
For the record, the British are right.
This:
Still, how the hell did that happen? It's the same language, right?
Well....I don't know. We in America speak one more language in our English than the English do in their English.
For instance in American this is a patio:
And we can trace things like that to this:
Matthew 6:9-13
- Our Father in heaven,
- hallowed be your name.
- Your kingdom come,
- your will be done,
- on earth, as it is in heaven.
- Give us this day our daily bread,
- and forgive us our debts,
- as we also have forgiven our debtors.
- And lead us not into temptation,
- but deliver us from evil.
Pater noster in caelis est,
sanctificetur nomen tuum.
Adveniat regnum tuum,
fiat voluntas tua,
in terris sicut in caelis.
Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie,
et dimitte nobis debita nostra,
sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris.
Et ne nos inducas in tentationem;
sed libera nos a malo.
sanctificetur nomen tuum.
Adveniat regnum tuum,
fiat voluntas tua,
in terris sicut in caelis.
Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie,
et dimitte nobis debita nostra,
sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris.
Et ne nos inducas in tentationem;
sed libera nos a malo.
And Latin is a wonderful language because you sort of have to pronounce every letter in the word for anyone to be able to understand you. A lot of languages don't do that.
You get the point...now try pronouncing "through" with all the letters.
Fun isn't it?
My favorite is "receipt." Give it a shot. R-E-C-E-I-P-T it's a hell of a lot of fun to say when you actually pronounce every letter in the word. We get that from the Latin "Recepta" which isn't as much fun to say when you pronounce every letter & yet another reason that Dan Brown is full of shit...That picture below this is another reason.
...moving on...
...Until it fell.
But before it fell & the barbarians came steaming in to parcel off their land, they became Catholic & their language was about as strictly monitored as French is today...because the French are under the false illusion that they are only speaking a single language.
Shortly after it fell, however, the Pope sent out a little Italian priest to go from town to town all across barbarian occupied previously-Rome to make sure that they were saying the Lord's Prayer correctly.
This was about a century after the fall.
And he recorded the prayers in the book that you can see if you scroll up a little...a lot.
The thing is, he recorded the prayers phonetically & what would be Italy today was still speaking pretty strict Latin...in the North. In Spain the Latin had a little Germanic in it & in France it had a LOT of Germanic in it & the closer he got to Constantinople, the more Greek & Mongolian had worked its way into the language.
The Lord's Prayer was the same, but they were already pronouncing their Latin a lot differently than actual Latin. The words were the same but the sounds were different.
That prayer book is important because it marks how several new languages were born, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, & Modern Greek.
You get the picture.
But how does that explain the difference between English:
The first US settlers came from the East, surprise, surprise, surprise, western expansion. But they were also French & we sort of pushed that language straight down South & were left with, well, a sort of Bostonian accent.
Bostonian for that time.
But the thing is that, well, some people call Chicago "little Warsaw," & that has a lot to do with it, because, despite what the Republican party will tell you, America really is a melting pot & it wasn't until recently that we started to close our gates & make immigration to the United States super hard & not super easy.
Once upon a time there was an island.
So now our fair city has a lot of German & Polish & other Eastern European immigrants living in it & despite what some people would tell you the first generation didn't speak English, at all, let alone fluently.
That little boy in the picture, he spoke English for the entire family, & did all of the translations.
But the thing is that he learned how to speak English as a second language because he was surrounded by the Easterners that already lived there & employed him & his family at the local sweatshop. So when he started to speak English, he did it with a pretty heavy accent.
The accent gradually faded, but from there it's just, well, it's just statistics & numbers. It doesn't take a linguist to realize that eventually the accents sort of merge to make the Chicago Accent...as we know it today.
It happened the same way that Latin in France became French.
And with the accent we started using words & slang that came from Eastern Europe that the people on the East Coast didn't use & they were using the occasional word that people in England didn't use.
But he sounds Black.
No, it's NOT a racist statement, there is actually a Black accent...if you are living in certain Midwestern states & unfortunately the Black Chicago accent is on its way out.
But then we fought a war...it was between the North & the South...& the North won & when we won we also freed all the slaves, even the slaves in the slave states that sided with the North.
But the people in the South were not happy & they had a series of Jim Crow laws that oppressed the Black people & in some cases, made them work as slaves again...by twisting the laws & we have the Historic Library District in Kenosha as well as a few other places in Chicago that were built with bricks made by Black slaves after the Civil War...when they were free...sort of.
The Black people really didn't like that at all...for the obvious reasons.
Thankfully...no,accuracy...shamefully industrialization hit America & the Northern states took to it & they opened up more sweatshops than ever before.
The thing is nearly all of those factory workers were Europeans that had come here for a better life only to discover that it was worse than their lives were in Europe where they were peasants & still treated a lot better than they were in sweatshops.
So they organized themselves into Labor Unions & went on strike to demand things like an 8 hour work day, safe working conditions, an end to child labor, workman's compensation, a minimum wage & all those other things that conservatives hate because it means that they can't have the sweatshops that they want in America...& now they are called "regulations" & people think that they are evil & not good.
But that didn't work & it largely didn't work because of a report in Pittsburgh that called for MORE immigrants because they had lost the combined number of causalities of the Confederate & Union soldiers at the battle of Gettysburg in a single year, due to sweatshop related deaths & the government decided to start to intervene....moving on....
So the factory owners start paying to move the Black population from the South to the North to stop all the strikes & leave the white people that are fighting to end wage slavery unemployed & thus preserve the horrible working conditions, low pay, & child labor that are making them even richer than they would be if they weren't exploiting people.
But all of those Black people came from the South & they brought a Southern accent with them. Even though they were living in the North racism still existed & the factory owners didn't want their new Black workers to live in the shitty tenement houses that they made for their white wage slaves, so they forced them all to build entirely new & very segregated neighborhoods.
You know, they would let the Blacks work for them, but they were still so racist that they wouldn't let them live anywhere near their factories.
So the Southern accent stayed, for a while, & started to slowly merge with the Chicago accent that everyone else was speaking & we had the Black accent.
But that accent didn't have the staying power as the Chicago accent, so instead of merging with what we have today, because of the segregation, it started to die out & now we only really hear it in our elders.
But wait, there is more & this more is ground breaking.
What?
You don't have to pay an illegal immigrant minimum wage. They are illegal & you can now pay sweatshop wages to the people that cook your food, harvest your food, & make what few products we still make in America. If we had an open immigration policy, like we used to, the corporations would have to pay them the same minimum wage as everyone else.
So we are encouraging them to come to America out of one side of our mouths, while we tell them to stay in Mexico out of the other.
Even though a lot of them aren't Mexican but you know, everything South of the Rio Grande is Mexico if you are American.
We are picking up words that aren't really in English English...yet.
Americans are adding more Spanish to their English than ever before, but an odd thing is happening. Something that has never happened before in the history of language & migration.
You see there is something that America still does better than anyone else in the entire world. Something that makes American culture reign supreme across the globe.
You don't believe me? Ask a German, of a Frenchman, or a Brazilian, or a whatever where they learned to speak English, chances are they will give you the same answer:
I'll leave you with this...ALL of this:
School spirit & all.
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