Wow Sal, just talking to him and already talking about impaling yourself on his stick? I could almost confuse you with Joe with tits rather than Walky with Tits.
As gangler is getting at, she’s asking what KIND of English accent he has. Or, hell, maybe he’s from Australia. They’re pretty similar-sounding to untrained ears. At any rate, it’s always smarter to ask where someone’s from than assume and possibly offend.
Sounds like those people may have somewhat fanciful notions about New England. (I’m from Vermont and tend to get pegged as “vaguely northeastern US” now that I live in the midwest.)
For the record, if he speaks “The Queen’s English,” he almost certainly speaks Received English. While it’s technically a regional dialect (South-East/London), it’s mostly considered ‘Standard English’ in England, and such for generations was the dialect that students were trained in when learning to speak ‘properly.’
The American equivalent would probably be the generalized mid-midwestern accent often called “anchorman,” otherwise known as ‘losing my [X] accent.’ It mostly exists on television.
I’m English, and I’ve had my accent guessed as Australian, South African and Dutch when I’ve travelled in North America, coupled with a load of “Where’s that accent from?”/”You’re not from round here, are you?” (oh, and one “Are you from Toronto?”)
I hate to say it, but I agree with Doc onthis one, MK, David Tennant has a ‘I know everything that’s going on and am fascinated.’
Smith, however, has a -very- dorky and almost child-like attitude at times which fits so well with this character. I mean the only thing he’s missing is dark hair and the suspenders.
Interestingly, 9 and 10 were the first two Doctors to actually speak in regional dialects. 9 spoke with the ‘Northern’ Salford dialect Eccleston actually used. 10 spoke with an Estuary accent, which is the actual, proper ‘Southeast’ accent without the refinements of Received English. 1-8 all spoke Received English in part because… well, that’s what the BBC used, and it was meant to denote ‘upper crust/class educated.’ Eccelston’s dialect was briefly controversial because he stopped the tradition.
Matt Smith’s voice is a touch mercurial, but he’s mostly going back to Received.
Actually the first was Seven, who had a Scottish accent. Eight TRIED to keep the Received English on in the shitty TV movie, but his Liverpoolian dialect kept slipping in and he basically gave up on trying on the audio dramas (or so I heard, never actually…err, watched the DW audio dramas yet, one of my greatest shames as a massive Whovian)
I hear my own voice. For reasons of being British and having had elocution lessons. Obviously, I hear the version which doesn’t have my various speech impediments.
“PS—Why, yes, I can capitalize any words I desire. The language is English. I am English. Therefore mine is the opinion which matters, colonial heathen.”
The REAL PPPS: The capitalization thing was based on a joke from The Dresden Files: Changes. I followed up with the actual passage, which took place in a letter containing somewhat randomly capitalized words.
That is the thing, Americans (especially Southerners) can NEVER say that that the English speak goofy because by definition they have the correct accent.
But which English accent is the correct one? And was it more correct hundreds of years ago back when America split off, or is it more correct now, after having evolved and changed? Are the parts of North American English that evolved less from that splitting-off point more correct than the parts of British English that evolved more?
Funny you should mention that. There’s an essay on that subject which appeared in one of the better known Sci-Fi mags that asserted that natives of late 1960 Chicago spoke a variant of English that was closer to that of Shakespeare’s day than that of Londoners of the late 60’s. (I was hoping that I could find my “Best of ” anthology to cite title and author exactly for those interested, but it has vanished.)
But doesn’t that get into the whole prescriptivism versus descriptivism argument? Also, near as I could tell folks at Oxford didn’t talk any differently than folks at Cambridge or London. I was only at the two universities for a few days, though, so maybe I didn’t run into the cultivated accents.
Received English isn’t Oxford English, it’s a refined version of London. Whatever associations it has with Oxbridge comes from the long period of time when it was considered ‘proper’ English, while other dialects were considered guttural.
Oxford English as a dialect has a somewhat softer edge than Received. Terry Jones is probably the most famous speaker of it, when he’s not adopting some other dialect. However, most of the time when people say ‘Oxford English,’ they’re referring to written language, rhetoric and (especially) spelling, not spoken. This is in large part because the Standard Reference for British English spelling is the Oxford English Dictionary.
The Queen’s accent is closer to Estuary English these days, sad to say. The real ‘Queen’s English’ accent is good old Received Pronunciation, aka The One The BBC Makes All Its News Presenters Use.
Not even news readers speak RP any more. True RP is becoming increasingly rare and is likely to die out (I can’t say I think it’s that sad myself, though).
Yeah — somewhere along the line, British personalities stopped caring so much about the ‘neutral/educated’ accent versus their natural ones. Which is funny, since American broadcasting cares a lot about it, at least as far as presenters go. Most of the time, you’re either going to have heavy dialect (think Paula Deen), so as to be ‘cute,’ or you go for Anchorman, to sound as accommodating and authoritative as possible. (Alton Brown’s my favorite example — he had a thick Atlanta dialect before he decided he wanted to be on television, so he worked very hard to master Anchorman.)
(Which going back to the old “which doctor” debate above, would probably mean a voice like Tennant’s, since he probably used RP.
Since Jason speaks the Queen’s English, though, that would make him speak closer to Estuary English – Eccleston’s accent I believe. Now I want to hear him say “I like bananas. Bananas are good.” xD
Though if he means what you mean, then back to Tennant’s voice.)
The accent Tennant used to do the Doctor was an Estuary English accent (which is an accent native to south-east England – the estuary in question being the Thames).
Eccleston doesn’t have an Estuary accent, he’s from Lancashire, in the north (Lots of planets have a North, remember) and has a Lancashire accent.
As I age, I find myself with an accent more and more like my parents. There are words I used to think they said funny compared to my classmates and other people I knew, but now that I’m out of school, I increasingly say those words the same way, and notice myself saying them in ways I used to think were strange.
Just go to your local emergency ward. I hear that the excuse of “I slipped in the shower and I fell on the (any random object) where it became stuck up my ass” is used a lot.
I never realised Jason spoke the Queen’s English!
I always presumed he had an average English accent (I know, define average) like me.
Now I can’t help but laugh every time I read his dialogue 😀
Nah, that’s not what I meant. England has like a million distinct accents that they identify even among themselves. Saying you don’t have an accent in America means you talk like they do in movies. Saying you don’t have an accent in England is nonsense, because there’s no baseline English accent at all, BBC notwithstanding.
In part that’s because of the class distinctions the dialects always conveyed. That was another reason Received Pronunciation was so significant for so long — it was the dialect of the Learned, the Gentry, and Authority.
In more modern Britain, those distinctions are becoming sources of pride, and attitudes are significantly more egalitarian than they used to be.
In America, the presumption from our cultural mythology is that we’re all equal. Why this means an amalgamated Midwestern dialect is considered ‘not’ having an accent is beyond me.
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Well, that was short.
(Tuesday: MAD LOVIN’)
With his penis.
Or the huge stick up his ass.
Just sayin…
You’re saying that his penis is short?
awesome
What? You expecting snuggling?
Not until the second date.
Wait, What?!
Wow Sal, just talking to him and already talking about impaling yourself on his stick? I could almost confuse you with Joe with tits rather than Walky with Tits.
Joe doesn’t need his own tits, since he can always borrow a pair or three at any given moment.
Cue the Sal/Joe shippers. (Jal? Soe?)
JalapenJoe Salad.
Sal is waaaaaay too good for Joe.
Could this be a start of a relationship? Who knows.
Now I’ve got “The Start of Something New” HSM in my head thanks to this comment
She is not familiar with an English accent?
Well, it takes all kinds, I guess.
There are a lot of English accents. It’s a very large country.
True (it’s the size of Pennsylvania), but most people can get the gist of it when they hear it.
As gangler is getting at, she’s asking what KIND of English accent he has. Or, hell, maybe he’s from Australia. They’re pretty similar-sounding to untrained ears. At any rate, it’s always smarter to ask where someone’s from than assume and possibly offend.
Indeed.
Let me tell ‘ya, Australians don’t like it when you ask them if they’re from New Zealand.
A NZer accent sounds something like this:
six = sux
fish and chips = farch en chupps
A kiwi accent sounds mostly like an white American talking gangsta’ somethin’ fierce.
*a
Bret: Did she sound Australian? Australian accent?
Jemaine: Yes, yes.
Bret: What did it sound like?
Jemaine: Kind of like an evil version of our accent.
When I think of someone speaking the Queen’s English, I think of Roger Moore.
From what I have been told, many Australians sound a lot like people who come from the New England area of the US.
No they don’t I sound nothing like an Australian.
Just going by what I have heard people say.
Sounds like those people may have somewhat fanciful notions about New England. (I’m from Vermont and tend to get pegged as “vaguely northeastern US” now that I live in the midwest.)
In many TV shows I seen, when an ‘Australian’ shows up, they sound more like what a Cockney accent sounds like than anything else.
For the record, if he speaks “The Queen’s English,” he almost certainly speaks Received English. While it’s technically a regional dialect (South-East/London), it’s mostly considered ‘Standard English’ in England, and such for generations was the dialect that students were trained in when learning to speak ‘properly.’
The American equivalent would probably be the generalized mid-midwestern accent often called “anchorman,” otherwise known as ‘losing my [X] accent.’ It mostly exists on television.
Damn Iowa.
I’m English, and I’ve had my accent guessed as Australian, South African and Dutch when I’ve travelled in North America, coupled with a load of “Where’s that accent from?”/”You’re not from round here, are you?” (oh, and one “Are you from Toronto?”)
…Dutch??
I’m not sure they could be farther off if they said you sounded Japanese,
Erm… The Netherlands are on the other side of the North Sea. Geographically, it’s just a bit closer than Japan…
Between the accent and the bowtie (which is cool), I now definitely hear Matt Smith’s voice in my head when reading Jason’s dialog.
I hear David Tennant’s.
He’s too “Genuinely cool”. Smith is more “Dorkishly cool”, which is far more Jason.
Also, Tennant’s accent was phony, he’s actually Scottish.
You got something agsinst the Scottish.
I hate to say it, but I agree with Doc onthis one, MK, David Tennant has a ‘I know everything that’s going on and am fascinated.’
Smith, however, has a -very- dorky and almost child-like attitude at times which fits so well with this character. I mean the only thing he’s missing is dark hair and the suspenders.
My favourite Doctor was the Tenth.
I’m old school, I like the 4th one best and surprisingly the 7th one as well.
The second doesn’t get enough love. And the recent Big Finish Productions audio plays on BBC radio 7 have cemented 8 as another favourite of mine.
Personally, I prefer William Hartnell (first Doctor). Oldest school. 🙂
9 doesn’t get enough love either.
Interestingly, 9 and 10 were the first two Doctors to actually speak in regional dialects. 9 spoke with the ‘Northern’ Salford dialect Eccleston actually used. 10 spoke with an Estuary accent, which is the actual, proper ‘Southeast’ accent without the refinements of Received English. 1-8 all spoke Received English in part because… well, that’s what the BBC used, and it was meant to denote ‘upper crust/class educated.’ Eccelston’s dialect was briefly controversial because he stopped the tradition.
Matt Smith’s voice is a touch mercurial, but he’s mostly going back to Received.
Actually the first was Seven, who had a Scottish accent. Eight TRIED to keep the Received English on in the shitty TV movie, but his Liverpoolian dialect kept slipping in and he basically gave up on trying on the audio dramas (or so I heard, never actually…err, watched the DW audio dramas yet, one of my greatest shames as a massive Whovian)
“Trust me, I’m a TA”
“, who likes the T N A!” 😀
No, no TNA. TNA sucks, man. All confusing storylines, the young talents pushed aside for the has beens. It’s like WCW all over again.
Not that TNA, I mean TnA as in Tits And ASs.
Oh that, well I’m more of a T-man than an A-man.
Can’t it be both? I appreciate all the letters.
T
A
L
B
N
E
The whole works.
I hear Bob Hoskins.
I hear David McCallum.
Oooh, nice one! 60’s Ilya McCallum or Duckie McCallum?
Duckie.
I hear David Niven 😀
Yet neither speak the Queen’s English… 😛
He needs a fez if he’s going to be Matt Smith.
I was gonna do a “Lots of places have a North” joke, but…it really doesn’t work here, does it.
Well it would if I know to spell his name.
Christopher Eccleston 🙂
Thank you kindly.
I hear my own voice. For reasons of being British and having had elocution lessons. Obviously, I hear the version which doesn’t have my various speech impediments.
I also hear Tony Robinson (the tiny tit in a beard who played Baldrick)
Huh, this looks interesting…
Wait, does this mean we’ll have to wait a hundred strips until Tuesday comes around? Damn.
Kinky.
YES! STILL BRITISH!
Hey, is that a Tarantugun tattoo?
Don’t you start!
Really? I coulda sworn it was some sort of Solifugae (camel spider/ wind scorpion/sun spider)
I thought it was a potato peeler with legs.
… Which would be an awesomely stupid tattoo.
Does him being English mean he can Capitalize any Word he chooses?
Yes! Wait, how can you tell if he’s capitalizing anything unusual? The entire comic is in capital letters.
“PS—Why, yes, I can capitalize any words I desire. The language is English. I am English. Therefore mine is the opinion which matters, colonial heathen.”
PPS- you didn’t answer my question.
PPPS- just because I wanted to continue on the P’s
The REAL PPPS: The capitalization thing was based on a joke from The Dresden Files: Changes. I followed up with the actual passage, which took place in a letter containing somewhat randomly capitalized words.
Is it bad that my first thought was “It’s Pee-Wee, not Peewee?”
That is the thing, Americans (especially Southerners) can NEVER say that that the English speak goofy because by definition they have the correct accent.
But which English accent is the correct one? And was it more correct hundreds of years ago back when America split off, or is it more correct now, after having evolved and changed? Are the parts of North American English that evolved less from that splitting-off point more correct than the parts of British English that evolved more?
My head.
It spins.
DAMN YOU WILLIS!!!!!
(justkidingyou’reawesome)
Funny you should mention that. There’s an essay on that subject which appeared in one of the better known Sci-Fi mags that asserted that natives of late 1960 Chicago spoke a variant of English that was closer to that of Shakespeare’s day than that of Londoners of the late 60’s. (I was hoping that I could find my “Best of ” anthology to cite title and author exactly for those interested, but it has vanished.)
Oxford English.
But doesn’t that get into the whole prescriptivism versus descriptivism argument? Also, near as I could tell folks at Oxford didn’t talk any differently than folks at Cambridge or London. I was only at the two universities for a few days, though, so maybe I didn’t run into the cultivated accents.
It’s also known as Received Pronuciation. You tend to hear when you listen to the BBC.
Received English isn’t Oxford English, it’s a refined version of London. Whatever associations it has with Oxbridge comes from the long period of time when it was considered ‘proper’ English, while other dialects were considered guttural.
Oxford English as a dialect has a somewhat softer edge than Received. Terry Jones is probably the most famous speaker of it, when he’s not adopting some other dialect. However, most of the time when people say ‘Oxford English,’ they’re referring to written language, rhetoric and (especially) spelling, not spoken. This is in large part because the Standard Reference for British English spelling is the Oxford English Dictionary.
Surely the Queen’s accent is the correct one? On account of it being called the Queen’s English?
Should probably point out that the Queen is mostly German at this point.
Unless he’s referring to the last Queen, Victoria, who was even more mostly German.
The Queen was born and raised in England. That makes her English as far as I’m concerned.
The Queen’s accent is closer to Estuary English these days, sad to say. The real ‘Queen’s English’ accent is good old Received Pronunciation, aka The One The BBC Makes All Its News Presenters Use.
Not even news readers speak RP any more. True RP is becoming increasingly rare and is likely to die out (I can’t say I think it’s that sad myself, though).
I actually naturally speak in RP. It’s just one of the many pitfalls of living in Kent.
Being from Thurrock, I naturally (Excluding impediments) speak Estuary.
Yeah — somewhere along the line, British personalities stopped caring so much about the ‘neutral/educated’ accent versus their natural ones. Which is funny, since American broadcasting cares a lot about it, at least as far as presenters go. Most of the time, you’re either going to have heavy dialect (think Paula Deen), so as to be ‘cute,’ or you go for Anchorman, to sound as accommodating and authoritative as possible. (Alton Brown’s my favorite example — he had a thick Atlanta dialect before he decided he wanted to be on television, so he worked very hard to master Anchorman.)
…I’m such a nerd.
(Which going back to the old “which doctor” debate above, would probably mean a voice like Tennant’s, since he probably used RP.
Since Jason speaks the Queen’s English, though, that would make him speak closer to Estuary English – Eccleston’s accent I believe. Now I want to hear him say “I like bananas. Bananas are good.” xD
Though if he means what you mean, then back to Tennant’s voice.)
The accent Tennant used to do the Doctor was an Estuary English accent (which is an accent native to south-east England – the estuary in question being the Thames).
Eccleston doesn’t have an Estuary accent, he’s from Lancashire, in the north (Lots of planets have a North, remember) and has a Lancashire accent.
My accent is the correct one. All of the rest of you talk funny.
Animal’s English will conquer you all.
Goofy is in the ear of the beholder. Any claim of goofiness is implicitly a statement of opinion, because it can never be an absolute fact.
What a goofy thing to say.
I would like to point out that It’s much easier to understand a sourtherner than a liverpudlian.
It is not!
I’m wondering what Rule 34 would do to Sal’s last comment, but not really coming up with anything.
I think I’m still nauseous, though.
Nauseous indeed. Obviously, Rule 34 would just take the comment (all of it) literally and declare it ‘guro’.
SCNR.
/me hands out brain bleach.
Here you go(man these comics are makeing me use up my months supply T.T)
Ugh, thanks for reminding guro exists. I’m gonna need the industrial strength Brain Bleach.
I always wonder what type of accent Sal and Jason’s hypothetical offspring would have. Hopefully some Frankensteinian combination of the two.
Probably just the accent of the offspring’s classmates.
Willis is right, a person’s accent is influenced more by their peers than their parent’s.
Ah, but what if they were home-schooled?
They still have peers.
As I age, I find myself with an accent more and more like my parents. There are words I used to think they said funny compared to my classmates and other people I knew, but now that I’m out of school, I increasingly say those words the same way, and notice myself saying them in ways I used to think were strange.
If she impales herself on his ass-stick, would that turn them into a kabab?
Would it mean that Jason would have to change his name to Vlad?
Swing and a miss.
No way. For Jason to be Vlad, Jason needs to impales someone and since Sal impales herself, Jason does not have to change his name.
Hm, good point. Anybody known for impaling themselves?
Just go to your local emergency ward. I hear that the excuse of “I slipped in the shower and I fell on the (any random object) where it became stuck up my ass” is used a lot.
Where do they keep getting the guinea pigs?
In the shower for some strange reason.
I was thinking a little more famous than that, as well as on purpose, but I suppose that works too.
Famous? Like Richard Gere and those poor gerbils?
…Do I even want to know what you’re talking about?
A match made in accent heaven! <3
Hmm, perhaps an accent fight is in order here?
Que Pee-Wee psa
[[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agT2GVNQjao]]
This is crack.
Yay for being anal!
I never realised Jason spoke the Queen’s English!
I always presumed he had an average English accent (I know, define average) like me.
Now I can’t help but laugh every time I read his dialogue 😀
I actually inagine him sounding like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K8_jgiNqUc
LIke John Cleese you mean or the twat in the toga?
The twat of course.
I bet she didn’t mean for that to sound quite so raunchy…
Or did she….
So Jason has a stick up his ass and Sal’s gonna ‘impale’ herself on it.
It’s a double-dildo, right?
..and of course ROZ is the best Avatar to think of that.
Well, all the other possibilities are too horrifying.
))((
Dang comment system deleted my angle brackets thinking they were html. Let’s see if it likes this.
))<>((
Of course it would make much more sense if Jason would get a stick up his ass by Sal. Or, stuck something up his ass by Sal.
If you know what I mean.
Hint: It’s the same thing I stuck up your mum’s ass.
For a nickel.
He’s seriously going to claim a lack of accent while being an Englishman living in Indiana? Fail.
Makes more sense than claiming no accent being an Englishman living in England, where EVERYONE has an accent.
Only if you’re an outsider looking in. In England, anyone who doesn’t sound like them (i.e. Americans) are the ones with the accent.
Nah, that’s not what I meant. England has like a million distinct accents that they identify even among themselves. Saying you don’t have an accent in America means you talk like they do in movies. Saying you don’t have an accent in England is nonsense, because there’s no baseline English accent at all, BBC notwithstanding.
In part that’s because of the class distinctions the dialects always conveyed. That was another reason Received Pronunciation was so significant for so long — it was the dialect of the Learned, the Gentry, and Authority.
In more modern Britain, those distinctions are becoming sources of pride, and attitudes are significantly more egalitarian than they used to be.
In America, the presumption from our cultural mythology is that we’re all equal. Why this means an amalgamated Midwestern dialect is considered ‘not’ having an accent is beyond me.
It’s the stereotypically English response to being told they have an accent by an American.
We can’t help it. It’s a reflex.
“It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.” – George Bernard Shaw
Sounds like love to me.
…I wouldn’t mind a fan fic of this.
I am just loving how the fandom contains so many knowledgeable people when it comes to language. *Walky icon*
Is Sal’s tattoo of a real kind of spider or some stylistic symbol thing?
I meant “*Walky gravatar*”. I’m still getting used to that word, sorry.
Omg, omg, omg…. ILLICIT STUDENT TEACHER AIDE SEXIN’!!! I can’t wait! I can’t wait!! This is what I HAVE been waiting for! 😀
0.0
Anyway, I always thought english accents were kinda stupid…
“I do not have an accent” would be the grammatically correct statement in the Queens English.
I am a pedant.
I’m kinda wanting to hear Jason’s backstory in this comic. Why choose Indiana of all the universities he could come to in the states?
Aside from, you know, Mr. Willis demanding that everyone everywhere lives in Indiana.
Is she mental? Hot English guy. HIT THAT.
Haha! Nice comeback, Sal. =P
Sal’s tattoo is that what I think it is? the robot bug attacker thing in “It’s Walky”? like is it a reference to that or is it just a bug?
Yes, Sal has tarantu-guns.
That IS an accent.