Date:  Wed, 2 Mar 1994 12:49:39 EST

From:  Wayne Glowka <wglowka[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MAIL.GAC.PEACHNET.EDU>

Subject: Re: attitude & prescription



>Re Tim Frazer's query about singers and the national anthem.

>

>Do we have American stage speech? Is it just a matter of drama coaches

>telling actors to enunciate /t/ etc., or is there a lectal dimension that

>has some systematic features? These may be rhetorical questions.

>                              DMLance





Anecdotal Observation from Wayne Glowka: I have been in a number of

plays--all with the same director. My problems with pronunciation came not

from the director, but from the music director. Again, I always had to

deal with the same one, but she had a thing about reduced vowels. My /[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]/

(schwa) had to be replaced with her /E/ (open e). I kept my mouth shut

about variation. Music directors don't negotiate.



I was once a phonetics consultant for _My Fair Lady_. I brought in a

Trudgill tape and handouts for RP and Cockney. One gentleman in the

cast--with a very loud voice--refused to follow the pronunciations for

Cockney. He purposely followed the pronunciation that he heard on his

record of the show and told me that he was doing so because people wouldn't

understand that he was speaking Cockney if he followed the suggestions of

linguists. Thus, there may be set dialect standards that people teach.

People around here have a hard time watching the CBS _In the Heat of the

Night_. The accents are horrible. The accents in _Gone with the Wind_--a

movie that all real people here forgive--make the hair on my back stand up.

 Honest local accents are heard on locally made advertisements:

[bU<gzIn+yo+hA[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]s#w[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]i+gIt[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]m+A[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]t+[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]t+bU<g+hA[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]s] (where [U<] is a fronted

horse-U)--"Bugs in your house? We get them out at Bug House." But then

these accents embarrass the locals. Don't even ask me about Leckie's

Income Tax or Tommy's Retreads.