[HPforGrownups] Re: Bigotry in the Potterverse

[Rick H. Kennerly]

No: HPFGUIDX 188051

Geoff:
> Staying marginally OT, I must agree that you are lost at UK dialect.
>
> Katie Leung, who plays Cho Chang in the "medium that dare not 
> speak it's name" was born in Scotland and has a very marked Scots 
> accent.
> :-)
>   

Oh....See?  No ear for UK accents and dialects. 

Although, now that I think about it, I shouldn't have said Katie had a 
Welsh accent because we get a lot of British Educational TV over here, 
so we know from that series on British folkways and manners, Benny Hill, 
that if Benny can't understand a low level functionary, lorry driver, or 
scullery maid, it's always a person from Wales.  All the clues we 
usually use to decipher Britain are stripped from the JKR movies: 
clothing, riding crops, and steamy interaction below stairs.  In the HP 
movies everybody wears the same thing (why do the girls wear neckties 
and who taught then to tie them?)

Tonk's "Wotcher, Harry?" threw me for the longest, which reads like a 
warning to us (Wha'cher [self], Harry, round those dragons).  Now it 
sounds like the song of a cardinal.  Don't know how many times I've 
heard Seamus pronounced like a bodily fluid.  Steven Fry did a nice 
little primer on British names though, things like Fothergill being 
pronounced Finshaw (more or less...on spelling and pronunciation).  
British English is a land mine for us, I'm afraid.


-- 

Rick Kennerly
Virginia Beach, VA
www.mouseherder.com 
<http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/profile.php?id=1213141578&ref=name>



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