You say potato - BookWyrm

247 pages

English language

Published Jan. 18, 2014 by Macmillan.

ISBN:: 978-1-4472-4969-6
OCLC Number:: 893527899

Some people say scohn, while others say schown. He says bath, while she says bahth. You say potayto. I say potahto And- -wait a second, no one says potahto. No one's ever said potahto. Have they? From reconstructing Shakespeare's accent to the rise and fall of Received Pronunciation, actor Ben Crystal and his linguist father David travel the world in search of the stories of spoken English. Everyone has an accent, though many of us think we don't. We all have our likes and dislikes about the way other people speak, and everyone has something to say about 'correct' pronunciation. But how did all these accents come about, and why do people feel so strongly about them? Are regional accents dying out as English becomes a global language? And most importantly of all: what went wrong in Birmingham? Witty, authoritative and jam-packed full of fascinating facts, You Say Potato is …

Some people say scohn, while others say schown. He says bath, while she says bahth. You say potayto. I say potahto And- -wait a second, no one says potahto. No one's ever said potahto. Have they? From reconstructing Shakespeare's accent to the rise and fall of Received Pronunciation, actor Ben Crystal and his linguist father David travel the world in search of the stories of spoken English. Everyone has an accent, though many of us think we don't. We all have our likes and dislikes about the way other people speak, and everyone has something to say about 'correct' pronunciation. But how did all these accents come about, and why do people feel so strongly about them? Are regional accents dying out as English becomes a global language? And most importantly of all: what went wrong in Birmingham? Witty, authoritative and jam-packed full of fascinating facts, You Say Potato is a celebration of the myriad ways in which the English language is spoken - and how our accents, in so many ways, speak louder than words.

2 editions

patchworkbunny reviewed You say potato by Ben Crystal

Review of 'You say potato' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Written by a father and son team, it’s a conversational style non-fiction book that’s easy to pick up and read in snippets. As someone with a hodge podge accent, I loved the fact that it helped me trace different parts of my accent to different places I have lived. It also tells us a lot about Received Pronunciation English, that accent that everyone who is not British assumes is what we all talk like. It’s actually pretty new in our history and it turns out we trust regional accents more. Maybe that Jaguar ad had a point.

David Crystal is involved in Original Pronunciation Shakespeare, in which they perform the plays in an accent as close as they can get to what would have been spoken at the time it was first performed. Now I’d love to see a performance, but I felt it went on a bit too much …

Written by a father and son team, it’s a conversational style non-fiction book that’s easy to pick up and read in snippets. As someone with a hodge podge accent, I loved the fact that it helped me trace different parts of my accent to different places I have lived. It also tells us a lot about Received Pronunciation English, that accent that everyone who is not British assumes is what we all talk like. It’s actually pretty new in our history and it turns out we trust regional accents more. Maybe that Jaguar ad had a point.

David Crystal is involved in Original Pronunciation Shakespeare, in which they perform the plays in an accent as close as they can get to what would have been spoken at the time it was first performed. Now I’d love to see a performance, but I felt it went on a bit too much near the end about this. There was a conversation with an actor about his use of accents that didn’t quite fit the rest of the book. However it does seem to be David’s passion so I’ll let him off. I would certainly recommend this to any American writers planning on including a British character in their next book!

Subjects

English language
Accents and accentuation
Pronunciation
History
Englisch
Mundart
Sprachentwicklung
Anglais (langue)
Dialectes
Histoire
Prononciation