On 11/9/20 5:42 am, Timothy Collinson - timothy.collinson at port.ac.uk
(via tml list) wrote:
>
>     .
>     <snip> but Loren ended up "translating" between the
>     Norwegian (who was speaking English) and the Finn (who was speaking
>     English), as he could understand both (speaking English), and both
>     could
>     understand him (speaking English), but neither could understand
>     the other.
>
>
>
> I can better that as I shared a flat at uni with two guys, one of whom
> came from Newcastle and the other from Yorkshire.  Two places that are
> about as close together as they could be (whereas at least there's
> some distance between Finland and Norway - unless you're far north of
> course). 
>
> Close as they are, both are rather 'north' for me, but it fell to me
> as a southerner to translate between the two of them on occasion! 
>
> I never worked out if it was because I spoke a more neutral form of
> English to act as a bridge, or because I'd spent a year in Nigeria and
> was more used to "heavy" accents, or because my parents were Geordies
> originally and I had some vague idea of Tyneside dialect.
> <snip>
>
> tc
>
>  

Collision,

For language-related WTF of a written variety, may I refer you to the
earlier installments of Parental Advisory: Vector Thrust and the Learned
& Honourable Members' reaction thereto?  Written in (something
approximating) English and read in (something approximating) English, to
boot.

The Old Dart - as Billy Birmingham (aka The 12th Man) put it somewhat
hyperbolically, "What _is_ an English accent?  Go a mile up the road and
it changes."

I'd guess it was your exposure to heavy accents and/or dialects that
allowed you to unpick what your flatmates were saying.

I had a bit of a crash course in that one semester - on the lecturer
side, I ended up with a Sri Lankan who had done all his tertiary
education in sunny, warm Scotland (I still vividly recall his
pronunciation of "ceteris paribus" some 13 years later) followed up by a
Germanophone Swiss (some of us joked about needing climbing gear to
unpick what he was saying).  On the student side of things, the project
groups pitched me in headfirst - on a couple, I was the only native
English speaker (so I ended up doing lots of copy editing, and some
diplomacy, to boot), and on a third, I nearly found myself in Loren's
situation between an Indian and a South African.

Alex