jayeless
jayeless

Somehow I blinked today and 9 hours passed, and all I have to show for it is new personal wiki pages on Australian English and our accents, specifically. If you want my takes on those topics feel free to go check them out, but man! I could NOT keep them to a reasonable length 😅

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odd
odd

@jayeless Is capsicum what we call paprika maybe? The doona we call dyne, (y without the “ai”).

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jayeless
jayeless

@odd It's possible! "Paprika" here is a spice, but I believe it's made from capsicums, so it would make sense to me that some languages use "paprika" for the fruit/vegetable directly. That's also interesting that your word for "doona" seems a lot closer than the UK/US words – maybe that's where we got it from 😊

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purisubzi
purisubzi

@odd @jayeless Are bell peppers called Paprika in Norway? For us Capsicum is bell pepper. In India these are overwhelmingly green. The red and yellow ones are only available in gourmet stores in big cities. Paprika for us is an entirely different thing: a ground spice.

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Archimage
Archimage

@odd capscicum is the compound in peppers that make them hot. It is also the genus of peppers.

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hjertnes
hjertnes

@purisubzi all the sweet peppers are called paprika in Norway

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purisubzi
purisubzi

@hjertnes Got it! Languages are weird and wonderful in so many ways 😊

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kjz
kjz

@jayeless OK, this is fun :-)

Firstly, are you aware of any similarities/ancestry between the UK Suffolk accent (not dialect) and Australian (general)? I’ve heard it argued and hear some similarities, but doubt it.

As for vocab:

  • “Pepper” in Britain
  • “Tennis shoes” are a subset of trainers
  • “Duvet”
  • “Lollies” are boiled sweets on a stick or frozen sweets on a stick
  • We’d understand “jute” but don’t really have a phrase apart “pick-up truck”
  • Definitely is “coriander” here
  • We also use “sweater” but jumper’s more common. They’re interchangeable (i.e. a sweater can be knitted), I think.
  • Cardigans are not jumpers; they’re buttoned up

Cool to discover

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jayeless
jayeless

@leonp Thanks for the vocab list! It's interesting, and good to see I got many things right 😊

As far as the accents go, I'm not sure about the Australian accent having any strong connection to the Suffolk one, particularly. The first Australian English speakers were the children of the (mostly) convicts around Sydney Harbour, who were mostly from southeast England but particularly from London, as you might expect. (There were also plenty of Irish convicts, but they didn't make much impact on the accent – I've read a theory that it's because they were mostly second-language speakers of English at that time, but idk really.) I did just look up a video of a Suffolk accent and did notice some similarities, though, especially in the PRICE vowel (this guy, at least, alternates between the [ɛɪ] and [æɪ] vowels for it) and the strong pronunciation of schwa as [ɐ] at the ends of words. So similarities, yes, but I don't think the Aus accent is "descended" from the Suffolk one, it's more likely a convergent development :)

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kjz
kjz

@jayeless thanks for looking into it; I think “ancestry” was the wrong word. I don’t have the lingo you have to express the similarity in some sounds, but there are perhaps some connections. There’s a dude who gives talks on it here in Suffolk.

I nearly did an applied linguistics MA after my English degree, several hundred years ago.

And we have biccies too 😀

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jayeless
jayeless

@leonp Yeah, I never want to presume that an Australian slang word will also be shared by the UK, but a fair number of them are! I found yesterday that Wikipedia has a whole list of Australian diminutives, including a marker next to the ones (or at least some of the ones) that are also used in the UK. There are almost certainly more that it doesn't include, too.

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