Comic 599 - Native Speaker
12th Jan 2021, 12:00 AM
in The Butterfly Ruby Heist - Part 1
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Author Notes:
But what is this about a stolen canopic jar? Buy Stilldown's The Zeppelins Will Rise Again to find out! ;-)
Just like Kanny, I also find it a bit hard to describe the specific way a language spoken by a native speaker sounds versus by someone who learned it as a second language. (Especially when it's a dead language, that you can't even practice via everyday conversation.)
I am not a linguist, but I hope I hit some valid points here: "No accent" is supposed to mean no foreign accents in this case. (Native speakers can have regional accents of course.) At the same time, a native speaker just talks, (paradoxically) without always pronouncing everything über-correctly, thus the mention of contractions. (Even though the tape recording is of a public speech, wherein the speaker surely pays more attention to enunciation than in a casual conversation.)
By the way, the text I used here are the first few sentences of Cicero's First Catiline Oration from 63 BC - thus Kanny's dating is correct. :-)
User comments:
PS: I must admit that I read Cicero in the translated versions. (Except a few passages we had to translate in the latin lessons, but that's long ago and I wouldn't stand a chance now.)
What I do remember well though is the we read Caesar's De Bello Gallico. I always thought that the first sentence in there ("Gaul in its entirety is divided in three parts") is quite similar to the introduction in the Asterix comics ("Gaul is entirely occupied by the Romans") - and this I think is quite certainly not a coincidence!
In the English version of the previous page, I originally abbreviated "cassette tape" as "cassette". But Taily told me that, while English speakers would understand what is meant, "tape" is the far more common abbreviation.