Malazan Empire: Whisperzzzzzzz - Viewing Profile - Malazan Empire

ACT OF MODGOD

'What Makes Mare of Easttown So Watchable


Its actors even mimic the forbidding accent, which my husband, who grew up in Delco, likens to speaking with a broad, fixed grin on your face, so “oh” becomes “eaux,” and “water” becomes “wooder.” As a character, Mare embodies her surroundings—she’s gloomy and stoic, mostly understated in appearance. [...]


Without making addiction its hectoring focus, the show paints it as an ingrained reality for locals, as commonplace and impossible to avoid as guns and fists. [...]

Brad Ingelsby, who created the series and wrote all seven episodes, grew up near Delaware County, and Mare has a sense for the aesthetic details—crocheted blankets, screened-in porches, piney dive bars—that enhance the show’s verisimilitude without being distracting. More crucial, though, is the show’s choice to render a community without judgment. For a work about a neglected corner of America, there’s none of the sneering critique of Hillbilly Elegy or the ludicrous rivalries of Ozark. Instead, Mare of Easttown is just a subtle, textured portrait of a place where some people are suffering, and a woman is doing her imperfect and insufficient best to help them.'

https://www.theatlan...article/618661/

Ha, a 'broad, fixed grin' does get you part of the way there, though I think some vowel fronting, nasality, and tensing of the back of the tongue and/or top/front of the throat (maybe the larynx? probably not the false folds right above it, which you might use for death metal growls...).

'Can ‘Mare of Easttown’ Help Bring the Philadelphia Accent Mainstream?

[...] the Philly dialect is a big part of Kate Winslet’s new HBO drama—and its presence is increasing across popular culture

The very first word Mare utters in the teaser is her own name. Only instead of sounding like a female horse, it comes out more like “Mear.” She goes on to talk about “most people” and to ask Pearce’s character: “You don’t have any bodies hidden under your porch, do you?” But the vowels in most and don’t became peculiar diphthongs that sounded a little like meust and deun’t.

“Oh my God,” I thought. “Is she trying the Accent?”

[...] “We know what we’re supposed to think about a character if they have a Brooklyn accent and are dropping their r’s, or even a Boston accent, or a Southern accent. But it’s not as clear what the persona of the character is supposed to be if they’re speaking with a Philly accent. There’s a technical word linguists have for this called ‘enregisterment.’ So there’s two things: There’s not necessarily a public awareness of what a Philadelphia accent sounds like, but also, if a character has a Philadelphia accent, what are we supposed to know about them?”

[...]

Sneller discovered while conducting interviews for her doctoral dissertation on Philadelphia English[... that] if one actor goes for the Philly accent while the rest of the cast does the standard Northeastern boilerplate, it not only stands out, it might not even register as American English to those unfamiliar with the dialect.

[...] most [speakers] will say, ‘[people] usually ask if I’m from the South.’ Or they’ll pick something completely off base, like Australia.”

[...]

One of the most obvious characteristics of a Philadelphia accent, Sneller says, is the uncomfortable marriage between Northeastern sounds—including the tensed and raised tongue groove that makes the o in dog sound like awe—with Southern-influenced vowel sounds like you’d hear in goose and house. These are created farther forward in the mouth, or “fronted.” (This whole conversation calls to mind the Peanuts strip in which Linus becomes aware of his tongue.)

Then there’s the short a vowel, as in cat. Sneller singled this sound out as one of the most complex in the dialect. In some accents, that vowel gets pronounced like the middle of the word yeah. In others, it’s the æ sound. Philadelphians use both, based on phonological context, or what sounds come before and after that short a vowel. For instance, in a Philly accent, mad and sad don’t have the same vowel sound.

Since the split in the short a vowel is particular to Philadelphia, almost every non-Philadelphian is going to have a hard time keeping the sounds straight, because they’ve never had to make that distinction before. [...] There are some hard-and-fast rules, but it took Sneller four and a half minutes just to explain them to me. [...]


“Philadelphia has innovated this allophonic split, taking one category and making it two categories, where if a word ends in a it gets pronounced a little bit lower [in the mouth],” Sneller said. She illustrated this split with an anecdote about a waiter who asked her table whether anyone wanted a glass of orange juice (pronounced “oh-jay”) and who then brought over a tray of “oh-jeez.”

An exception to this rule, Sneller says, is that the days of the week take the closed syllable sound. At one point in Mare of Easttown, a character says “Thursday” and “three days since” in the same sentence, and pronounces the two “day” sounds differently. This is accurate.


[...] Tina Fey, a Delco native, has been poking fun at the Philly accent for years. The “Pawnsylvania” sketches on Kroll Show feature a pair of cousins who own pawn shops at opposite ends of the state and speak with voices that drip Cheez Whiz and onions. [...]


The crown jewel of these is a 2019 Saturday Night Live sketch featuring James McAvoy as a ribald Eagles fan who’s in a focus group for a Charmin toilet paper commercial. The Scottish actor even nails as challenging a phrase as “Bear sits down on a public toilet and the automatic flush goes off while he’s still got his ass on the seat, right?” (This is “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs,” but for the Philly accent.)'

https://www.theringe...nt-kate-winslet




Hmm, McAvoy's 'down' sounds too Southern---too relaxed or not nasal enough maybe---but not bad (for comedy).

Tina Fey may be underdoing it a bit (for comedy... though I guess the real humor starts when the guest star tries it):

Whisperzzzzzzz, on 17 April 2021 - 12:30 PM, said:

Whisperzzzzzzz, on 19 April 2021 - 03:50 AM, said:

Carey is the best writer of the group. He is a wordsmith and master of the slow boil to big finish. Despite how low key he keeps the magic through the first few CASTOR books, they utterly held my attention and when he went bigger for the last two they were riveting. It causes me rhetorical pain that we will never get CASTOR bk 6, but 1-5 read complete and are a gift. I read pretty much everything he writes, albeit not always on release.

Butcher... Butcher is big Hollywood. His DRESDEN books are fast and loaded w action and the characters are larger than life and twice as witty. A new Butcher book - Dresden or otherwise - is an automatic pre-order for me, tho i have had mixed feelings about his Dresden comics..

Jacka is somewhere in between. His series started low key but he's gradually amped it up to near Dresden level splosions and shootfestes. His 'magic system' is probably the most complicated of the three, but at times is a little too flexible for story purposes. He writes great characters, especially villains. He was not on my pre-order list until i binged 5 VERUS books in a row and now i preorder them.

Kate Griffin... i tried, she didn't hold my attention. The level of praise for her Claire North work has me thinking about another try.

Others in the same vein...

Ben Aaronovitch's PETER GRANT series is wonderful. The magic varies from low key to big, the characters are at once very ordinary and very exceptional, the 'world' and magic system are well thought out and always surprising. The action can get big but doesn't always, the pace varies from slow to breakneck, his London is fantastically written. The books are automatic pre-orders for me, the comics more or less when each new tpb comes out.

Richard Kadrey's SANDMAN SLIM gets a lot of paise. I've only read a short story or two but i've enjoyed other work by Kadrey and will try these sooner or later.

Laurell K Hamilton's ANITA BLAKE VAMPIRE EXECUTIONER series is a solid urban fantasy series that ended at book ten and they all lived happily ever aftr and she never wrote anything else about the characters lalalalalalathe othe rbooks never happened NEVER HAPPENED lalalalalalalala

China Meiville is a divisive author, but his KRAKEN is such a great piece of urban fantasy it's utterly worth reading.

Hearn's IRON DRUID series... the early books had some fun with Indigenous and Celtic and non-traditional European myths that were a lot of fun. Conversely, his vampires and werewolves were meh and his Norse gods verged on irritating. It's a good enough series if you need something new, but for me mid-list at best. (And the earbook narrator, whose other work i have enjoyed, really didn't work for me here.)


Ilona (really two people) Andrews' KATE DANIELS series is post-magic-apocalypse fantasy, not urban fantasy. It sort of works with some of the tropes, but doesn't really belong on a list with the others above. Regardless, it's a lot of fun, and while she's working on a couple of spinoffs, the original KATE DANIELS series is done and an awesome fun read.


Rebecca Roanhorse's THE SIXTH WORLD is also post-magic-apocalypse more than urban fantasy, but i'm throwing it in here for the same reason, and also because she does some really original work w traditional Indigineous myths that make for a fun and interesting read. The first book was good, i have the second standing by in the eTRP.