Well, a lot of the modern American accent clearly descends from what became West Country English. (And Irish.) I guess most people in the British Isles used to speak English with a rhotic R a few hundred years ago.
pretty good tool i think. you obviously have to try to sound like the accent and not just pronounce it standardly and magically get the accent. it helps with the particular sounds which are different, but there's more to an accent than that. also, if you want to sound scottish, read trainspotting out loud. or anything written in Scots- this works in a similar way really. tae reid e oot lahd soons thae seim.
Leo didn't have a great accent in Gangs but it's still one of the better Irish accents I've heard by a non-Irish actor. Funny how the got the Irish guy (Day Lewis) to play an American and the American guy (DiCaprio) to play the Irish kid.
@talibanfacebang Comes out more South African or Brummie. Very difficult to do Scottish using this technique because one of the keys to the Scots accent is learning to do the soft roll on the "R", i.e. saying "really" with a Scots accent requires putting the tongue forward on the roof of the mouth almost as though you're going to start with a T or D, but not taking the contact all the way.
ehm..... obviously DiCaprio is suppose to have an accent that is being lost as he gets older. the boy has a strong irish accent at the beginning of the film then when he gets out of his borstal school the American accent is creeping in. i thought it was excellent.
I imagine the phonetic thing is only a small part of it, a lot more important is the way sounds are formed, which is why just reading a phonetic sentence won't work. really rather pointless.
The thing they lack when trying to read the phonetic sentences is the context and intonation of how to speak it. For example the if they took into account intonation of Brad Pitt's Tennessee accent in inglorious basterds it rolls off the tongue in a more natural fashion. In my opinion Brad Pitt's does a fine job in assuming accents in many movies especially his irish gypsy accent in snatch. It's a tough feat to do even the simplest accents with a degree of sincerity so kudo's to him
The problem with phonetic spelling of this kind is that it's gonna be influence by the accent you have yourself. For example, 'beer can' sounding like 'bacon' in a Jamaican accent only works if you have a southern English accent which doesn't pronounce certain 'r' sounds. It doesn't work for someone like me because I have a Northern Irish accent and therefore pronounce the 'r' in 'beer can'.
Quite interesting that so few know the film well enough to know that DiCaprio worked so that his accent is a mix of the Irish accent his character is supposed to have because of his father, and a NY accent of that time, because of the 16 years he then spent in the asylum. I'm not an English native speaker, but, finding his accent in the film pretty strange and unfamiliar, I guess it means the job wasn't bad, right?
Is Day Lewis really Irish or is it one of those claiming him for the irish situations like Barack Obama or Wayne Rooney? I don't know myself haven't looked it up but I thought he was English.
I agree. I'm Irish and his accents seems fine with me considering its from a character who's been living in New York. He always does good accents and is always being put down by idiots who have never visited the countries the accent originates from.
One of the things brits do all the time is to delete, downgrade or distort anything irish people do or others do that is irish related. One of the things they always do is try to diss anyone that attempts an Irish accent by using derogatory extressions like 'oirish'.
