Why can't we get our th sounds right.

Curly Judge

Am I the only person in this country who is driven mad by poor pronunciation and diction.
The amount of dis, dat, dese and doze one hears one the airways is getting worse.
Am I missing something or are people who know better just using it in a perverse attempt to sound more "Irish".
Are we breeding a new genus of tirty tree and a turd republicans?
How is it possible to come through a three or four year journalism degree and still sound like the half - wit son of an illiterate bogman?
I know some people regard English as a foreign language but come on, if we are going to speak it at all we should learn to to speak it properly and stop making fools of ourselves at home and abroad.

aujopimur

I tink it's called dialect or sumtin like dat

Irish_wolf

Because we dont speak english, we speak Hiberno-English. It's a Dialect as the previous poster said, and it's no more right to say tirty tree as it is to say thirty three or firty free.

Dont know why you care really, you know what they mean. Pronunciation changes all the time anyway. 100 years or so ago they'd probably laugh at the way we say things now.

Curly Judge

I just find it inelegant and uncultured.
Don't know why, as I didn't have what you might describe as an Oxbridge upbringing, having been born and reared in the Irish Midlands.

franc 91

I wouldn't want to stir up any arguments about it, but I'm sure you'll agree that Irish has an important influence on the way English is spoken in Ireland - and of course the English 'th' sound doesn't exist not only in Irish but not in other European languages either, apart from Greek.

Scortho

Curly Judge wrote: »

Am I the only person in this country who is driven mad by poor pronunciation and diction.
The amount of dis, dat, dese and doze one hears one the airways is getting worse.
Am I missing something or are people who know better just using it in a perverse attempt to sound more "Irish".
Are we breeding a new genus of tirty tree and a turd republicans?
How is it possible to come through a three or four year journalism degree and still sound like the half - wit son of an illiterate bogman?
I know some people regard English as a foreign language but come on, if we are going to speak it at all we should learn to to speak it properly and stop making fools of ourselves at home and abroad.

You sound like my ex!

Anyway as others have posted, it's due to our dialect.

few

franc 91 wrote: »

I wouldn't want to stir up any arguments about it, but I'm sure you'll agree that Irish has an important influence on the way English is spoken in Ireland - and of course the English 'th' sound doesn't exist not only in Irish but not in other European languages either, apart from Greek.

How about Spanish of Spain?

1:15

Tefral

Im living over in london at the moment and the women love our D's instead of our th's.

Embrace it, it might get you laid.

All joking aside though, I know a guy who makes an effort to use the th "correctly" and it sounds like talking is a massive effort for him. Im a "turty tree" person. I would say like the posters above, its just a dialect. In England alot of them sound different like Northerners and Londoners

franc 91

Yes of course you're right - you do get the 'th' sound in Spanish, though I believe it does depend on which dialect of Spanish is spoken.

Yakuza

franc 91 wrote: »

Yes of course you're right - you do get the 'th' sound in Spanish, though I believe it does depend on which dialect of Spanish is spoken.

(I didn't watch the above video, cant see YT in work)

In standard (Castillian) Spanish, c followed by a slender vowel (i or e) or z followed by a vowel has the "th" sound -
Cerveza (beer) = "ther vay tha" or zumo (juice) = "thu mo"
whereas coche (car) = "ko chay".

Down south (andalusia) the C is pronounced like it is in English so you'd have "ser vay sa" for beer etc. Most of the explorers that went to South America were from there so that accent is used in that neck of the woods.

Getting back to ourselves, I would describe myself as a Hiberno-English speaker (in terms of construction of phrases, syntax and grammar) but I used standard pronunciation (as would my family and friends). Personally, I find "turty tree and a turd" grating (try listening to Minister Kathleen Lynch in full flight) but I accept its how some people speak and is no less correct than "my" way of speaking.

Curly Judge

Yakuza wrote: »

(I didn't watch the above video, cant see YT in work)

In standard (Castillian) Spanish, c followed by a slender vowel (i or e) or z followed by a vowel has the "th" sound -
Cerveza (beer) = "ther vay tha" or zumo (juice) = "thu mo"
whereas coche (car) = "ko chay".

Down south (andalusia) the C is pronounced like it is in English so you'd have "ser vay sa" for beer etc. Most of the explorers that went to South America were from there so that accent is used in that neck of the woods.

Getting back to ourselves, I would describe myself as a Hiberno-English speaker (in terms of construction of phrases, syntax and grammar) but I used standard pronunciation (as would my family and friends). Personally, I find "turty tree and a turd" grating (try listening to Minister Kathleen Lynch in full flight) but I accept its how some people speak and is no less correct than "my" way of speaking.

I'll bow to your expertise on the Spanish question - about which I know very little.
As regards the highlighted part of your post I must respectfully disagree.
In most things in life there are standards and when these standards are ignored a person is entitled to ask if it really matters.
I think it does!
Otherwise why would we bother with grammar or elocution at all?
I have no wish whatsoever to interfere with peoples accents.
One of my favourite radio voices in earlier years was the great Bryan MacMahon.
I could listen to him reading out of the telephone directory and still be entertained.
On a good day he was equal to Richard Burton reading from "Under Milk Wood".
The difference between the two was purely accent.and that difference was made up mostly by inflection .
Pronunciation- to my mind - is an entirely different matter.
The dis, dat, deeze and doze brigade [henceforth to be known as the D squares] may be all right talking in a pub where they can do little harm but they should not be let loose on any form of international forum.
I do hope there are none in the IDA?

N17er

Curly Judge wrote: »

half - wit son of an illiterate bogman?
QUOTE]

You'd prefer to sound like a west brit descendant of the landed gentry?

Curly Judge

N17er wrote: »

Curly Judge wrote: »

half - wit son of an illiterate bogman?
QUOTE]

You'd prefer to sound like a west brit descendant of the landed gentry?

From which of the two sections listed above do you hail ?

Yakuza

N17er wrote: »

You'd prefer to sound like a west brit descendant of the landed gentry?

Curly Judge wrote: »

half - wit son of an illiterate bogman?

It would appear both of you have opposing sets of baggage. I speak like neither of the above two stereotypes.

I should probably refine my post to say "but I grudgingly accept its how some people speak and is no less correct than "my" way of speaking."

Accents / dialects / creoles are pretty much a feature of most languages that I have any experience with. "Dis and Dat" isn't confined to Ireland - you'll hear it in American cities as well, and in Laandaahn you'll hear "vis and vat".

It's not something I can change on a global scale, so I don't spend my time worrying about it - all I can do is speak the way I do and watch my kids speaking the same way

100% agree on Richard Burton's voice - what a timbre that man had! I remember hearing the prologue to the War of the Worlds as a child and thought "Wow, what a voice"

odds_on

I think it might be something to do with the age of the listener. I also find myself thinking that the pronunciation in Ireland is getting worse, especially programme hosts on the radio. I put it down to getting older and being less tolerant.

And having just returned to Ireland after nearly 15 years teaching English abroad, I seem to have forgotten how the Irish pronounce many words. It's just another part of not hearing any English spoken by native speakers.

who the fug

What ever, english is a broad church and Dis and turty are just as acceptable as what Geordies Jocks Cockneys, criminals(Aussies) and Boers speak.

tac foley

My late father was from Cork, and spoke all his life with an accent that you could use to sole your boots. He was one of the disparaged 'D-Squares' so patronisingly mentioned above. He also said the 'aZoo' and 'fillums' and 'fudgies' for knick-knacks, and my wife, at that time my fiancée, couldn't understand a word he uttered - she is Welsh, BTW, but has vitually no accent from that side of the border.

I grew up as near accentless as is possible to be, in a house where four or five languages were spoken on a daily basis, so I love to hear an Irish voice, in whatever accent it comes in. Living outside Ireland [apart from holidays] as I have done all my life, the arrival of my last Sergeant Chief Clerk, who came from Ballsbridge, was something that made my last two years of service a lot more fun than it had been up to then, as he taught me 'his' Irish.

So those of you who say 'dese', 'dat' and 'dose', please carry on. Do you say 'fillums'? That's great by me. Do you say 'dat yoke'? Great.

Don't let snobbishness and a mistaken sense of identity take it away from you - as the man said, it's NOT English that you're speaking , it's Hiberno-English. Snobs need to listen to Mr O'Briain ruling the TV panel games over here, and scoff at HIM and his version of English.

tac

odds_on

When I was a little lad, my mother was always correcting me for saying "fillums".

Curly Judge

tac foley wrote: »

My late father was from Cork, and spoke all his life with an accent that you could use to sole your boots. He was one of the disparaged 'D-Squares' so patronisingly mentioned above. He also said the 'aZoo' and 'fillums' and 'fudgies' for knick-knacks, and my wife, at that time my fiancée, couldn't understand a word he uttered - she is Welsh, BTW, but has vitually no accent from that side of the border.

I grew up as near accentless as is possible to be, in a house where four or five languages were spoken on a daily basis, so I love to hear an Irish voice, in whatever accent it comes in. Living outside Ireland [apart from holidays] as I have done all my life, the arrival of my last Sergeant Chief Clerk, who came from Ballsbridge, was something that made my last two years of service a lot more fun than it had been up to then, as he taught me 'his' Irish.

So those of you who say 'dese', 'dat' and 'dose', please carry on. Do you say 'fillums'? That's great by me. Do you say 'dat yoke'? Great.

Don't let snobbishness and a mistaken sense of identity take it away from you - as the man said, it's NOT English that you're speaking , it's Hiberno-English. Snobs need to listen to Mr O'Briain ruling the TV panel games over here, and scoff at HIM and his version of English.

tac

Sorry to have upset you so much!
In the late 1960's I worked in London for a predominantly English staffed outfit.
One of my colleagues was from Stamullen in Co. Meath and was a very in your face type republican.
His English fellow workers didn't know what to make of him and I thought his attitude was somewhat inappropriate seeing as he was making a good living among them.
What saved him was that he was very good at his job and a diligent time keeper.
One night at a works party he struck up "Boolavogue" in a wonderful bell like voice and brought the house down. The Brits like a good song, well sung, as much as anyone even if it is having a go at them.
If he had stopped there he would have been a hero but he then started into the Bobby Darren hit, "Things".

"Every night I sit here by my window.
Staring at my lonely avenue.
Watching lovers holding hands and laughing".

So far so good, and we were all bopping back and forth and trying not to spill our beer.
Next minute it all started to go downhill:

And tinking about the tings we used to do.

Chorus

Tink about tings like a walk in the park.
Tings... like a kiss in the dark.
Tings... like a lovers vow.
Tings... that we don't do now
I'm tinking about the tings we used to do.


The gufaws could be heard all the way to Charing Cross.

If you work abroad in an English speaking country, [and many of us are forced to do so nowadays] my advice would be to learn to pronounce your th's properly if you want to be taken seriously.

P. Breathnach

In Lunnun, inni'?

Should have been Fink abaht fings...

tac foley

Curly Judge wrote: »

Sorry to have upset you so much!.......If you work abroad in an English speaking country, [and many of us are forced to do so nowadays] my advice would be to learn to pronounce your th's properly if you want to be taken seriously.

1. I'm not upset, just saddened that an Irishman gets castigated for speaking English with his native Irish accent. I would give years of my life to hear my dad speaking with his mighty Cork accent. But he died in 1971.

2. I think you'll find that Ireland is an English-speaking country, disregarding for a moment the very small part of the population that actually speak Irish either as their first language or as part of their employment. I'd be willing to bet my next month's pension that very few of the 'new Irish' from Poland, Latvia or Botswana actually speak a work of Irish. Moreoever, for the most part, THEY have accents, too.

3. Having an inferiority complex about your manner of speaking in your own country is one thing, but it's a mite degrading to read that an Irishman is encouraging other Irishmen to try and sound English, when 50% of the population of the UK also have regional accents that are broadly incomprehensible from one end to the other.

5. Imagine listening to the Dubliners singing in 'cut-glass received English' - a ridiculous notion. We love them BECAUSE they had those accents that you seem to intent on improving!:D

tac

tac foley

who the fug wrote: »

What ever, english is a broad church and Dis and turty are just as acceptable as what Geordies Jocks Cockneys, criminals(Aussies) and Boers speak.

Ahem, just like to point out that Geordies and Jocks are ostensibly either English [Geordies]or British [Jocks], and their accents are part of their lives.

Boers were not, and are not now, either British or English, but mostly of Dutch or Huguenot ancestry - English is not their first language, or for many of them, a language that they use in their everyday lives.

tac

slowburner

I worked for an awfully, awfully firm in London many years ago, and when I started there I thought I was pronouncing my "th's", very well.
But despite my best efforts I was continuously ribbed about it.
Thinking about it, it's more than likely a product of the fact that there are so many subtle inflections of the way "t" is pronounced in Irish.
If "Tá siad ag teacht", for example, is pronounced with the t's and d as is correct in English - it just sounds ridiculous.

Anyway, that's what I told my colleagues...but I wanted to know in return why they cannot pronounce "r" at the end of a word.
Listen carefully to one of the many ads for "heh ceh products, which nourish and shine".

Which reminds me of the English lisp (bwush, Wupert, Jonathan Woss etc.) - I don't think I've ever heard an Irish person with such a lisp.

franc 91

I remember sometime ago a discussion on another forum which caters for people like me - among others - who aren't Irish and are faced with the daunting task of trying pronounce Irish correctly. The 't' in ort for example or the 'r' at the end of ceathair. Here in France the t and d tend to be pronounced softly, shall we say, so that does help, I suppose. I said that having to explain to English speakers how to pronounce a soft t in French, that it is a 't' that's ashamed of itself and is trying to become a 'd' - so I'm assuming that it would be similar in Irish. I was asked in the first pub/petrol station when we got off the boat at Rosslare many years ago, from what part of Ireland I was from as he couldn't place my brogue. I was suitably flattered of course, but I had to tell him that I wasn't at all Irish. When I lived in England, a soft Irish accent was considered pleasant to hear.

two wheels good

Irish_wolf wrote: »

Because we dont speak english, we speak Hiberno-English. It's a Dialect as the previous poster said, and it's no more right to say tirty tree as it is to say thirty three or firty free.

Dont know why you care really, you know what they mean. Pronunciation changes all the time anyway. 100 years or so ago they'd probably laugh at the way we say things now.

That sounds like a complacent cop-out. We can still keep this treasured (by some posters here) dialect and still use "received pronunciation". The dialect is also composed the idioms and accent.

Proper/received pronunciation aids understanding and communication. Listening to "dis , dat dese and dose" is distracting from the message conveyed and it sounds sloppy and careless.

Good diction\pronounciation has nothing to do with being more Oxbridge or west brit or landed gentry. Listen to any of the RTE Radio 1 well-spoken presenters - and there are quite few. Do they sound somehow less Irish because they know how to handle a 'th'?

pickarooney

two wheels good wrote: »

That sounds like a complacent cop-out. We can still keep this treasured (by some posters here) dialect and still use "received pronunciation". The dialect is also composed the idioms and accent.

No you can't. Received pronunciation is by definition an English accent. It would sound ludicrous to use Hiberno-English idioms with a BBC accent.

two wheels good

pickarooney wrote: »

No you can't. Received pronunciation is by definition an English accent. It would sound ludicrous to use Hiberno-English idioms with a BBC accent.

Maybe ludicrous , certainly comedic potential.
"Received pronunciation": Definition - the accent of standard Southern British English.
Apologies for my misunderstanding of the term.

However my point stands: pronouncing a 'th' correctly does not preclude speaking in an Irish regional accent. For example Pat Kenny, speaking on the radio at the moment. Nothing ludicrous about his use of idioms.

Now I'm trying to think of a rural speaker saying something that would sounds ludicrous just because it pronounces 'th'... Feel free to suggest something.

two wheels good

tac foley wrote: »

So those of you who say 'dese', 'dat' and 'dose', please carry on. Do you say 'fillums'? That's great by me. Do you say 'dat yoke'? Great.

Don't let snobbishness and a mistaken sense of identity take it away from you - as the man said, it's NOT English that you're speaking , it's Hiberno-English. Snobs need to listen to Mr O'Briain ruling the TV panel games over here, and scoff at HIM and his version of English.
tac

Please don't carry on - especially if you are in public life, a journalist, a broadcaster, a politician, any regular public speaker. If so, it is in your interests - and mine if I have to listen to you - to make an effort to learn some proper diction and pronunciation.

Dara O'Briain - a suitable example. Irish accent and idioms, sometimes uses "th", sometimes "d". If he was to use "th" always he wouldn't suffer any perceived identity change by his audience or accusations of snobbishness. Would he?

odds_on

pickarooney wrote: »

No you can't. Received pronunciation is by definition an English accent. It would sound ludicrous to use Hiberno-English idioms with a BBC accent.

A slightly lower form of the “posh accent” has been named “Received Standard English”. Eton or Harrow College students whose accents are from their locality acquire this “new accent”. It also applies to students who attend Oxford and Cambridge Universities.

Seanchai

Curly Judge wrote: »

Am I the only person in this country who is driven mad by poor pronunciation and diction.
The amount of dis, dat, dese and doze one hears one the airways is getting worse.
Am I missing something or are people who know better just using it in a perverse attempt to sound more "Irish".
Are we breeding a new genus of tirty tree and a turd republicans?
How is it possible to come through a three or four year journalism degree and still sound like the half - wit son of an illiterate bogman?
I know some people regard English as a foreign language but come on, if we are going to speak it at all we should learn to to speak it properly and stop making fools of ourselves at home and abroad.

Tut, tut. Amount v. number

Bannasidhe

pickarooney wrote: »

No you can't. Received pronunciation is by definition an English accent. It would sound ludicrous to use Hiberno-English idioms with a BBC accent.

Why not?

I actually did it on a BBC TV programme.

It was myself and a Scot speaking. I have a Cork 'lilt' but still can say 'th', 'modern', 'film', 'Italy, etc with no problem - he has a Scots (Ayr/Dumfries to be precise) accent but can do likewise. My 'turn of phrase' is Irish, my accent is - for want of a better term - middle class Cork, my Pronunciation is 'standard' English with a hint of Irish vowel lengthening.