Austria One - Text
This Caucasian male was born in 1940 in Berlin and raised in Vienna, Austria. His mother was a nurse; his father an optician. His lower grade schooling was at an elite school in Vienna. Over the years he has deliberately minimized the accent that was attached to that school.
He graduated as a medical doctor and currently teaches and does research at Innsbruck, Austria in the Tirol.
Places he has lived for more than a year other than where he was raised include Innsbruck and P.Q. Canada for three years. He says that his accent is essentially Viennese, but educated people in Innsbruck thinks he is from Salzburg, so he believes he has picked up a bit of the Tirol accent in Innsbruck.
Unfortunately, I erased the beginning of his reading which included the "Comma" passage, although I do have some notes from that passage. The story he tells is about how he embarked on an adventure alone at age sixteen to immerse himself in the land of classical antiquity, Greece.
Many of the most significant pronunciation changes occur in consonants. The "s" sound is usually transposed into a "z" sound, as in "use', "years", "price" and "also". The voiceless consonant in "mouth" and "thought" is sounded as an "s". The voiced consonant in "with" is a "z" and the same consonant in "leather", "them" or "this" becomes a "d". He makes no such substitutions in the words "Athens" and "marathon".
The "d" in words like "hired", "stayed", "did" and "food" is replaced by a "t". The "v" in "give" and "lived" is replaced wiith an "f".
The consonant sound in "judge" is replaced by the sound in "church". This is heard in his pronunciation of "German" and "George".
Note the intrusive "g" that follows the "ing" sound in "evening".
We hear the uvular "r" in "real" and "Troy".
The vowel in "sat" and "can't" "had", "blanket" and "bag" is replaced by a higher front vowel.
The vowel in "passed" and "Mary" is the "a" of the "ask list".
Sample recorded by Pat Toole, August 2000 and edited by Paul Meier March, 2001. Running time: 00:05:04
Transcription of Unscripted Speech
I had had uh, two years of ancient Greek in school. I had the idea to use my holidays...to travel to Greece...and see...and look for myself the things that I had been taught. In preparation for the trip, I hired...quotation marks "a Greek student" to help me with the pronunciation of modern Greek, and to my big surprise... this was not all that difficult. So after having prepared for three months, I hitchhiked down the coast of Italy, took the boat over to Greece, stayed in Athens...and has the great idea...to...to the marathon, but backwards, by hiking from Athens to marathon...because the mountain, on this. Uh, during enterprise, I had a problem, I lost, somewhere I lost my way and ended up at the coast at the place where Iphigenia--Iphigenia had uh...had been sacrificed when the Greeks whet to Troy. At this place, there's a chapel there now-a-days, dedicated to St. George, and the Methephelo (unclear) who was tending to the fields there. I stayed with him overnight, and then he had to go to town, for 1 or 2 days, to collect some thing. In the evening of this day, I realized that there was low on food, I had a can of sardines but I had no more bread, as the evening--as dawn--er, er--as the night--as the eve--as the day vanished, I realized I had to do something because I was hungry. And finally there was a group of shepherds coming with the flock...and, they passed me by and after some hesitation I asked them for some bread. And they were very sorry, they had no bread with them, but invited me to go along with them to the hut. So, that's what I did. And I trotted...beside them, and talked to them and the sheep were all around, and it went up and down little hills, and descending into little valleys, and they were filled with the fragrance of the...southern..herbs, like rosemary and other citrus, and I was tired so the trot altogether had a very, dreamy effect on me, and the balmy air and these depressions and was like (?) the sheep trotting to the ground, and the dust getting into the air, and the last rays of the sun, and this dust it was like, out of this world. Then we ended up at the hut which was a stone hut, a very primitive stone hut, they were very sorry that they were not able to feed me right away because they had to take care of the sheep, to milk the sheep, to push the meat into a sort of coil the meat up (?) thorny wheat pulled together like a fence, and I sat at the corner of the house and felt the warmth of the stove, felt the reflection of the sun, and sort of fell asleep, being tired and hungry. Then they got me to the house, they had an oil light, they had wooden--wooden bowls, and gave me some cheese and some milk and some bread. They were very sorry that they couldn't go for me meat, they felt it was a--sort of the--as if they would owe me anything, and then I want--I was very grateful and situated and felt well enough to go home to my sleeping bag, but they didn't want to let me go because some of the systems in the area didn't have a cover, and they were very afraid that I could slip and fall into one of the systems and hurt myself. They made my stay. And they gave me a bed, and the bed was...made up of wooden frames with uh, with leather..leather straps uh, woven into, instead of uh--yeah, woven into a, into a net, and on that there were uh *clears throat* furs..fur, goatskin, and then it was covered a rough-rough I don't know goatskin blanked or something...and fell asl--fell asleep--I fell asleep, it was very soft.
Unscripted Speech Transcribed by Faith Harvey 15 March 2008