Can’t hear the difference: 03 (American accent vs Canadian accent)

This is another one where lack of exposure also causes problems.  Luckily, they don’t mind when I identify them wrongly.

    A Canadian hitchhiker in Scotland to whom I gave a lift to Glencoe back in 1984 didn’t have long enough time to go into the details, so he told me that the rule of thumb is that the American accent is more nasal.

    Someone else told me there’re some vowel sounds that give them away.  “Mac” rings a vague bell.

    Googling has produced this:

Quote

Vowel Sounds:  Canadians tend to have a slightly different set of vowel sounds compared to Americans, particularly in the “a” sound.

Unquote

(from googling) Canadian and American English are closely related, with Canadian English often described as a variant of General American English. The most notable difference is Canadian Raising, where Canadians raise the vowel sound before voiceless consonants in words like "house" and "bike," resulting in a higher pitch. Americans tend to pronounce these sounds with a lower pitch.

Losing track of time: 02 (London)

I was given a small Mac in the summer of 1987(?) to work on at home when I was tasked with compiling a list of the traditional character equivalents for the simplified character database that we had on our Unix system in my office at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), where I was working on two Chinese computer research projects:  Speech Recognition and Speech Synthesis, and CALL / Computer Aided Language Learning).

    My desk was in a corner of the living room at a north-facing window.

    I had surrounded myself with five different dictionaries to cross reference.

    I’d get home from SOAS around 10pm.  (I always left at SOAS closing time, 9pm, one of the last to leave the building.)

    I’d walk straight into my living room and switch on the Mac first, as it took time (this was 1987) to boot up, then go and remove my shoes.  That was how keen I was to get going.

    During one long stretch, I’d only get up out of my chair in the corner of the living room to go to the kitchen for coffee or to the loo, then back again.

    At one point, I looked up out of the window.  The sky was a shade that I couldn’t tell was dawn (4am in summer before it got light) or dusk (9:30pm before it got dark), that was how sucked in I was by the database conversion work.

    I had no idea at all which day it was, and how long I’d been working at it.

    In the end, I found out that I’d been sitting there, working at it for 19 hours non-stop.

    So, I can understand how these artistic people could be so lost in their own creative world all the time.

(London, 1987)

Worrying about what people think (Taipei)

 

I arrived in Taipei on Sunday 27 December 1974 for my new job with Conoco Taiwan.

    I didn’t have any winter gear, so I bought some sweaters and a Mackintosh (waterproof coat) in Hong Kong where I’d spent two half days en route as a tourist.

    Being from the tropics, I felt self-conscious about wearing a winter coat if it wasn’t cold enough — that people could tell from miles away that I was from a hot country.  

    So, each morning, I’d look out of my bedroom window to check the weather — which is all we need to do in Singapore:  Is it raining or not?  

    It happened to be sunny every time, so I’d leave for work without my Mac.  By the time I finished work, however, it’d be dark, cold and raining.  (Taipei is wet and rainy most of the time throughout the winter.)  I had to grab a cab home every day.  Luckily, I was earning a lot of money (working for an American company — and oil company at that, too) and the cost of living in Taiwan at the time was low for my salary.

    After a few more times of this, I learned not to be silly about appearances.  After all, I could always just carry my Mac over my arm if it was not cold enough for me to wear it.  

    Now, five decades later and in London where people don’t really care (or don’t stare even if they do notice), I’m even saying to my old friend Valerio, “So what?  Why does one have to wear matching socks?” when he reports that his socks seem to go AWOL after a while and he ends up with single socks that he doesn’t know what to do with.  

    Yes, age does that to one:  one doesn’t worry that much anymore about what people think.

(Taipei, 1974)