English vs. Irish, Internet Phone, Radio Show

Oct 1, 2007 by Justin Wayne

01/10/07
jwa

I’ve got some business to post in this blog as well as my observations on the English vs. the Irish. It’s fun to be a causal observer of the cultural differences between these similar but decidedly different ethnic backgrounds. Later, I’ll discuss how I’ve found the best way is to call the states, and if you want in for free, or to make it cheaper for us to call each other, you’ll have to sign up too, but it’s free. And finally, my radio show starts today, but I’ll also post the show right here, on the blog (if I can figure out how…)

Alright, so when we first moved here we noticed, as you may notice as well, the native English speak with a distinct “dropping of their Rs”. No, we’re not in Boston or New York, but as one would listen, especially to my Londoner roommate, she will not say Rs nearly at all.

“Motobike” (motorbike)
“Afte’ tha’ ” (after that)

Now, they do pronounce R’s and make that sound in regular speech, but only to separate words which end and start with a vowel sound. Brian Kassar always liked this, as he used to demonstrate with our friend Julia’s name.

“Julia-r-austil”

…I can’t think of any other good examples off the top of my head.

Where do the Irish come in? Those from Northern Ireland, the independent section of Ireland really lay on their Rs. It’s really cool, because after not being able to understand some of these English with their dropped Rs (like they don’t exist!) we met an Irish girl in Jamie’s class and it was almost better than talking to an American. Her speech sounded so clear and crisp, I want to find more of them and have them record things for me to listen to, like:

“The rolling hills of Redding are ready for red riders.”

That’d be sweet.

I think that it was just a way to separate themselves back in the day (and not so back in the day, much of that conflict is in recent memory.) Let me tell you, it’s easy to tell one from the other. Think about how much you say the letter R. In fact, if you want, use the “find” command in your browser and find all the Rs in this document. It’s ALOT! Finding an English in Northern Ireland would be like finding a white guy at the Apollo. Well, maybe not that easy.

Internet Phone…

Skype, you may have heard is an easy way to make phone calls over the computer, and it’s free if you call from Skype to Skype. Which is to say, it’s free if you call someone else, computer to computer, with this program. Also, computer to phone calls are very cheap, about one or two cents a minute, I recall, from the UK to the US.

All you need is to go to www.skype.com, download for free and sign up. Once you’ve got your username and password (still free) you can, on the website, add money to your account in order to call computer to phone. If you want to call me for free, my name is “jwarndt1983”. Put me on your friends list and email me your name. We’ll have to schedule a time, 6 hours difference (ahead of you) in Central Standard Time and 7 hours ahead of Mountain Standard Time.

As for my radio show,

At 11:30pm GMT until 12am, one-half-hour… Monday through Thursday this week is my online radio show. It’s on a internet radio station called OffTheChartRadio and you can find the website at www.offthechartradio.co.uk. 11:30pm GMT is 5:30pm Central and 4:30pm Mountain.

I’m going to try and post the shows on here too… lemme see if I can do that now…

…so that took ten minutes and didn’t work. I’ve gotta shower and go to Jamie’s induction ceremony. I’ll try to post the show tomorrow. I think I can export the audio differently.

Alright, love you all, and thanks again for all your support. It’s always appreciated.

Cheers,

Justin