Pratica di Shadowing: 1976: NORTHUMBERLAND accents | Word of Mouth | Voice of the People | BBC Archive - Impara a parlare inglese con i video
Caricamento...
1
For all the viewers who don't live in the north-east of England, it is, in a sense, time for a song, because I think this is a lovely accent, which you could indeed put to music.
2
It's spoken by thousands of people, now, every day of their lives.
3
But to those not used to it, it's probably a little hard to follow at first.
4
It's the sort of accent which, although rich and resolute, does in the end make you grateful that we all also understand the Queen's English.
5
This isn't a condemnation, far from it.
6
I grew up in a neighbouring county and I loved it.
7
But for everyone south of the Tees and north of the Tweed, It is quite tough on the air.
8
So up north, Northumberland.
9
He's far away from more sheep this afternoon.
10
If he doesn't get his cell in shortly, the heat will get him down.
11
Then if I drive with the heat, you better start all in his gym, get your sheep in before the heat gets up, and then he can walk away after that.
12
Oh, yeah.
13
Oh, yeah.
14
We're not here because we want to be here, OK?
15
We've got to do something.
16
You've got to live, you know?
17
What a living.
18
It gets home at the end of season capital D.
19
Eight percent.
20
That's not...
21
You know, I don't think we wouldn't do, is it?
22
Pretty sure they wouldn't.
23
I couldn't have that.
24
You said it wasn't.
25
Oh no, like we're not.
26
We just, you know, you have to.
27
But I don't think I could have a, you know, eight to five job.
28
Yeah.
29
Such as putting car wheels on, fixing batteries up, you know.
30
From eight to five, I couldn't do that.
31
It's just not my type of work.
32
That type of work is shearing.
33
They work as a team, wandering across the Chiviotts every spring in the hope of making
34
making enough money in three months to last them apart from a few odd jobs for the rest of the year
35
their voices with those rolling hours pronounced from somewhere deep at
36
the back of the throat aren't easy to follow it's an accent that's sometimes taken for scottish
37
and sometimes for the harsher urban milt of tyneside and it's a way of life that's dominated by the sheep
38
Shall never die out the sheep.
39
We spent our time making these shepherds walking sticks.
40
This is how it starts to be with the ram's horn.
41
Then this is a post a little bit farther advanced.
42
It's a little bit further down and straightened up.
43
And it still has this bit twist on.
44
But after we get them boiled and warmed and hot, we can get them passed together.
45
These were put in the long winter nights where when I was a youngster, I was a shepherd in the upper Cougar Hill.
46
When I was brought up there and this is what we spent the long winter nights with, make carving working sticks.
47
This is the sort of stick that I like to work with, a good playing stick.
48
They're a great help when you're a shepherd on the hill to have a really good stick to work with.
49
It's a skilled job being a shepherd.
50
You can't just get a dog on a stick and say, well, I'm going to be a shepherd.
51
It just doesn't work that way.
52
It's a slither thing, it's just bright into it.
53
Your father that's here, he is a shepherd, his grandfather was a shepherd, his great grandfather on both sides were shepherds.
54
It's a way of life that may seem unchanging, but the decline of the hill farmer has brought problems for the hill shepherd.
55
I'll tell you what's wrong with other hill places.
56
There should be resident tenants.
57
If there was an tenants, they would get men under them.
58
Nationalise other hill places and let the herds have them.
59
That's what I said.
60
That's good for the country, that.
61
If you're going to nationalise them, that'll be the end of all the work.
62
There'll be no good shepherds left either.
63
It's not the young man that'll get us.
64
They want to give them a decent living to get out there.
65
their conversation still reflects their work and their pride in their skills even
66
when they're relaxing over what in Northumberland they call their bait.
67
He clips a different stale of what you think?
68
What clips the hand-brewed stale?
69
The right hand stale, the burn stale, the Guffrey burn stale.
70
He's out right hand it and the way up the back burn.
71
Martin, Martin.
72
He's about six foot nine isn't he?
73
That's a big jury sitting out with him, with the feet flat across the floor and it'll be a I've done my deceit.
74
Man bought him, he says, Furley's hellopman, give a man a seat.
75
He couldn't get banged.
76
His bloody feet hit from the window, right to the bar.
77
He says, man, burp.
78
Them two dunes, I might have thought about it.
79
Hell, what's different from there wasn't chuck and cheese?
80
Well, there was, yeah.
81
Burp was a comic in short.
82
He was a soft-haired, bad-dummed flavour.
83
He was.
84
We had a clipping gang, you know, used to go and whip that cricket.
85
He went away in the morning and came back on a Saturday night to kill the sheep.
86
And he had mutten for your breakfast, mutten for your dinner, mutten for your tea and mutten for your supper.
87
And there was three days he was nearly bleeding.
88
And there was a couple of that day when he was fishing.
89
I'll shut those gates.
90
We'll let them shut those gates.
91
We have three there.
92
I think we have five there.
93
No, no, no. Take a bear, boy.
94
So I wonder how many people, if they turned on in the middle of that piece of film, would have realised that it was in England now?
95
Oh, probably not.
96
I can remember the first time I went to Northumberland, being absolutely unable to understand the word that was said.
97
I went to one of the fishing communities on the coast, couldn't understand the word.
98
And later on I learned to love it and got to know these same people up in the hills, these shepherds.
99
And particularly I remember a piper.
100
These Northumberian pipes, they played with the bellows, you don't blow down them, played with the bellows under one arm and the bag under the other.
101
And they're really for playing inside the house.
102
One old chap said to me that they weren't like the Scottish pipes, They were nutsy squally in the hoofs, rather lovely.
103
But it really is a way of life.
104
And I think for lots and lots of people, many, many words there will be quite unintelligible.
105
All right, well, let's get cracking on that, because we have to sort of try to decipher, in a way, what was said.
106
Now, going through that film, can you just pick out, you've made a lot of notes, pick out some of the words and tell us about what they came from, what they meant and that sort of thing.
107
Yeah, but in fact there wasn't a great deal of vocabulary that was unusual.
108
It was the way of the pronunciation.
109
Again, the brr, the thing as you mentioned is deep down in the throat.
110
Now the effect of that is to pull back the vowel sounds that are related to it.
111
So when they say afternoon, instead of saying er, the rr pulls it back and they say afternoon.
112
And as soon as somebody said that rr sound, the next two or three syllables become terribly difficult to understand, and you're really thrown.
113
And words like work become walk, and then the effect of the W initially in a word when an a sound follows it.
114
In the standard language, we've undergone what we call a rounding, so quarry has resulted from what was earlier quarry.
115
They would still say quarry, and you notice one of them said whack.
116
Now whack is our modern word in standard English, walk.
117
And even the ordinary short sounds like in a word like not becomes nut, nut but a lovely sort of rounded sound, which doesn't exist, that er sound,
118
in standard English at all.
119
One of the things, though, that I noticed, maybe just with these particular men,
120
but a characteristic of most country speech is slowness of delivery and evenness of delivery.
121
But these men were speaking very quickly all the time.
122
Yeah, they were obviously eavesdropped on and were in quite a relaxed mood.
123
I think Northumbrians give you the impression of speaking quickly, because you have to listen to them so hard.
124
Those chaps who were lying back eating their sandwiches over dinner time, they weren't really talking fast.
125
They were discussing what ought to happen to the land.
126
And you notice one of them said they ought to give it to the herds.
127
The herds is the shepherds.
128
The second part of the word shepherd, the herds.
129
But they say herd.
130
How do you spell that?
131
How do you spell it? Or herd.
132
Well, you can't spell it.
133
Herd, yes.
134
It's H-E-R-D, I suppose.
135
It's the second part of shepherd, you see, the herd but say harb, and the r has that interruption.
136
And then what was it they said?
137
They went and give them a decent living to gan out there.
138
To gan out, yes.
139
Yeah, to gan out there.
140
And of course this gan is another of these examples of the preservation of an old form,
141
to gan, the old infinitive which has gone out in standard English and has given us our modern word, to go.
142
And so you've got this conservative element, much of it literally unchanged over a thousand years,
143
going back unchanged all that time.
144
We'll listen to a man now who specialises in using the Northumbrian vocabulary, back to Northumberland, and to Fred Reid.
145
Fred Reid used to be a coal miner.
146
He's retired now and in his seventies.
147
His poems are all in the dialect, using local words, skilfully and, I think, movingly.
148
The Northumbrian literary tradition that Fred Reid represents is urban, but it's not the voice of Tyneside.
149
It comes from the east coast of Northumberland around Ashington and Blythe, where, towards the end of the last century, new mining communities sprang up.
150
As a boy, Fred Reid's first job was down this Ashington pit.
151
One old chap used to put himself in the dark, and I could hear him in the pitch darkness,
152
his tremulous, teen sort of voice with a childlike intonation saying, the Lord's my shepherd, HX care of me.
153
I soon learned what was meant by the phrase,
154
quite a number of phrases used down the pit are used on the surface,
155
but they have a metaphorical, they're similes.
156
It's not the same meaning as down the pit.
157
For instance, if someone says to you, take your pipe till the reek hands out,
158
that means that you've retired after lighting a squib, and you mustn't go into the place again until the reek's cleared away.
159
Now, that's what it means down the pit.
160
But on the surface it means, well, keep your head, keep your cool.
161
Just hold on a bit, don't lose your temper temper, don't get hotted up.
162
And then such phrases as bumping the debodice kissed has a different meaning.
163
It means that you don't get your own way on the surface.
Per chi è questo video?
Questo video è perfetto per gli apprendenti di inglese a livello intermedio o avanzato che vogliono migliorare la pratica di conversazione in inglese e familiarizzare con accenti regionali. Ideale per chi si interessa di culture locali e vuole superare la "Queen's English" standard, offrendo un'opportunità unica per esercitare l'orecchio e la pronuncia tramite tecniche come lo shadowing in inglese.
Parole e modi di dire da rubare
- "get his cell in shortly": "riunire le pecore presto" (con testo specifico del contesto pastorale).
- "tough on the air": "difficile da capire all'orecchio" (riferito all'accento).
- "odd jobs": "lavori occasionali" (utile per descrivere attività non regolari).
- "rolling hours": "intonazione rotonda" (caratteristica dell'accento northumberland).
Questi espressioni, legate alla vita rurale, aggiungono concretezza alle conversazioni e mostrano come il linguaggio si adatta al contesto.
Come imitare correttamente l'accento
Per ricreare l'accento northumberland, concentrati su due aspetti: la pronuncia profonda (le vocali sono emesse dal retro della gola) e l'intonazione lenta e rotonda, simile a quella scozzese ma meno aspra. Usa lo shadow speak: ascolta una frase, pausa e ripetila immediatamente, cercando di copiare il tono e il ritmo. Un shadowing site può aiutare a sincronizzare la tua voce con quella del video. Ricorda che l'accento è legato alla vita dei pastori, quindi la pronuncia trasmette solidità e connessione alla terra: non accelera, lascia che le parole "rotolino" naturalmente. Questo esercizio non solo migliora la pronuncia, ma anche la capacità di capire accenti non standard nella pratica di conversazione in inglese.
Cos'è la tecnica dello Shadowing?
Shadowing è una tecnica di apprendimento delle lingue supportata da studi scientifici, originariamente sviluppata per la formazione dei traduttori professionisti e resa popolare dal poliglotta Dr. Alexander Arguelles. Il metodo è semplice ma potente: ascolti un audio in inglese di madrelingua e lo ripeti immediatamente ad alta voce — come un'ombra che segue il parlante con un ritardo di solo 1–2 secondi. A differenza dell'ascolto passivo o degli esercizi di grammatica, lo shadowing costringe il tuo cervello e i muscoli della bocca a elaborare e riprodurre simultaneamente i modelli di discorso reale. La ricerca dimostra che migliora significativamente la precisione della pronuncia, l'intonazione, il ritmo, il discorso connesso, la comprensione dell'ascolto e la fluidità del parlato — rendendolo uno dei metodi più efficaci per la preparazione alla prova di speaking dell'IELTS e per la comunicazione reale in inglese.