Grammar, Language & Socioeconomic Class by Ian Lang

Here's a recent answer by Ian Lang at Quora. Mr Lang has kindly given me blanket permission to use any of his answers I wish to use, on my blog.

The ticklish question was:

How much does grammar and proper language impact a person’s social and professional image? Is this a mark of socioeconomic class?

Answer by "Ian Lang, Former Oik (still quite oiky from time to time)"

Putting forward the same(ish) answer four ways then:

Ay-up, me duck, not half. You get them snobby gets what won’t even look at owt we’ve wrote down up here in t’ north cos it i’nt wrote like what they speak down in t’ leafy bits of Surrey.

It does, yes, some people look at a piece of prose and if they spot a gramatical error then they dismiss it. Typos are allowed as long as it’s clear it’s a typo (look at the word grammatical previously again).

All communications should be worded and punctuated correctly in order to portray a clear and professional image of the organisation. Please comply with the attached guidelines and templates.

Within the precepts of certain types of individuals who, having had made accesible to them the zeniths, apogees, and pinnacles of the academic world, and who pride themselves on the fact, knowing exactly where to put apostrophes, semi-colons, and all the other apparatus of substantive prose, and understanding the rules of adjectives, adverbs and the sundry paraphernalia of the craft of the wordsmith, will look down upon those who have not had such extensive groundings and will instantly rebut even the most reasoned piece if the i is not correctly dotted in the approved manner.

The first is my northern mode. I do this when I want to put forward a sarcastic rebuttal to anybody who thinks we here are a bunch of illiterate oiks.

The second is my plain English mode. I do this to explain things that may be quite complicated in terms that are clear to somebody who doesn’t know it terribly well.

The third is my corporate drone mode. I almost never do this because frankly it creates prose that grinds my gears. If you’ve ever read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four you’ll remember Newspeak. They pride themselves that the vocabulary is shrinking every year. I feel the same about corporate drone prose as Winston did about Newspeak.

The fourth is my over-educated-arse mode. I do this when somebody’s grinding my corn and trying to prove that they’re clever-clever and vocabularious. Don’t start with me sunshine, because if you do, I’m going sesquipedalian on your arse. If you carry on, I might even go dodecasyllabic, and then you’ll be sorry.

Everything thereafter (including this bit) is my normal mode. You’ll notice that I use a lot of contractions (you’ll, I’m, don’t) and inject a dollop of patois every now and then, and then slip into a bit of bathos. This is because I can’t bear any prose where the author has clearly taken pains to make his/her grammar, structure, and syntax as clever-looking as possible. It just comes out stilted and reads like the report of a village parish council meeting. Going the other way you get stream of consciousness writing, which is just a posh way to say “bloody mess”.

Now then. Imagine the above were all written by different people. What would you conclude about their standards of education, social class, and means of earning a living?

Oh yes. Grammar, spelling and punctuation can tell you much. But not when it’s in the hands of a wordsmith (which is the written equivalent of a gobshite), it can’t.

Americanisms - Frustrating but Unexciting

There was an interesting piece on the BBC website the other day:

How Americanisms are Killing the English Language

A book released this year claims that Americanisms will have completely absorbed the English language by 2120. Hephzibah Anderson takes a look.

The piece begins:

So it turns out I can no longer speak English. This was the alarming realisation foisted upon me by Matthew Engel’s witty, cantankerous yet nonetheless persuasive polemic That’s the Way it Crumbles: The American Conquest of English. Because by English, I mean British English.

Despite having been born, raised and educated on British shores, it seems my mother tongue has been irreparably corrupted by the linguistic equivalent of the grey squirrel. And I’m not alone. Whether you’re a lover or a loather of phrases like “Can I get a decaf soy latte to go?”, chances are your vocabulary has been similarly colonised.

As a British ex-pat myself, living in the USA since 2004, I've been through the scratchy phases of having to accept, without question, what has been done to The Queen's English over here. I refuse to change my written English, continue to use 's' rather than 'z' in certain words, and insert the 'u' in colour, flavour etc. I will never, ever, while there's breath in my body utter "gotten"; and yet, and yet, as is told later in the linked piece, "When Dr Johnson compiled his seminal 1755 dictionary, ‘gotten’ was still in use as a past participle of ‘get’. But as Engel points out, good old English is not good new English."

I was mildly amused to note that Ms Anderson had slipped into what I see as an Americanism herself, and possibly without realising it. Here:

I was excited to find out how it would read after it had been ‘Americanized’, but I’ve noticed it’s fast becoming the norm for American works to make it into print over here without so much as having a ‘z’ switched for an ‘s’ or a ‘u’ tacked on to an ‘o’.

Americans use "excited to" in this way, I notice it a lot, and I do believe that a British English speaker would not be likely to use "excited" in that context - unless, of course, what they were looking forward to was something actually capable of bringing forth excitement: the flushed cheeks, the sweaty palms, the speeded-up heartbeat. What people mean in the American use, translated, is really just: "I'm looking forward to..." As in so many instances, in this star spangled, oft thought to be exceptional, nation, hyperbole rules.

Let us all, though, whether American or British, devoutly hope that the current American President's Americanisms will never find their way into widely accepted English: "bigly" is a case in point, or that fumble-fingered f-up: "covfefe".

Communication & Arrival

“Language is the dress of thought” wrote Samuel Johnson in 18th century England. Languages, national, international, ancient, modern, written, spoken, technical, speciality, and even slang, how they evolved, how they are written, how so much diversity exists - all of this presents a constant source of wonder. Accents, side-kicks of language, add an extra layer of fascination.

In astrology, these matters are ruled by planet Mercury, planet of communication. Astrology has its own language, with a vocabulary capable of confusing "outsiders", as well as the occasional "insider". The computer, internet and social networks have their own special vocabularies too.

More important than language itself, or accents, is nuance of understanding or misunderstanding arising between people, even when using the same language in the same accent.

Here's where astrology, as well as life-experience, can play a part, with particular emphasis on Mercury's natal position. As Anais Nin wrote:We don't see things as they are. We see them as we are. I'd paraphrase that and say that we don't always perceive words, phrases and concepts as they are commonly defined, but as we are, via our uncommon natal charts.

The above paragraphs, edited from a 2010 post of mine, came to mind after we'd visited our local cinema to see the new movie Arrival, which did, after all arrive there. I'd been expecting we were going to miss it, at least until DVD or Netflix release.

The movie Arrival has its main focus on a new language conundrum, when visitors from another planet and civilisation land in 12 locations on our planet Earth. How to communicate? Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist played by Amy Adams, is recruited by the US government for her translation skills.

Vox has a review of the movie HERE
From the beginning of that review:

Science fiction is never really about the future; it’s always about us. And Arrival, set in the barely distant future, feels like a movie tailor-made for 2016, dropping into theaters mere days after the most explosive election in most of the American electorate’s memory.
But the story Arrival is based on — the award-winning novella Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang — was published in 1998, almost two decades ago, which indicates its central themes were brewing long before this year. Arrival is much more concerned with deep truths about language, imagination, and human relationships than any one political moment...........

We thought the movie interesting, glad to have seen it, but I wouldn't go along with the level of praise most reviewers are according the film. It's a tad unbalanced, in that too much time is spent hovering on screens filled with nothing much, in the early part of the story, time which could have been much better used later in the film. The closing scenes felt too rushed for the average audience member to fully catch up. There's a "twist", though part of it it wasn't too hard to guess, another twisty part can temporarily tangle the brain.

There are a number of reviews, and even a video, with "spoilers" around the net for anyone curious and unlikely to see the movie. The concept revealed by the ending is one quite familiar to sci-fi fans, but maybe not to the average viewer.

The movie is well worth seeing but, all in all, I much preferred Interstellar.

Trailer:

Robert Pinsky and The Refinery "palace on the water"

I discovered poet Robert Pinsky a couple of weeks ago, posted his poem December Blues
on 3 December. Wikipedia tells me that

Robert Pinsky (born October 20, 1940) is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. From 1997 to 2000, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Pinsky is the author of nineteen books, most of which are collections of his poetry. His published work also includes critically acclaimed translations, including The Inferno of Dante Alighieri....

Here's another of his poems - this one fascinated me - I needed to read it over and over, loving the feel of it, the words, trying to grasp overall meaning - which, really is explained in those initial lines, in quotation marks.

THE REFINERY
by Robert Pinsky


". . . our language, forged in the dark by centuries of violent
pressure, underground, out of the stuff of dead life."

Thirsty and languorous after their long black sleep
The old gods crooned and shuffled and shook their heads.
Dry, dry. By railroad they set out
Across the desert of stars to drink the world
Our mouths had soaked
In the strange sentences we made
While they were asleep: a pollen-tinted
Slurry of passion and lapsed
Intention, whose imagined
Taste made the savage deities hiss and snort.

In the lightless carriages, a smell of snake
And coarse fur, glands of lymphless breath
And ichor, the avid stenches of
Immortal bodies.

Their long train clicked and sighed
Through the gulfs of night between the planets
And came down through the evening fog
Of redwood canyons. From the train
At sunset, fiery warehouse windows
Along a wharf. Then dusk, a gash of neon:
Bar. Black pinewoods, a junction crossing, glimpses
Of sluggish surf among the rocks, a moan
Of dreamy forgotten divinity calling and fading
Against the windows of a town. Inside
The train, a flash
Of dragonfly wings, an antlered brow.

Black night again, and then
After the bridge, a palace on the water:

The great Refinery--impossible city of lights,
A million bulbs tracing its turreted
Boulevards and mazes. The castle of a person
Pronounced alive, the Corporation: a fictional
Lord real in law.

Barbicans and torches
Along the siding where the engine slows
At the central tanks, a ward
Of steel palisades, valved and chandeliered.

The muttering gods
Greedily penetrate those bright pavilions--
Libation of Benzene, Naphthalene, Asphalt,
Gasoline, Tar: syllables
Fractioned and cracked from unarticulated

Crude, the smeared keep of life that fed
On itself in pitchy darkness when the gods
Were new--inedible, volatile
And sublimated afresh to sting
Our tongues who use it, refined from oil of stone.

The gods batten on the vats, and drink up
Lovecries and memorized Chaucer, lines from movies
And songs hoarded in mortmain: exiles' charms,
The basal or desperate distillates of breath
Steeped, brewed and spent
As though we were their aphids, or their bees,
That monstered up sweetness for them while they dozed.

It's about the metaphorical refining of language isn't it?

A bit of reverse ekphrasis ? (Click on it to see full image). We came across this when out and about one day, probably somewhere in Texas.

Robert Pinsky is featured in several brief YouTube videos, I especially enjoyed these two: one is about words and language, the other about himself and his place of birth.

Tout le monde - or as we say down here - "all y'all"

I was entertained earlier this week by this piece at Salon:

The secret history of “Y’all”: The murky origins of a legendary Southern slang word,
The phrase "y'all" might not simply be the shortened form of "you all" — but something far more complex,
by Cameron Hunt McNabb.

Comments following the piece brought several chuckles-out-loud from yours truly, especially when it came to plurals and possessives.

I enjoy "y'all" - don't actually say it out loud, but often find myself writing it in these posts. "Y'all" and "kind of" and "guy"/"guys" are, I think, the only bits of American-speak I've adopted so far. I used to find myself adopting local expressions and inflections quite easily during my wander around Britain in the 1960s and early 1970s. I suppose because, back then, due to my work I had to converse quite a lot in real life. Now I don't. I rattle around on the keyboard more than rattling my tongue around my teeth.

I just love it when I hear "y'all", "all y'all" and derivatives of that. It feels warm and comfortable to me. All the chit-chat about formal and informal "you" is for school-rooms. Real people say what they feel like saying. In Yorkshire, decades ago, my grandparents would very often use the old "thou" instead of "you"(but pronounced "thoo" or "tha").

Wikipedia has a version of a rather mean stereotypical old rhyme about Yorkshire folk:

'Ear all, see all, say nowt;
Eyt all, sup all, pay nowt;
And if ivver tha does owt fer nowt –
Allus do it fer thissen.

Being translated: Hear everything, see everything, say nothing. Eat everything, drink everything, pay nothing. And if ever you do anything for nothing, always do it for yourself.

Not good advice to live by, y'all!

Pesky Grand Cross, plus Bits & Pieces.

First, a wee bit of reporting back, regarding that pesky Grand Cross formation of late April this year. In my post about the formation I mentioned that my own natal Saturn at 12.55 Aries would be hooked up in the Grand Cross pattern which linked planets in cardinal signs at around 13 degrees. At the time I couldn't relate anything personal to me other than having recently changed computer operating system after some 10 years, from Windows XP to Windows 7.

Shortly after those Grand Cross days of late April I began to be aware of a problem with my scalp - itching, scaly, getting gradually worse. I'd experienced a similar condition before, back in the 1990s in the UK. I wasn't unduly alarmed because then it was reasonably quickly cleared up using a particular shampoo (Nizoral 2%), and a mild corticosteroid liquid scalp treatment. This year's version eventually grew more virulent though, possibly it was seborrhoeic dermatitis rather than a simple fungal scalp infection. My hair began falling out in places where the problem was at its worst.

The Grand Cross involved my natal Saturn in Aries being conjoined by Uranus, squared by Pluto and Jupiter and opposed by Mars. Aries in medical astrology rules the head face and eyes; Capricorn rules knees, joints and hair, Saturn, Capricorn's governor rules the skin and bones. (Information from here) So, did the Grand Cross reflect its challenges in my scalp and hair problem? Any ideas?

I think - hope - that I now have the problem under control, I'm fairly optimistic that the lost hair will grow back in time, in the meantime I can cover the loss by some judicious combing...or by wearing a hat! I cannot, though, risk carrying on with my visits to the hairdresser every 2 months or so for a dye job. It could even be that my scalp, at last, had rebelled against some element of that treatment. I won't mind the white/grey - it's time now. ...some would say past time!

This is clever!

Quick & Animated History of the English Language

"That lucky old sun has nothin' to do
But roll around Heaven all day"

Russell Brand taking on Fox News - perhaps his accent might confuse some US viewers - I'll translate where needed, just ask!

Lastly ~

Ever wondered why, in a universe as vast as we are told it is, we Earthlings have never been contacted by beings from somewhere out there? There's an entertaining and enlightening article titled The Fermi Paradox at an always interesting website:
Wait But Why.

Weekend Pick and Mix

In 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald. wrote a short story titled “Rich Boy", in 1936 it was published in a book of his short stories "All the Sad Young Men". The story begins:

"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different."

True enough! And proven by one Tom Perkins earlier this week. He showed his true, ignorant colours by using the comparison he did.

On Saturday, Tom Perkins, a founder of one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture-capital firms, wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal comparing the “progressive war” he thinks is being waged against wealthy Americans to the Nazis’ persecution of Jews. It wasn’t the first time someone had made the comparison, but it was among the most bizarre. “Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent ‘progressive’ radicalism unthinkable now?” Perkins asked, and described the form this progressive war has taken: for one thing, people seem outraged about rising real-estate prices, he wrote. For another, someone called Danielle Steel a “snob.” (The San Francisco-based romance novelist is Perkins’s ex-wife, though he didn’t mention this in the letter. The insult against her appeared in a column by the San Francisco Chronicle’s C. W. Nevius, about a Berlin Wall-like hedge surrounding Steel’s house.)

See HERE (and elsewhere)

Yesterday David Sirota, in an article at Salon showed that this ignorant use of Hitler and the holocaust as comparison to present-day situations has become common:

Twisted minds of the super-rich: Why insane Nazi analogies have become so common
Billionaire Tom Perkins thinks the "war on the one percent" is like the Holocaust. The saddest part? He's not alone.

Could these people become any more despicable? I guess they'd be too lily-livered to use a more accurate comparison of what could occur one day: what the French eventually did with France's corrupt equivalent to our 1%, at several points in the 18th century.

While in McKinney, Texas recently, wandering around a couple of antique stores I spotted this in a locked glass case: framed magazine dated August, 1925. I wouldn't have considered paying the asking price, $50 for it, but asked husband to take a quick photograph of it instead.

Evangeline Adams' news of "what men asked " would have been a good read!
I've mentioned Ms Adams in the past here and here.

This news story of a woman in Montreal who died after her scarf and hair caught in an escalator, brought to mind Isadora Duncan's story. Duncan's fondness for flowing scarves contributed to her death in 1927 in an automobile accident in Nice, France, when she was a passenger in an Amilcar. Her silk scarf, draped around her neck, became entangled around the open-spoked wheels and rear axle, breaking her neck.

There's no denying the value of escalators, but it pays not to take their safety for granted. As a child, growing up in an area of England back when escalators weren't commonly found, and eyed with suspicion whenever we encountered one, I remember being warned: "If you don't step off just at the right time at the top, you'll fall into a big black hole!" So, along with that lesson, never forgotten, I shall add: do not wear dangling scarf or any other dangling attire when riding an escalator. However, unsurprisingly these wonders of a once modern age are still few and far between in this South Western Oklahoma township.

Duolingo. I saw, somewhere, a link to this language-learning website the other day. Decided to give it a try as a prelude to diving once again into the Spanish course software I bought some time ago but abandoned after getting myself somehow tangled up in the computer with it. Duolingo is a pleasant and useful way to pass half an hour a day to get a steady footing on the bottom step of learning a language. It can be used on a "steam" desktop computer, laptop, or as an app on a phone or hand-held device. It's free too! Here's a review.

Question: "Will we use commas in the future?" Article by Matthew J.X. Malady at Slate this week.

Answer: One would hope so, unless civilisation crumbles to the point where no human is capable of writing, reading and constructing an intelligible sentence.

New Pope and Two Pieces

I don't have anything nice to say about the new Pope.













The husband occasionally remarks to me "You're a piece of work, do you know that?" I'll respnd with "What does that mean?" All I get next is a wry grin. So I looked it up. Hmmm. Knowing him....knowing me....he's teasing - mainly - but it seems there's no cut and dried definition of the idiom. Some think it's another way of saying "You're an asshole", others think it just refers to a person who's being a little obtuse, obscure, obnoxious or difficult - I'll put my hand up to the first two ob...s, not the last two - as if!

"A piece of work", I was later able to enlighten Himself, comes originally from Will Shakespeare's Hamlet - Act 2:

Hamlet:
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet,
to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—
nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

Rosencrantz:
My lord, there was no such stuff in my thoughts.

The Bard was putting a touch of irony into Hamlet's words I believe.






How about that second "piece" : a piece of cake? It's less ambiguous, easily interpreted. It refers to something that has proved, or is expected to prove, to be an easy task.

Origin of the phrase is less clear. Most sources quote a line from one of Ogden Nash's poems in a book, The Primrose Path, published in 1936. I haven't yet identified the exact poem, but the line goes: "Her picture's in the papers now, And life's a piece of cake." Did Nash invent the phrase himself, or was it culled from elsewhere? He was certainly no slouch when it came to inventing words! The phrase was rapidly picked up, or so it seemed, by British airmen in World War II. In 1943, author of Spitfires over Malta wrote: "The mass raids promised to be a 'piece of cake' and we expected to take a heavy toll." The phrase, possibly from that source, gained popular usage in Britain even faster than in the USA, but did the author of that book read Ogden Nash ?

Other possibilities for the origin of "a piece of cake", beyond Ogden Nash's use of it are: from ancient Greece, when a "cake" was a toasted cereal bound together with honey. It was given to the most vigilant man on night watch. Aristotle is quoted as having written in "The Knights": "if you surpass him in impudence, then we take the cake".

The idea of cake being "easy" seems to originate in the late 19th century. Cakes were given out as prizes for winning competitions. There was a tradition in the US South, the slavery states, where slaves would circle around a cake performing a kind of strutting dance step. The most outstanding pair would win the cake the in middle. The term "cake walk" came from this, also meaning that something was easy to accomplish....as in "it'll be a cake walk".

There is an equivalent French phrase for "piece of cake": c'est du gâteau; in Latin America also: "como un queque" meaning very easy - queque = cake. The first recorded use of "c'est du gâteau" was around 1952, according to Le Robert's Dictionnaire des expressions et locutions, so doesn't pre-date Ogden Nash's use of the phrase.

Although Ogden Nash's "piece of cake" is the first printed use of the phrase, it could well have been in oral use before that; or, Ogden Nash being Ogden Nash, a real piece of work one might say - he could have combined the traditions of Greece with traditions of the Southern States of his own land, and come up with the now common idiom. Piece of cake!

See also
HERE and HERE.

“Meow” means “woof” in cat. ~ George Carlin

I suddenly had a rather unexpected urge to learn Spanish the other day - sent for a CD course and book. The first has arrived and I've listened to the alphabet and how to pronounce it properly. I still await the book - I like a book, computer screen is good, but paper and print are essential - I'm an old-fashioned gal.

But, before I rush full tilt into my studies I realise that, as yet, I cannot fully understand the evolving English language - as she is spoken in this fair land. Yesterday I came across an article about "bracket wars" Brackets? Those are for putting up shelves. Is there a shortage, or are competing manufacturers getting over-stroppy? The piece made no sense to me at all, especially as, within a few paragraphs, I stumbled over another unknown term: "meta". I have always understood meta- as a prefix meaning beyond or above. It appears writers who feel they are being "hip" or "cool" now use meta to refer to something that is self-referential. Sigh. I searched for enlightenment, found this piece by Ben Zimmer from last May in the Boston Globe He begins:

You know what? I’d love to write a column about the word meta. I could explain how meta started off as a prefix meaning “above or beyond” (the metaphysical realm is beyond the physical one) or “at a higher level of abstraction” (metalanguage is language used to describe other language). Then I could talk about how meta broke free as a standalone adjective to mean “consciously self-referential” and has become a perfect meta-commentary on the consciously self-referential age we live in. Maybe I could even start the column with an introduction about wanting to write about the word meta............

I think it'll be less irritating for me to learn Spanish than to wind my head around what is happening to English.

LANGUAGE, PERCEPTION and MERCURY (& Ms Merkel's declaration).

“Language is the dress of thought” wrote Samuel Johnson back in 18th century England. Languages, national, international, ancient, modern, written, spoken, technical, speciality, and even slang, how they evolved, how they are written, how so much diversity exists - all of this is a constant source of wonder. Accents, side-kicks of language, add an extra layer of fascination.

All these, in astrology, are ruled by planet Mercury. Astrology is a language in itself of course, with its own vocabulary capable of confusing "outsiders", as well as the occasional "insider". The computer and the internet have their own technical language, better known as "jargon", which confused me no end when I began writing this blog, even though I'd been using a computer for years.


More important than language itself, or accents, is nuance of understanding or misunderstanding arising between people, even when using the same language in the same accent.

Perception.

Here's where astrology, as well as life-experience, plays its part, with particular emphasis on Mercury's natal position. As Anais Nin wrote:We don't see things as they are. We see them as we are. I'd paraphrase that and say that we don't always perceive words, phrases and concepts as they are commonly defined, but as we are, via our uncommon natal charts.

Sanderson Beck has this to say on his website Astrology Time Patterns: Mercury:

Mercury and the mind are like a great lens or focus device; it is an instrument we use to focus our awareness. The soul is the true experiencer of the consciousness, but our direction and consequent awareness depends on how and where we focus the mind. The mind is tremendously powerful; how we use it is up to us.

There's a list of interpretations for Mercury in the 12 zodiac signs, and Mercury the 12 houses at the above link.

Just this week the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel had something to say about language, and the learning of it by immigrants to her country. For anyone intending to spend their lives in a country where the language spoken isn't that they learned as a child, it would seem to be a "given" that they'd do everything possible to learn the native language fairly soon - for ease of everyday requirements: shopping, education, news etc. Some language transitions, though, will be easier to manage than others. I suspect that Turkish to German (the one Ms Merkel referred to) might pose more difficulties than some others. Turkish President Abdullah Gul, went too far in my opinion - in a weekend interview, when urging the Turkish community in Germany to master the language he stated: "That is why I tell them at every opportunity that they should learn German, and speak it fluently and without an accent." Without an accent!? That is a tall order, almost impossible for a person not born in Germany to comply with!

Being a comparative newcomer to the USA (6 years this month) I still sound like a foreigner here. My accent hasn't changed, as far as I'm aware, nor will it, and to my mind nor should it. Good thing I didn't marry a German then!