I'm an actress, and I have to do a monologue in Standard British (I'm American).
Anyway, there's a word in my monologue that I don't know how to pronounce. It is the name of a city or school.
"Camilliard".
I speak French, so I know how to say it in French (kam.e.yard), but if you're from England, you're aware of how crazy locations are pronounced (for example, Beauchamps).
So, if you are from England and speak (or are familiar with) Queen's English, could you type out phonetically how to say this word? Thanks!
Cam-meal-i-yard it what I'd say but If you are trying a cut glass accent it may change to Kham-eel-e-Yard ? (emphasis on the first syllable) Sound both out on a friend and go with what sounds natural to them
Posts: 13105 | Location: 6 miles west of Wigan UK | Registered: 06-05-02
There is no 'standard British pronunciation'. That's an old-fashioned idea from when the Home Counties were the centre of the universe. As in the US, each area or city of the UK has its own accent.
Possibly, what you might want to aim for is "BBC English" - find BBC Radio 4 on the Internet.
I'd suggest 'ka-milly-ard', with the accent on 'mill'.
The problem though is that the accents heard on the BBC (including BBC Radio 4) are nowadays far removed from what the term "BBC English" originally invoked. This is the result of a deliberate ploy on the part of the BBC as well as the passage of time and "change". Way back, as newnickname rightly implies, Home Counties English was an old-fashioned idea of excellence, but BBC English too has gone the same way as that erstwheile desirable way to speak. Listen to Radio 4 and you'll see what I'm driving at. Make it your target if you will, but the number of indeterminate whatnots, Scots, Northeners, Welsh and others (I include myself in this list - no e-mails please )that you'll hear there will mean that you'll have great difficulty in taking proper aim and discovering what "the Queen's English" really is. Because it's no longer part of the BBC's built-in fabric. To end though, can you give more details about Camilliard? This will certainly help people who live nearby give you help and guidance in how to pronounce it.
I'm with NNN Around Chelsea we'd say it like he has it (and in Newmarket too, m'dear )
But I can't find any school in Britain called 'Camilliard' and have certainly never heard of one named that. So I can't yet help, if this place exists, by saying how students and tutors there pronounce it. (That's not always obvious from a spelling: the Cambridge college written Caius is pronounced 'keys', Magdalen College, Oxford is 'maudlin' but Magdalene College, Cambridge is said as it looks. )
What piece or play is this in? Can you give us some clues ? Even the sentence containing the name would help.
Right time to post a favourite quote from Camelot: "It's never being alone that bothers me most. Do you know, I have never been without someone around me in my entire life? Neither at Camilliard, or Camelot. I mean, completely, totally, solitarily alone? Sometimes I wish the castle were empty, everyone gone, and no one here but me. Do you know what I would do? I would bolt every door, lock every window, take off all my clothes and run stark naked from room to room. I would go to the kitchen, naked; I'd prepare my own meals, naked; I would do some embroidery, naked; and put on the crown. And when I passed a mirror, I would stop and say: (With a broad cockney accent) 'Ello, Jenny old thing! Nice to see ya!"
What's the betting that the piece is that which Bedstor has quoted? If it is then sounding like Julie Andrews, who performed it, can't be far wrong, indeed.
Quite incidentally,if you wanted to sound like a modern well spoken English person, to such an English person now , then Julie Andrews would not be the ideal model.Her accent sounds a little quaint and dated. That's because her pronunciation sounds to be the product of elocution lessons in stage school, when she was a girl (she was born in 1935).In those days the teachers had all their girls sound exactly the same, whatever their original accent,and the product was a strange impersonation of a posh person circa 1920.It's a sort of stage English but as all regional accents on the English stage were taboo until about 1964 it had to be learned.Quite a number of older actors who had regional accents now find it difficult to reproduce the accents they once had in their youth, before training, so far has the false accent become their normal one.
Thank you. We've been taught all of that. I'm taking Advanced Voice for the Actor right now. I'm well aware that different areas of the UK have different accents (you can hear clearly the difference among cockney, Yorkshire, and Liverpool dialects). What we are learning is best defined as "Standard British" to us, meaning the uppercrusted standard, or Queen's English, as it were. I hope that didn't sound snobby or anything. I guess what I'm saying is that we're learning the most "generic" and "proper" of UK dialects--it would be similar to a Brit learning "General American" as opposed to American English with a Southern, Bostonian, or New York accent.
Additionally, we've learned IPA (international phonetic alphabet), so after a bit of practice, the dialect comes quite easily to me...I'm just wondering about the pronunciation of this particular word because it's a place (I think), and Brits have a tendency to pronounce pronouns in really screwy ways in comparison to the spelling of them.
I have a feeling "Cuh.mil.e.ard" is correct as well...but I'm not sure.
So, is this a location somewhere, or is it long gone (meaning it was only around in the time of Camelot)?
So, is this a location somewhere, or is it long gone (meaning it was only around in the time of Camelot)?
Cameliard was the kingdom ruled by Guinevere's father. It has variously been located in anywhere from Scotland to southwest England. As with Camelot, it is likely fictional.
Posts: 7646 | Location: On Vacation | Registered: 06-06-02
You are learning what we used to call Received Pronunciation or 'R.P.' which was supposedly the pronunciation of someone educated who lived in the South East of England.It is the one accent which nobody complained about as being too posh or too regional to be generally accepted by the hearers. If you seek a modern speaker of it then our Prime Minister, Tony Blair, is a good example. Naturally he is not from the South East (he was born in Edinburgh, Scotland) nor raised there (he grew up in the far North East of England, in Durham) and he was educated in a posh Scottish school (Fettes) and then at Oxford University That's the way our system works or worked As you can read the phonetic alphabet you may find that The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is a help in cases of doubt.
So Mr Blair would not say 'orf' (antiquated aristocratic) for 'off' but he would pronounce the H in 'here' (working class London is "'ere" ) but that word would not be 'hyarr' (sometimes heard in upper-middles and posh from the countryside)
In 'Bridget Jones' Diary' Renee Zellweger made the best American attempt we have heard at speaking like a normal English woman. But her accent is not RP. It is a variant of another accent heard in the South East, Estuary English. Hugh Grant, playing opposite her, speaks deliberately like a stage Englishman, someone who has had elocution lessons to sound posher: his accent is a slightly posh version of RP. Confusing, ain't it ? !
Can't find Camilliard in any gazetteer. It is possible that it is a place-name invented for the script of the play in question . It doesn't sound like any British place-name. It sounds a little French but not a French place-name. French place-names do exist here but arrived post-Norman Conquest, a long time after Camelot They were the product of the new Norman French invaders renaming their Anglo-Saxon estates.This was sometimes with irony: many a marsh or other useless terrain got renamed something like Beauchamp 'fine field' or Belvoir 'fine view' . What happened too was that the French name was soon pronounced as English so Beauchamp is not a nasal Bow-shahng but Bee-cham .
As a side-note:Professor Higgins in Pygmalion/My Fair Lady, who claimed that he could identify London accents down to a small district or even a street, was not far removed from the typical middle-class Englishman, who can spot an accent from two or three words and classify the speaker in an instant. Accent was long regarded as the key indicator of a person's education and , above all, their status or class in British life and so it was very important here.So was vocabulary: the choice of a word for a napkin ( serviette?) or a lavatory (toilet?lavatory? loo? bog? 'smallest room'? ) could be critical.
And, by the way,it is almost certain that Mr Blair never spoke with any accent local to his birthplace or his childhood but with the accent of Received Pronunciation.If he didn't he must certainly have taken voice coaching, or learned the accent by copying others, quite early in life.One reason why parents sent their children to boarding schools was to ensure that their offspring spoke 'correctly': any pupil who did not speak like the others would soon be teased out of their original accent. The result was that many children of the better-off, whose parents could therefore afford the fees, ended up speaking in an accent which was entirely different from that of their own parents or anyone else in their home vilage or town. A curious by-product of boarding was that boys from, say Eton, spoke slightly differently from boys from the equally correct Harrow School.
Good luck ! 'Liverpool' is fun (and, needless to say, Liverpudlians may distinguish between accents from either side of their river and even different districts of their own city !)
I promise I'll be around. I was actually one of the first people to register here, when AskJeeves was discontinued. I just recently remembered Answerpool...I love this place!
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