A poll, random linguistics and a few requests

[erratio]

The Poll
When you sing the Australian National Anthem, how do you pronounce the word 'advance'?
A: To rhyme with 'pants'
B: Advarnce, to be assonant with the word 'path'


For myself, I have no idea. I read both pronounciations and they both sound correct to me.

Random Linguistics

I finally discovered why I've occasionally been mistaken for Canadian/British!

From the Wikipedia article on Australian English:

Cultivated Australian English has many similarities to British Received Pronunciation, and is often mistaken for it. Cultivated Australian English is now spoken by less than 10% of the population.


I find this strange though because I don't consider my word usage to be very.. cultivated, to say the least. In fact I often seem to go out of my way (without really meaning to) to use some really weird or earthy turns of phrase and pronounciation. Sometimes I think that it's my subconscious need to distance myself from the speech patterns of people who I don't like, so my mum's strange idioms are in, my high schools' South African phrases and accents are out, and in between is a healthy sprinkling of random phrases that seemed particularly apt to me when I heard/read them. Oh and growing up with a reading vocabulary far beyond your spoken can lead to some really strange pronounciations :) I'm still coming across them nowadays (who the hell uses that word anyway? Other than me)

Anyway, I guess that puts my accent mostly in General Australian English but sometimes straying into Cultivated. Woot!

The requests

1. Does anyone know where I can buy dreidels? At some point I'll probably go check Gold's near Bondi Beach but I have no idea where else one could possibly buy these. And Gold's has a reputation for being expensive, so an alternate source would be nice. Heck, any source would be nice, I don't even know if Gold's has them.

2. If I wanted to read the Christian Bible (ie. the New Testament, Gospels, etc) what version(s) would you recommend I read?

Comments

[doctorer.livejournal.com]

Unfounded, and unhelpful. The most commonly read is neither the most accurate nor the most appropriate, simply the most widely disseminated - sort of like saying McDonalds is the best food because it's everywhere.

Not meant as a personal attack mind, just a venture into clarity for the day.

There are two major distinctions you want to make when seeking a Christian Bible. The first is whether you want a "Catholic" or "Protestant" bible. This history will be fiercely denied by protestants, but you know me too well to think I care. =)

Basically, the "bible" as we know it did not exist for several decades after the death (and, presumably, resurrection and ascention) of Jesus. In that period the sole governance of the faith was held by the Church and its leaders, the apostles. The apostles not only traveled, preached, and wrote; they appointed successors to the office conferred on them to continue this work of teaching and governance. There were several generations of these successors (the first bishops) before the Synod of Rome in the 4th century had to sort out the real Christian "scriptures" from the fakers - this council decided the contents of the Bible. The division came over a thousand years later at the protestant "reformation", when Martin Luther effectively decided that his personal theology had more authority than the universal practice of the entire Church over the previous 1200 years. He rejected certain parts of what we call the Old Testament and rearranged books of the New in order to modify the apparent importance of a few (key) epistles. Protestants will claim that the books he rejected were "the insertions of a corrupt church", but that claim can be addressed by our friendly apologists at Catholic Answers:

http://catholic.com/library/What_Your_Authority.asp

In short, the protestant bible is the thinner (incomplete) and inaccurate version, the Catholic bible is the version in continuous use since the establishment of the Faith.

[erratio.livejournal.com]

So.. where does the King James lie in this? And in general which version is which?