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

[erratio.livejournal.com]

Ahh, my thanks for that

I should perhaps have mentioned in my post that I was looking for the more literal versions. It's all very well to have a nice story but when I remember back to my scripture at school there's way too much meaning packed in there for an interpretation to do it any justice

Revised standard version it shall be then!

[doctorer.livejournal.com]

The RSV is pretty good, it's one of my preferred translations. For my personal use though my favourite remains the Jerusalem. Though the translation itself is somewhat less literal, the cross-referencing and footnotes in the Jerusalem Bible convey far more meaning than transliterated Hebrew idiom ever could.