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

POLL

[seirenes.livejournal.com]

A) :) but then again i've got a pretty strange mixture accent myself....

[(Anonymous)]

Straight to the Bible question: your best bet is the NRSV. They have attempted to be non-denominational, and have Jews as well as different demoninations of Christians on their editorial committee. King James Version (also known as the Authorised Version) is also very good, but does not take recent scholarship on the Dead Sea Scrolls into account. Do not, however, bother with the NIV or any of the idiomatic translations (like Good News Bible, etc).

[axl12.livejournal.com]

The most commonly read is the New International Version.