Accents, etc.

     My fourth meeting with Milla didn’t have any huge thematic element. We sat and casually discussed several different topics last week.

     I got to meet Milla’s husband, who happened to be on TCU’s campus. He was a really nice man and I was surprised to find that he was extremely fluent in English. As it turns out, one of the companies he worked for in Venezuela required him to learn English to work in conferences with the CEO in the United States. Milla said his education was much more advanced and intensive than hers is at TCU. His company hired a private tutor that practiced with him every single day.

     Milla’s husband left us alone to talk after I met him. She told me about how she was going to go to Houston to cast her vote in Venezuela’s upcoming election. As anyone can see from my last post, she did not want Maduro to serve the rest of Chavez’s term. Since Maduro did win, however, I’m curious to see her response when I meet with her again this Wednesday.

     Milla expressed again how much she loves Venezuela and how she’d love to go back someday. Unfortunately, the political situation is preventing her from doing that.

     She wanted to know an update on my life, so I told her about how my work for the TCU speech and debate team has taken over my life recently. I told her that I just went to nationals, and had been working nonstop for a month preparing for the competition. My speech was difficult, I told her, because I had to switch between four different accents and characters repeatedly for 10 minutes while reciting my piece.

     The amount of work I was putting in to mastering accents surprised her, and she began asking me how to do different accents. I’m always impressed by Milla’s thirst for knowledge. I spoke in the southern drawl I used for one of my characters, but couldn’t quite figure out how to tell her how to do that accent. I didn’t have to work too much on identifying the intricate sounds in that accent as I’m from small-town Texas and have heard the sounds my entire life. I did, however, have to work at identifying exactly what sounds were different in the English and French accents. (My fourth accent was just a normal, Midwestern American.)

     Milla was especially interested in learning a French accent, so I told her the key basics of what I’d learned in my month of practice: drop the “h” when it appears at the beginning of a word (so “how”=“ow”), change the “th” sound to a “z” (so “that”=“zat”), pronounce the “r” with a throaty, saliva-ey noise, and put the verbal emphasis on the last syllable of words.

     By the time I finished explaining the basics of the French accent and she had practiced a couple of words, it was time for our meeting to end. Milla’s husband came to escort her home and tell me goodbye, and she told him about my work with accents. He became interested as well, and asked if I noticed any differences in Hispanic accents. Since I haven’t studied those accents extensively, I told him, I didn’t notice a huge difference right away. I did, however, notice that he spoke with a much quicker rate of speech than Hispanics I know from Mexico and El Salvador. His rate of speech resembled that of some of my Cuban family members, I told him. He granted that the rate of speech was different and complimented me for picking up on that difference. It was then time for he and Milla to leave, so we said goodbye and parted ways.