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Upper RP and Nineteenth-century English, French, and Latin


Dandylover1

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  Hello.  I am a native speaker of American English.  However, while I find Transatlantic acceptable for daily usage (if I can master it) I have loved Upper Received Pronunciation since I was a child, and it has always been a passion of mine to learn it properly.   This is the form used from roughly the nineteenth century until the 1950's or so, and often contains such features as the trap-bath split, rhoticity in words such as story and when a word ending in r is followed by one beginning with a vowel such as father and mother, and the eh sound in words such as happy and family.  I have been told that, although my pronunciation is good, my mouth is often too open and my intonation doesn't always fit this form of English. To me, it sounds as if I am better at Conservative RP than Upper.  I am totally blind, so I am unable to read material with graphics, to use the IPA system, or to follow lip movement based on videos.  Perhaps, someone here can assist me via audio calls on Facetime, Zoom, or Skype, or I can upload some files of my speaking to this site for correction.

 

  Accent aside, I am a life-long grammar prescriptivist and lover of upper class nineteenth-century English, which I wish to adopt permenantly, both in speech and in writing.  To that end, I purchased two scholarly books on the subject and am in the process of scanning them into my computer so that I can read them.  Again, any suggestions would be sincerely appreciated.

 

  I am also learning French, using An Analytical  and Practical French Grammar (and its supplementary reader) by Jean Gustave Keetels (1894) as my main texts, along with some slightly newer readers and dictionaries.  I am a beginner in Latin and am learning that using An Introduction to the Latin Tongue  For the Use of Youth by Charles Duke Yonge (1874), and New Latin Grammar by Charles E. Bennett as my main texts, along with some readers and other Eton Latin exercise books.  If any of this interests you, perhaps we can work together, though the txt versions of these books contain many errors and I may need help in reading them.

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