Added: 4 years ago
From: admiraljello
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  • Mr Feeny....? lol

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  • Bean town, not B town, although it is equally awful, Boston sucks. No idea why you would work/live anywhere but NYC or LA

  • @orsetto81utube How many generations has your family been in Boston? You and your type belong in NYC and LA, all that you're good for is the transmission of STDs.

  • @sauroid1 Clearly you are one of the "friendly" Bostonians. By saying such a disgusting, evil and hateful thing you have proven yourself to be garbage.

  • @orsetto81utube You have no clue regarding anything about the Bostonian character. When you write that Boston sucks, you are saying the same about me and my ancestors. It is a matter of action/reaction and you will get as good as you give. Can't stand a hypocrite, especially an outsider, who cries foul when you give them a taste of their own medicine. Your pedantic barb would earn you a refreshing dip in the turd choked Charles when I was growing up. So don't school me in local idioms, tart!

  • @sauroid1 ooooo, sounds like I struck a nerve, ok blue collar, you do your thing!!! as far as STD's that's a poor man's sport, so right up your ally. Best of luck!

  • @orsetto81utube 2 weeks later? Are you serious? You struck a nerve? Why did you just respond you pedantic twit? Just hope you throw your little attitude about in your daily life, because it is just a matter of time until someone punches your ticket. You seem to be the type who feels himself above mostly everyone. I see others agree!!!!

  • @orsetto81utube Yeaa we should totally just crowd into those cities and desert the rest of the country, see where ya get your food then since no one would be in farms.

  • Doesnt sound anything like Llllllooyd Groessman

  • is this a documentary?

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  • They're like those two old muppets

  • When I was young this is how the Beacon Hill, Pride's Crossing, or Manchester By The Sea set spoke. The men usually wore Brooks Brother's suits with the old college tie and wingtip shoes. In the summer, searsucker suits, straw hats, and maybe spectator shoes.

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  • @sauroid1 Beacon hill is great, but very few speak with B anymore. Lots of wealthy students and wanna-be wasps. Sad really

  • @orsetto81utube Many years ago, when I lived in B town, there were still many of the old Yankees around. They were very proper and reserved people, not flashy in the least except when they went to the symphony or opera. It is sad that this accent is dying out.

  • All freedom of speech has been removed. Such drivel will not be tolerated on any video of mine.

  • This is proper british, NOT brahmin. LAME. You do not understand, I was educated in the uk, so i have a brohmin accent. Not quite one or the other. Brohmin as a bit british, but largely american

  • @orsetto81utube,

    It's a little different from "Mid-Atlantic" dialects that you'd hear from Bill Buckley. The speaker @1:10 has a thicker accent than the other, but it is nasal and the vowel shift is different than what one would hear in British English. Words such as "coarse" and "four" are two syllable words in this dialect.

  • @orsetto81utube No it is not British (whatever that is considerding there several *British* dialets). And no, you do not have a "brohim" accent. The Boston BRAHMIN'S* are wealthy Yankee families characterized by a "highly discreet and inconspicuous life" style. Based in and around Boston, they form an integral part of the historic core of the East Coast establishment. I highly doubt you are a Brahmin.

  • @HejEmily2 Yes, we are. And we are doing well, thank you.

  • @orsetto81utube Also, I highly doubt you have a British accent. Coming from a Welsh family I can tell you right now you cannot form our accent with just studying for 2-4 years in the UK, or in any country.

  • @HejEmily2 No, I did not, but my family speak with the proper B accent, living in the UK actually made me more aware of proper accents, welsh not being one of them. That said, I lived with two super cool welsh girls my 2nd year and couldn't understand a word they said when they were drunk. Matter of taste and standards I guess.

  • This is proper british, NOT brahmin. LAME. You do not understand, I was educated in the uk, so i have a brohmin accent. Not quite one or the other

  • there's still the distinct boston phoneticism of the A and the non rhoticity of words like card. as a speaker of received pronunciation from an aristocratic english family I cannot see how the accents are confused.

  • Coming from England that accent sounds more early 20th century English than the English sound today, yet he said his family had been in America for 350 years. amazing. I guess radio & TV has killed off a lot of the old accents, it's the same in Britain, sad in many ways.

  • I remember watching this video in elementary school in the 1980's. o.O

  • It's all Absolutely Smashing!

  • Lllove these accents.

  • Wonderful video. And yes, my Brahmin great grandparents sounded like this.

  • This is a pretty old video- these guys were probably born in the 1800s.

  • This sounds so strange to us on the west coast.

  • Is this what's also called a Mid-Atlantic accent, or is that something else?

  • @lonepantherkmt Brahmin was used metaphorically--it brought up certain associations that Holmes used to characterize (even satirize) his group. The "Aryan" thing is an entirely separate matter, and one with wholly unfortunate and despicable consequences: the Nazis weren't being metaphorical. Besides, their thinking was awful regardless of how they choose to characterize their racism--they could have called it "Germanic" and it would have been foul, even if it wasn't stolen.

  • price of change

  • Proud mid-Atlantic/Boston Brahmin accent speaker!

  • i remember in trinity church in boston, the verger used to recite the "fuuurst lesson, from the epistle of saint pawwwl to the corinthians"

    the guys in the vid, btw, are sitting in the top floor of the boston atheneum. brahmin territory if there ever was one. just ask walter muir whitehill....one of them...

  • This is how Katherine Hepburn talked. Kool!

  • @jb26508 Not exactly--her accent was Connecticut. It's a nitpick to say so, though--my grandmother grew up on Commonwealth Avenue and had the full-bore Brahmin accent, and you'd be hard-pressed to point out the difference between her accent and that of Miss Hepburn (who was a year older than Grandma).

  • @Affenschmidt O forgive me. I can only tell the difference between New York accents

  • these guys are awesome

  • Interesting accent from Boston!

  • We should maintain that transatlantic sound. It's more of a novelty amongst American thespians and voice actors these days.

  • I was reading a book that mentioned the 'Brahmin accent' so I, of course, had to find out what that was. I was just wondering why they refer to it as 'Brahmin'? I'm Indian and Boston isn't the first the thing I think of when I hear that term. Is it derived from the Indian meaning or is that coincidence?

  • @Minty210 The Brahmin in Boston Brahmin refers to the uppercrust, intellectual nature of the people speaking it. It was a way for the Boston's upper classes to set themselves apart from other people. It's why the accent can come off as snooty or lofty.

  • @Minty210

    During the early 19th century, New England intellectuals such as Thoreau and Emerson were quite immersed in Asian language and literatures, particularly Persian and South Asian stuff. Sanskrit philosophy was popular and Thoreau referenced things such as the Gita quite frequently, as did Emerson and some others.

    it was out of this that the term "Boston Brahmin" and the general term "pundit" came into common parlance. The former for Boston intellectuals. I'm South Asian too btw.

  • @cvvemuri Thank you for that! (And to 323guiltyspark too)

  • @Minty210 Kane and Abel? same here :D

  • It IS indirectly referring to the Indian meaning of Brahmin, in that it refers to a class distinction in Boston - Brahmin being the highes caste in Hinduism, and the Brahmins being the most influential and wealthy class in Boston years ago.

  • They speak normal!

  • What accent does the bossman of The Mclaughlin Group have?

    And was not Gilligan's Island's Thurston Howell III another Boston Brahmin?

  • I wish I spoke exactly like the man on the left. He sounds like William Daniels when he did John Adams in 1776.

  • You'll notice that 1:03-1:05 is incredibly Bostony. This is essentially how Lovecraft would've spoken, except perhaps a little more Rhode Island.

  • I hate to see these accents die off.

  • The gentleman on the right is pitch perfect. I'll bet he was born in a townhouse on Beacon Hill, graduated from Harvard, belongs to the Algonquin Club, and summers on the island of North Haven, Maine.

  • The one on the right definitely sounds British.

    The guy on the left sounds like an upper crust Bostonian.

  • cool video, but Dickens (THE greatest novelist in the English language) wrote only one great book? The very same whose great stories were an inspiration to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Hardy, Kafka, Nabokov et al.

    If he thinks Pickwick is Dickens' greatest book, then he's not read any Dickens at all! His Brahmin brother seems to be much more on the ball.

  • These guys are dinosaurs.

    Nobody under the age of 90 speaks like this anymore.

  • My grandmother, born 1912 in Camden, NJ, sounded just like this - except with a slightly more rhotic Philadelphian "R". When we were kids my brothers and cousins and I used to laugh at her and imitate her accent behind her back. lol It sounded very strange and "fancy" to us.

    I'd never met anyone but her who spoke like that - but the gentleman on the right in the video comes very close!

  • They don't sound british to me

  • My great uncle (a Catholic Priest) talks like this. In my opinion it's the perfect preaching voice.

  • @Meggie1994 ummmmmmmmmm if he's a Roman Catholic priest, I sincerely doubt he sounds anything like this. This is either an Epicopalian or a Unitarian accent.  Trust me.

  • The one on the left sounds exactly like the voice malcolm Mcdowell uses when he's voices John Henry Eden in the game Fallout 3.

  • I actually wanted to hear them discuss Austen and Dickens some more! I never heard someone describe him as being "messy", very interesting.

  • I've never heard this accent before. I'm English, and I'm astonished by how English the gent on the right sounds. He often sounds more English than American to my ears.

  • the one on the left looks a bit like he could be related to the bushes =) interesting....

  • WBUR about a year ago, did a very interesting piece on our speech patterns..."our" being Boston in particular and New England in general. It blamed the loss of it on TV and the mass culture of today. I have very carefully cultivated and kept my speech and still use the proper words (tonic, bubbler, trash barrel, etc.,) and a frappe is made with ice cream, not a milkshake!

    When was this made? What is it? Where can I find it?

  • do you get your Moxie at the packie? Watch out for staties as well on 495

  • I'm far enough south (New Bedford) that 495 isn't my problem, it's 195!

    And I usually buy my Moxie at Stop & Shop; none of the packies around here carry it, at least that I've found.

  • charles emerson winchester in MASH is perfect example

  • @itsaguinness  I agree. I could never make my mind up whether he was English or American.

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  • Well, yes, altho UK working class accents can be pretty painful to listen to. There are American accents--Piedmont Virginia, Maine Line Philadelphia, upper class Mississippi/South Carolina, Chesapeake Bay--that might have something of a drawl and soft diphthongs that would be more appealing to English ears. The duffer on the left wasn't too far wrong when he said that only about a thousand people in Boston sound like him! The rest sound like the Kennedys, or worse.

  • Yes I agree, especially scottish, I find them the hardest to understand :)

  • I wasnt going to comment but now reading the comments I will. My grandmother and the aunts spoke this way. my family on my grandmother's side had been here since the first settlers.

  • They sound like typical Beacon Hill Bostonians -- Yankee Protestant version -- of the late 19th/early 20th century, probably went to St. Mark's or Groton and Harvard, where they were members of the Porcellian and are now members of the Somerset Club. Some people sound like this in other parts of New England--Providence, southern New Hampshire, the Maine coast--but the distinction is largely social, not geographic. (And very different from any British accent!)

  • Yes these accents are still very different to any British accent, but from what i've heard still the closest American accent to an English or British one. I think its because the dominant dialect amongst the Founding Fathers was West Country English, which is the closest English accent to an American one because of its rhoticism.

  • Good lord. This doesn't sound at all like West Country English. YOu said it yourself, that's a highly rhotic accent. This is more like south east English with that drawly/lazy cadence affected by the upper classes.  If you want the the most archaic English dialect in America, you go to the apalachians and the Ozarks. You'll find them "right interesting." Lots of 16th and 17th century expressions pronounced in a mixture of Ulster scotts, westcountry and yorkshire imho.

  • Yes actually listening again to this i think you could be right. I think the issue here is British and American ears hear accents very differently to a large extent. To the British, it sounds like Americans don't have many regional accents, and maybe to Americans, the British accents all sound the same too. I shall try and find some example of Ozark accents , thanks!

  • i cant believe though how much these guys sound british lol, im british also, and they sound like they come from london.

  • It's a little "Maine accent'y".

  • You are wrong. It isn't affected. I know old people from Boston who naturally talk like that.

  • actually aren't they speaking different upper crust accents? notice the differing o vowels in "novelist"

  • this reminds me of dave powers, and the other irish mafia... (jfk's close friends)

  • Just for the record slickchick, Boston Brahmins by definition aren't Irish Catholic... I mean, the Kennedys are wealthy, powerful, and vaguely aristocratic, but they're not Brahmins from a sociological/historical standpoint.

  • Is Hannibal Lector supposed to be speaking Brahmin?

  • Tony Hopkins said he borrowed some of his mannerisms from Kate Hepburn, so I guess the answer is yes.

  • my grandparents talk like that

  • What documentary is this from?

  • The racist comments have been removed. Such drivel will not be tolerated on any video of mine.

  • @admiraljello cheers buddy :D

  • Thanks admiraljello for posting this..

    I'm reminded of my roots and those fine people who came before me because you've posted this.

  • Bregowald?

    Obama is half white and a seventh cousin on his mother's side to Dick Cheney.

  • What does upressing mean? God, I am hate people with such a ignorant and racist mind like you. And that 2040 crap is only speculative, don't get your hopes up!

  • well?

  • it almost seems as though everyone's grandpa should have these exact accents :)

  • omg my grandparents talked like that lol

  • shame on you, Nate! nobody should laugh at their own grandparents! show respect.

  • not in the least funny zesor.

    My parents speak precisely like that as do I.

  • Where do you think the allusion comes from, dear sir?

  • and, what you dont realize is that the "brahmins" have a great sense of humor. it is subtle and "dry" (understated). but i doubt if amar4200 would "get it" since apparently he/she doesnt have an adequate vocabulary. it was with self-deprecation that the term "brahmin" was first given to the group by a-a-a-a BRAHMIN!!!

    they also tend to have an education meaning that they can express themselves without resorting to such crudeness as used by amar4200

  • "and, what you dont realize is that the "brahmins" have a great sense of humor. it is subtle and "dry" (understated)."

    Hear hear gggreggg.

    It's akin to its English roots in that regard.

  • oh my god! could one possibly be more stupid? lolol

  • @AMAR4200

    U R such an idiot..

  • lol i watched this video in my anthropology class freshman year

  • I wish I could speak like a Brahmin.

  • This is an iffluenced on Seth macfarlanes Stewie Griffin.

  • I love Brahmin.

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