Originally Posted by
mecabq
I don't think that I have a misconception; I perhaps should have use the term United Kingdom instead of Britian (also, I mangled my original sentence; sorry
), but the point that I was trying to make is that, to an American, accents of people from all of the United Kingdom -- i.e., England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales (although I wouldn't know a Welsh accent if I heard one) -- sound similar to one another in general. Yes, I can tell a strong Scottish or Irish accent, but I would still group all of these accents together as similar.
In this case, I am afraid that I must disagree somewhat. I am an American, and I can distinguish quite a few of the 'British' accents, although in some cases, I might not know where they are from, so much as where they are not from. The difference between received pronunciation, Scottish, and Irish are pretty clear to me, and I can identify as different accents a number of others, even though I don't know where to pigeon-hole some as to class or geography. I think I could pick out a Welsh accent as being Welsh but am less confident of that, and I know that I could identify a Glaswegian (although I wouldn't understand him
).
On the Indian cities discussion, I found oopsz' history interesting, but also gathered that while the name Chennai was the traditional Tamil name for the city, Madras was the name in English, and that Madras is still widely used in India, even among people in the city. Oddly enough, even though I tend to pronounce cities by the common English pronunciation (although as someone else indicated, I refuse to call Livorno - Leghorn), I pronounce Chennai with something closer to the Tamil pronunciation - two evenly accented syllables with a bit of a stress on the double 'n' as opposed to the common American pronunciation which stresses the second syllable.