[MH] (Caribbean by Night) Driving Miss Piggy

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Wojciechowski's voice is quite convincing, except for that clause. I think "many-fold" would fit him better.

I have changed it.

I originally wrote it with a 'y', but the American spellchecker changed it and I was not aware that the pronunciation was different.

Like most Europeans who learned English in classroom settings before the turn of the millennium, Tomasz Mateusz Wojciechowski was taught a vaguely formal variety of British English. What books in English he read were also more likely to be from the UK than the US (and usually old enough to be literature, not popular fiction, so that they were not banned), at least at first. As for using the language, the first English-speakers he spoke with were SAS chaps helping to set up GROM, the Polish military premier special operations unit. who were based on the SAS at first.

After 1990, however, obtaining American popular culture became easier and when he moved away from Poland in 1999, he'd have seen the occasional movie in English (rarer than you'd think, however, as France still dubs some entertainment and dubbed pretty much everything in the 90s). It's not until 2010, when he moved to the United States (his home of record was in Texas between 2010-2015, though he spent about half the year in various Caribbean locations) that he started to hear American English spoken regularly.

It's possible that Wojciechowski, who is a ferociously intelligent polymath, is capable of consciously choosing his diction and syntax to emulate a native speaker. Still, that's pretty hard to do and isn't the sort of thing you do when you are conversing naturally and trying to relax. So we haven't really seen him make any such attempt, which means that his English is mostly the standard educated European variety, i.e. vaguely British syntax delivered in a strong accent of his native language and flavored with American popular culture.

Oh, and most articles, definite and indefinite, dropped as unimportant and extraneous.

In GURPS terms, though, it's not English (Accented), though, as his vocabulary, reading comprehension and general level of language knowledge is way above that level. It might be a Quirk, I suppose.

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Any more notes?

Seriously, professional authors usually get oodles of notes on first drafts and they are years and years of writing experience more polished than I am.

And, yes, I am working on today's episode, though not very diligently as yet. Suspect I shall need an early lunch before I can be productive.