Sorry I've been away so long, my life has gotten rather stressful and hectic. But more on that in a later post. Here's a post I began months ago, and never finished, until now.
I've often been asked where I come from, mostly because of my attitude, but also because of my accent; no one can pin me down to any one U.S. region. I think this is due partly to the fact that I constantly change my choice of words, trying to improve my speech, I've lived in and visited many different parts of this country (and others), and also because my parents came from two very different worlds.
My mother is the youngest in a large immigrant Dutch family from Friesland (frees-laan), a very norhtern part of the Netherlands. Friesland has a rather confusing array of names, which have changed within the last ten years, but I've been brought up calling it plain old "Friesland," so that's what I'm sticking with. The area has its own special dialect, called "West Frisian (freesian)," which turns out to be closely related to English, and a saying goes, "Bûter, brea, en griene tsiis; wa't dat net sizze kin, is gjin oprjochte Fries", which translates to, "Butter, bread, and green cheese, whoever can't say that is no upright Fries." (For those that know Germanic pronunciation, notice the similarities in pronunciation, such as "tsiis" and "cheese," and "oprjochte" and "upright.")
Mom came to the U.S. when she was about 3 years old, and because her parents were busy learning English, she never really learned Fries or even Amsterdam Dutch (Beppe—Fries for "Grandma"—knows both.)
Dad was born to a first-generation Greecian-American family in Ohio, somewhere near Cleveland, and, because I grew up around him, I never realized that he had an "East Coast" accent. Mr. Man pointed that out to me one time:
Your dad is from the East Coast, right?
No. Why?
He has a really thick accent.
He does?
Mr. Man is from different backgrounds, too. His mother is from Korea, and came to the States when she married Mr. Man's father, who is British and Mexican, and maybe something else thrown in.
What a multi-cultural couple we are.
