06-09-2011, 02:41 AM
For what it is worth, I think there are some different issues being confused here. Accent and pronunciation, which vary from country to country,and within in countries, are separate from stress and scansion, although in many cases differing speech will also entail differing stress, and thus put a spanner in the scanning works. Thus, dropping your 'h's, would not, of itself, affect the way you might recite something, in terms of stressed, and non-stressed syllables. On the other hand, the widespread habit in the north of England, of almost extinguishing 'the' before a noun does affect things --eg 'Where is the pub?' may become something like 'Where's t'pub?'
I suspect that a computer program could be devised to do whatever humans do. Yet there is a difference again, between a program which scans anything by anyone in the world, and one which scans your own speech. You would, however, need to have an idea of what you yourself regarded as 'correct' scansion --- and that might be a little stumbling-block.
As an aside, it frequently is the case that foreigners, who otherwise speak excellent English, find it hard to pick up this stress business at all, as in other languages it does not play the part it does in English. Alternatively, their native language is heavily accented, and this carries over to the pronunciation of English, and naturally causes them to be as mystified as English people are when they use stress in languages where there is none, or, more accurately, it happens in a much different fashion -- French!
I suspect that a computer program could be devised to do whatever humans do. Yet there is a difference again, between a program which scans anything by anyone in the world, and one which scans your own speech. You would, however, need to have an idea of what you yourself regarded as 'correct' scansion --- and that might be a little stumbling-block.
As an aside, it frequently is the case that foreigners, who otherwise speak excellent English, find it hard to pick up this stress business at all, as in other languages it does not play the part it does in English. Alternatively, their native language is heavily accented, and this carries over to the pronunciation of English, and naturally causes them to be as mystified as English people are when they use stress in languages where there is none, or, more accurately, it happens in a much different fashion -- French!