Who is this man with the mysteriously shifting accent who shuttles to and forth between the hotel barred against possible "revolution" and the foggy underworld outside?
He notes that Mr. Obama was a quick learner, who was not much of a speaker at first ("he was stentorian, professorial, self-serious -- a cake with no leavening"), and who could "change styles without relinquishing his genuineness," subtly shifting "accent and cadences depending on the audience".
A new Star Wars book will attempt to explain away Carrie Fisher's shifting accent as Princess Leia and reimagine the gold "slave" bikini she was forced to wear in 1983's Return of the Jedi as a symbol of empowerment, according to its author.
Her voice started shifting accent.
Between the shifting accents of Errol and his disturbing household, it's a fittingly unsettling opener.
They were from hundreds of tribes across West Africa, and they brought with them certain traits of West African music including call and response vocals and complexly rhythmic music, as well as syncopated beats and shifting accents.
Mr. Obama, for example, is described as "multilingual" in David Remnick's new biography of him, a "shape-shifter" who "could change styles without relinquishing his genuineness," with a "subtly shifted accent and cadences depending on the audience".
Every ragtime or jazz enthusiast knows that when you syncopate (from the Greek for "cut short"), you begin a note on a weak beat in the bar, sustaining it into the accented part, thereby shifting the accent.
In "Friend or Pho," there is a Larry David-esque leap from a fake commercial for the "Ride 'N Did," a coiffuring contraption attached to the P-Rex ("Get your hair done while you're driving!"), to a montage of the Baron gobbling Vietnamese food, to the appearance of Burgomeister Burger, an evil nemesis with a shifting German accent (played by Joe Bly, Mr. Fornal's other videographer).
Under a large and mottled American flag, on which the titles of the show's segments are projected, he impersonates 11 citizens and citizen hopefuls from all over the map by doing little more than changing his shirt and effectively shifting his accent.
Thus, long periods of contact with speakers of genuine African tone languages of Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan stock may have assisted the historical shift from pitch accent to tone systems in Afro-Asiatic.
