For those of you with an interest in linguistics, here are some very enjoyable podcasts on the development of English. Someone in a ChicagoBoyz comments thread, I think, referred me to Episodes 28-30 for the incidental political history that was included in them, concerning the time we usually associate with King Arthur.
I've been watching the Starz series "Outlander," a time-travel yarn about an woman who leaves post-WWII England, via a McGuffin that doesn't matter, and lands in Scotland just before the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. As I get older I find it more and more difficult to follow movie dialogue, especially BBC productions with regional accents, but for some reason I never have trouble with thick old-fashioned Scots accents, maybe because I've listened to so many old ballads. I could listen to that accent all day. (The show throws in a lot of Gaelic, too, of which I don't speak a word beyond "slainte," but it sounds incredibly romantic.) Anyway, the point is that the Frisian described in Episode 28 of the linguistic podcasts sounds an awful lot like a mashup between Cockney- and Scots-flavored English.
This looks like a wonderful series.
ReplyDeleteI need English subtitles to watch Western movies now. There's about 1/10 or 2/10 words in each sentence I don't understand, even with replay.
ReplyDeleteIt's partially due to how loud the surround 5.1 audio mix puts the background vs the voices. It's the opposite in 2.0 stereo for Japanese audio, where the background is actually the background.
I doubt if a TV show is getting accents right, especially 300 year old accents.
ReplyDeleteI have started the series from the beginning. Nothing new so far, but thanks.
ReplyDeleteAs for accents, in performance accuracy is less important than giving the bulk of the audience a believable impression. It is deeply irritating to those listening who actually know what the real item sounds like, but unless those are significant in number, they are unimportant.
I once read the Narrator's part in "Our Town" with an authentic accent - my own, tinged with my grandfather's - only to be told it was jarring and didn't sound right.
No, of course the accent isn't likely to be historically accurate. On the other hand, it's not quite like a modern Scots accent, either, to judge from what I hear in BBC productions and movies, and it does sound very like what I'm accustomed to hearing in performances of old-fashioned Scottish music. It's at least in an archaic dialect, as the ballads are. I assume it's the old dialect in structure with a modern modern sound overlaid on it.
ReplyDeleteYou can listen to American English as rendered in various period pieces produced over 100 years or so of cinematic history, and know that you're not likely to hear any accurate regional or historic accents in a movie.
But on the other hand, is Frisian still spoken anywhere? Or was I probably listening to an artificial reconstruction? It's just that it had all kinds of sounds that reminded me strongly of Scots shifts like "doon" and "bluid" for "down" and "blood," but also "digh" for "day," a la Eliza Doolittle.
I watched a clip the other day showing actors trying to pronounce Shakespeare as it might have sounded at the turn of the 16th century. I'm not sure what the point was, but it did sound interesting.
And of course, don't even get me started about what people seem to think Texans or Southerners sound like.
I spent enough time in the Army to know what southerners sound like. And Texans. And Texicans.
ReplyDeleteAnd I wouldn't take what a modern BBC production sounds like as any real indication of what actual people sound like.
You'd be better off listening to 'man on the street' interviews to get a sense of that.
Sometime after 9/11 some guy went all instant jihadi and drove a jeep into a Scottish airport building and crashed it and set himself on fire.
The BBC interviewed the policeman first on the scene who arrested the guy.
I couldn't understand half of what he said, the accent was so thick.
Performing arts are all artifice for a purpose. People want to look at movies and TV shows and think that is history.
And people still speak Frisian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QJM7PJAgaE
Although I don't know if it sounds the same as it did in the middle ages. Probably not.
It's just that it had all kinds of sounds that reminded me strongly of Scots shifts like "doon" and "bluid" for "down" and "blood," but also "digh" for "day," a la Eliza Doolittle.
ReplyDeleteI'm not a linguist, but having studied a little German, I think some of the Scots pronunciations are really retentions of the older Anglo-Saxon/Germanic ones.
This came home forcefully when I listened to the recording of "By Yon Castle Wa'" on this album...the alto gave a powerful rendition in a thickish accent...and one line struck me especially:
"My seven braw sons for Jamie drew sword."
But the way she interpreted it, the vowels were practically the same as the German..."seven" had the same vowels as the German "sieben," "braw" is pretty close to the German "brav," she pronounced "sons" with an o-umlaut (like "soehnen"), and sword was like "swaird"...assonant with the German "Schwert."
Scots always confuses me. The Gaelic language is Celtic, right? But what we're talking about here is the Scottish dialect of English, i.e., a branch of the Germanic languages, just like Frisian. Scots-English has virtually nothing to do with Gaelic, unless some of the sounds have drifted across the divide as a result of so many people speaking both all their lives. As much as a Scots dialect of English can remind you of German, it's even closer to Frisian. They say Frisian is the closest language to English, even closer than Dutch.
ReplyDeleteI noticed that I could read Frisian after a fashion, which is a good trick since I hadn't given it any thought until this post.
ReplyDelete"Bread, butter, and green cheese is good English and good Frise." They sound almost alike, but the written Frisian looks quite a bit different.
ReplyDeleteI noticed that I could read Frisian after a fashion, which is a good trick since I hadn't given it any thought until this post.
ReplyDeleteI recently discovered that I can read Romanian. I'd have never taken a bet on that, but it is so close to French/Latin plus English...