[ SECRET POST #2085 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2085 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 077 secrets from Secret Submission Post #298.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

The standard General American accent is actually closer to most medieval English dialects than British Recieved Pronunciation (what many Americans tend to call a 'british accent'.)

//now you know

I get annoyed when people in fantasy setting use RP English. If they're going to have everybody fake accents, then at least use Tidewater or Yorkshire or East Anglian or Ozark or something that at least vaguely resembles what some knights and ladies really spoke.

[silverau]

This.

I don't care that much about what accents people use in fantasy but people on this thread acting like English has stayed exactly the same since the medieval times that fantasy is based off of is kind of weird.

[(Anonymous)]

The standard General American accent is actually closer to most medieval English dialects than British Recieved Pronunciation (what many Americans tend to call a 'british accent'.)

I've read that before possibly on TVTropes, which is why it baffles me that RP is the default fantasy dialect, when you could really have a mix British, American, and many other accents and it would make just as much sense. I've also heard that in regards to historical dramas (which is a different genre, the phenomenon seems somewhat related), the RP accent has to do with the influence of Shakespeare and his Roman tragedies. So maybe that influenced fantasy as well?

I get annoyed when people in fantasy setting use RP English. If they're going to have everybody fake accents, then at least use Tidewater or Yorkshire or East Anglian or Ozark or something that at least vaguely resembles what some knights and ladies really spoke.

Game of Thrones tends to use more Northern accents for characters from the north of Westeros and more RP accents for the characters from the southern regions, so there's at least a little bit of variety.

[(Anonymous)]

Also, the Ozarks are a well-known hilly/mountainous region in southwestern Missouri, and those accents in a fantasy setting would sound really off to the OP.

[(Anonymous)]

Roman Tragedies = if you really want Fun With Fantasy Dialect, read an early-20th-century British translation of classical Athenian comedy. For some reason it was customary for translators to give all the Spartans a strong Scots dialect. (this kind of makes sense because the original Greek emphasized the spartan vs. athenian dialect differences, but Spartan=Scots kind of wrinkles my brain.)

[cloudsinvenice]

Oh wow, thanks for that. It's the sort of thing I would be unlikely to have found out for myself, but now I have an urge to dig those translations up. :)

[(Anonymous)]

Tolkien. Tolkien is why. Standard fantasy setting is based entirely on Tolkien's alternative medieval fantasy England.

[st_jane_ambulance]

It's a mythic-historical not-that-Medieval proto-England, really.

[(Anonymous)]

I guess. The Tidewater dialect that best reflects the original is that of Tangier Island, which was settled in 1686. I mean, it's closer than modern RP, but it's still off. Which was your point, but I just wanted to point out that, while it's old, it's not that old.

The real issue, imho, is that Brits like to pretend AmE is much, much younger than any BrE dialect (ignoring the fact that Modern English emerged in 1550 and AmE dialects started in 1607; as well as, duh, AmE dialects don't all come from the same BrE dialect) and so BrE is mistakenly billed as more antiquated than AmE (although AmE uses words like "gotten" and "fall" that have fallen out of use in BrE). It really comes down to ignorance about the true history of the two major dialects with both countries mistakenly believing that Modern BrE is the same as the language AmE and BrE are derived from.

Wow, this is hard to talk about without getting really snarky.

[(Anonymous)]

Legitimate question: how do scholars speculate which current accents are closer to medieval ones? There aren't recordings that old just laying around for comparison, right? (If there are, history was very different from anything I was ever taught.)

[(Anonymous)]

From what I understand, it has to do with the way that sound shifts occur in a given language over time - the closer to the "center" of the language, the faster it changes. The language of British English speakers therefore evolved much more quickly than the language of English speakers in America over the same period of time, so it can be assumed that many American English dialects are closer to what was spoken in medieval England than many British English dialects. I'm not 100% on this, so anyone please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

[(Anonymous)]

With English specifically, the easiest-to-understand method is going back to the written record; so things like words that have fallen out of use or grammatical constructions that are obsolete are recorded in the early writing. Also, early English spelling was largely phonetic - not perfectly, because some of the letters meant different things back then, but if you, say, go to Chaucer and pronounce every word exactly how he spelled it (even 'knight') you'll be a lot closer to his pronunciation (not really *that* close, but enough closer that Chaucer would probably be able to understand you, unlike if you spoke your modern accent.) And it will rhyme and have much better meter - rhyme and meter being two other ways of figuring out old pronunciation; you probably know some old poems or nursery rhymes with words that *just don't rhyme* even though it seems like they should. Well, they probably did when they were first written.

There's also all sorts of other ways to guess at pronunciation from the written record - puns and jokes, people trying to transcribe other dialects, the way words and names in one language are spelled by speakers of another (this is how they got started on Ancient Egyptian pronunciation), if you're really lucky actual language texts that discuss pronunciation - none of them are perfect, but when you put them all together, you get some ideas about how some things sounded.

(for languages with no written record, this is a lot harder, but you can still get some clues from things like nursery rhymes, and traditional place-names which will often preserve old pronunciations, and so on.)

Then you take all those clues, combine them with general linguistic theory (like anon above me is talking about), and make a *lot* of comparisons. One of the rules is that if a sound changes a certain way in one word, it's likely to change the same way in most words - so if, say, "house" and "mouse" both used to rhyme with "goose", you can guess that "louse" and "grouse" probably did too. (then you look at other comparisons to figure out rules why "goose" *didn't* change.)

There are enough rules like this that with enough comparisons and enough analysis, they can even work out dictionaries for whole ancient languages there is *no* written record of whatsoever, just by deducing back from how modern languages have changed.

As regards British vs. American vs. Age: the idea that there is less change on the periphery of a culture than in the core is part of it, yes. Although that's become less accepted with the british vs. american language thing lately (especially because there's a *lot* of identity politics involved in calling people things like "peripheral" or "more authentic", as you might guess.) But you can also trace back specific pronunciations and word usages and say 'yes, more of this is closer to what was being used in this other place and time'.

A lot of the regional British accents are at least as 'close' as General American to certain Medieval dialects (of which there were many - Chaucer's London-ish dialect wasn't necessarily even intelligible to people writing poetry in northern England at the time - so it doesn't really make sense to talk about *one* medieval English) but RP (aka BBC English, the Queen's English, Public School accent) is specifically more distant from older Englishes than most other dialects - it's been largely an accent of educated, middle-to-upper-class people, and thus is believed to have had a lot more influence, over time, from other modern languages, and from grammarians teaching arbitrary rules, than a lot of the regional and colonial accents.

[(Anonymous)]

This is insanely interesting; thanks so much!

Off to buy a book about the evolution of spoken English.

[(Anonymous)]

Sound shifts and vocabulary, both of which can be found in the written record. Some AmE accents have had little outside exposure and so have changed far less than others.