posted
So, I've been watching the HBO/BBC miniseries Rome and even though it is about a thousand times more historically accurate (save for the Vorenus/Pullo plots, seeing as how they were only mentioned in Ceasar's history of his Gallic campaign) than anything before. But there is one inaccuracy that Shakespeare is still perpetuating:
ROMANS HAD ITALIAN ACCENTS!!!
The Romans were NOT British. There were plenty of Brits that were Roman citizens, but that Gaius fellow- he was Italian. But ever since Shakespeare started writing historical plays about Rome every English representation of Rome has been with British accents for the Romans.
There are a few actors in Rome who use Italian accents, but the most central character to do so is Posca- Ceasar's assistant/butler/gopher, or as Marc Anthony calls him, "Ceasar's creature."
It's not the travesty that was the accents of Alexander, but... you spend all that money on making an accurate Rome and all you would need to make it perfect is to tell your actors to use Italian accents.
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edit: And if you want to really be picky, the Romans wouldn't be speaking English at all, no matter what kind of accent they had.
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It's not really the point what language they speak. They mosy certainly didn't speak English. No one did at that time. But that doesn't change the fact that Americans use British accents, and even Auzzies use a more Shakespearean accent when playing Romans (Galdiator, anyone? ANd he was supposed to have been born in Spain!).
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posted
Ick. The Romans DID NOT have Italian accents.
The had the accent that when with Classical Latin. Rather, Italian and Medieval Latin came to be pronounced very similarly. Classical Latin is a language full of hard consonants and pronounded vowels. Nothing like Medieval/Ecclesiastical Latin at all. Okay, a bit. They are more similar than, say, English and Gaelic. But a British accent does as well as any, since modern Italian is just as different in pronunciation.
Aside from that, to North American ears, British English is the sound of culture, which is probably the effect they are trying to get. Having the actors speak with Italian accents would (sadly, since I don't like stereotyping) make it sound too human.
Again, for emphasis, Italian sounds nothing like Caesar's Latin. Nothing at all. Giving the actors Italian accents would not make it any more realistic at all.
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quote:The series is developed by a mostly British cast and crew. The actors' regional British accents were used with effect to enhance the portrayal of the social distinctions of ancient Roman society; however, some of the stronger accents were toned down for American audiences.
quote:Originally posted by Eaquae Legit: Again, for emphasis, Italian sounds nothing like Caesar's Latin. Nothing at all. Giving the actors Italian accents would not make it any more realistic at all.
How do you know? We know Latin only from texts, which tell us nothing about pronounciation.
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posted
I'm not an expert in linguistic reconstruction (nor evena novice), but I'll find out tomorrow.
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quote: How do you know? We know Latin only from texts, which tell us nothing about pronounciation.
We can actually get a fair idea of pronunciation from poetry. This is true for most languages where we have vast amounts of written poetry, particularly when we have other texts telling us what the metrical, rhythmicaly, and rhyming schemes for these texts are. In addition we can look at the etymology of latin words to see how pronunciation affected spelling. Over a period of five hundred or a thousand years (like the length of the Roman Empire) words often changed in spelling to reflect a change in pronunciation. We see this most often when two words are combined. Just as an example the word 'labor' would become 'lapsus' rather than 'labsus' which gives us an idea of how 's' 'b' and 'p' are pronounced in conjuction with each other. I'm not a linguist so I can't explain the whole theory, but that's the idea of how they can figure it out. Of course, it's not going to be completely realistic, but it will give us a fair idea of how it was pronounced.
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posted
Even if we couldn't reconstruct the pronunciation, it's probably safe to assume that it has changed since the Roman Empire.
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posted
I very much doubt that there was a Roman accent, any more than there is an English accent. There ain't a NewYork accent even in NewYorkCity, why would there have been one accent in the city of Rome? With travel times between regions of the Empire so much greater than they are now, and speech patterns not shared on a daily basis between regions, there would have been very little reason for a common accent to have developed. And since the Roman metroplex recruited immigrants from an even farther flung world -- comparatively in terms of travel time -- there would have been more accents in the city of Rome than there are accents in NewYorkCity.
posted
What's hard for me to imagine, frankly, is how someone would present the image of a stuffy, erudite, refined, and quite possibly evil individual -- in English -- without using a clipped British accent. That's practically vocal shorthand for that character type.
I mean, what other voice would you use to convey the same attitude?
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posted
More than that. Only English is spoken with enough different accents throughout the world to convey the feeling of the wide variety in regional differences between accents used by Latin speakers.
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There wasn't a Roman accent, in fact we only have one surviving text written in the 'vulgar' or what we might say conversational Latin. Most of the surviving written works is written in a higher literary or poetical form that is most likely different from what was spoken in every day conversation. But Latin was a language that borrowed much from Greek, and Greek writing and story telling had not yet lost its roots in Oral stories, so even though the language, and probably even the accent, was much more formal in the writing, these writings were still intended to be read aloud. There is even some evidence to suggest that a classical Roman with good education would be incapable of reading silently. To go on with their being more than one accent, we also have many cases where people are either praised for their 'good' Latin or mocked for their 'provincial' Latin, so there may have been a standardization among Romans of a certain class to pronounce words correctly as determined by their peers.
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posted
Praise or mockery for language usage rarely has anything to do with how something is being said -- witness this forum -- instead it is based on whether the critic agrees or disagrees with the speaker's opinions.
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quote: very much doubt that there was a Roman accent, any more than there is an English accent. There ain't a NewYork accent even in NewYorkCity, why would there have been one in the city of Rome?
If any of you read Lindsey Davis, her characters speak in different accents-- educated people have a more "refined" one, then there's a slangy "street Latin" with an accent that changes depending where in the city you grew up, plus foreigners. I've always enjoyed that, because it makes sense to me, too, from what I've read on the subject.
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quote: Praise or mockery for language usage rarely has anything to do with how something is being said -- witness this forum -- instead it is based on whether the critic agrees or disagrees with the speaker's opinions.
You know, aspectre, the only thing that kept this from being categorically wrong was the vagueness of the word "rarely." Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
When making a movie about a barbarian tribe, do people use German accents? Do they use French accents? No. They use what they think is a barbarian accent. People use English accents for Romans because Shakespeare wrote historical plays about Rome. It would be like defending the electoral college to make up other excuses for using Enlgish accents.
And if using an Italian accent would make the characters more human, I don't see what the problem is. One of the objectives of Rome is to remind the audience that these were real people, and not just names in a history book.
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posted
This complaint seems pretty silly. The accents you're saying have been overthrown by Shakespeare are dead, Archer. Latin as spoken by the Romans thousands of years ago is no longer spoken in the world today.
Therefore any accent they pick will be horribly inaccurate. But, well, we can't really know because we don't have any tape recordings. It's quite possible that if you got a bunch of priests from the Vatican who still use languages from that long ago, they'd be speaking it as it was once spoken...but we wouldn't know in either case.
Oh, and a culture's accent is not as you suggest in the thread title its culture.
Wanting suspension of disbelief is fine-it's a complaint my father has about Deadwood, how in that show they swear like modern city-dwellers from America. Personally I think that complaint is more valid. Suspension of disbelief is fine, but just be aware that what you'd replace the current with is no more accurate than what we've got now in Rome.
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posted
Shakespeare has nothing to do with the use of English accents for the nobility of Rome... Hollywood does.
As for the classical pronunciation of Latin, we know so much about it not just through comparative linguistics and the inscriptions of marginally literate Romans, but also because of grammar books intended for teaching rustic young arrivistes how to correctly say certain sounds.
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posted
BTW, as concerns Deadwood, there is no reason to doubt that ruffians and people at the margins of society used as much vulgarity in the late 1800 as they do now... everyone of our major vulgarities has been around for centuries, some for nearly a millenium. There was a taboo on writing that sort of thing down at the time, but that certainly doesn't prove they didn't use all those four-letter words.
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posted
I didn't know that about Roman accents, DB. As for Deadwood...it's not the constant vulgarity that is jarring sometimes. Not a bit, I expect that. It's the fact that they're using the exact same vulgarities as we do now. That's the part that's (slightly) jarring to me, and very irritating to my old man.
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posted
Deadwood is more accurate than anything else in that respect. Let me give you some dates...
S**t is too old to date, as it comes from the word scitte (although I'm not sure if even posting that word is ok on these forums).
Ass comes from the animal, turned into an insult some time before Deadwood takes place.
Hell comes from the Norse goddess of the underworld, Hel.
D**n, p**s, and c**t are all from around the 13th century
And the f-bomb is early 16th century. Were you expecting them to throw around stuff like "Yella belly" or "varmit" ?
DB, where do you think Hollywood got the English accents? From when they did movies of Shakespeare's plays, of course.
Language is about 75% of a people's culture. Why do you think Parisians are such snobs? Why do you think Germany and Italy became nation-states?
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quote:Originally posted by ArCHeR: Language is about 75% of a people's culture. Why do you think Parisians are such snobs? Why do you think Germany and Italy became nation-states?
So, tell me, what do the German and Italian languages have in common that naturally leads its speakers to form nation-states?
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posted
BTW, a LOT of the actors on Rome ARE using Italian accents... because so many of the supporting actors are from Italy, where the series is shot.
Speaking of the series, holy merda! Did you see last night's episode?
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quote:So, tell me, what do the German and Italian languages have in common that naturally leads its speakers to form nation-states?
I think Eaquae Legit was implying that they formed nation-states because the peoples who got together and formed nation-states shared a common language.
quote:Speaking of the series, holy merda! Did you see last night's episode?
Yikes. There was more blood and gore last night than in all the other episodes put together. Good episode, regardless. I can't wait until the final one.
Spoilers:
It looks like Pullo and Verenus are in heaps of trouble. Verenus probably lost his good standing with Caesar, but what better time to be an enemy of Caesar? All hell will break loose soon, and who knows who will have time to concern themselves with a traitorous magistrate?
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posted
The original post seems way off base. An Italian accent is as modern and anachronistic to the setting as an English, or American, accent would be. English accents have a real ability to evoke a huge range of sophistication (or lack thereof), but so do American accents, but I couldn't imagine a working class or peasant Roman sounding like he came from somewhere like Alabama, for instance. As for someone being Spanish, they may as well have been Chinese for all the relevance that would have had to a modern Spanish accent. A few years ago the BBC did a drama series on the Borgias, and had an Italian actor playing Pope Alexander, complete with his Italian accent. The general consensus was that he sounded like a London cab driver. The same guy played a cardinal in The Agony and the Ecstasy, but was dubbed with an English accent in that.
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posted
Not using Alabama to infer that people from there sound like hicks, by the way. Not meaning to offend...
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Actually, Italy had quite diverse dialects and accents, some almost bordering on French. It was Dante and some other book that finally solidified which dialect was going to be predominant and end up being the official language we know as Italian.
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Yup, saw it last night. Enjoyed it very much. I was convinced that something would come of Vorenus and Naobi attending Atia's symposium, seeing as how Octavius and Octavia both know the truth about Naobi and Vorenus's "grandchild". I was thinking Octavius might spill the beans to Vorenus as a means of displaying Pullo's loyalty and friendship to Vorenus, but I was wrong.
Big trouble for Vorenus, quite possibly. He has set himself in direct opposition to one of Caesar's stated goals.
It would appear that Caesar really is Brutus's friend, since he has (apparently) accepted Brutus's refusal to go to Macedonia.
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posted
Oh, and also I think the claim that Shakespeare is destroying "true" Roman culture is pretty absurd, at least as far as the show is concerned. The show seems to be sticking to history pretty well, for a TV drama based on history.
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posted
You know the old saying about the difference between a language and a dialect being an army and a navy?
Well, I've had a chance to listen to a lot of "dialects" of German, and there are quite a few that, did an untrained person not know in advance they were German, he or she would assume they were very different languages.
I imagine something similar was up in Italy.
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posted
And why would Romans have Italian accents when they weren't Italians? That's like saying ancient Egyptians had Arab accents.
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posted
Um. Italy didn't even exist until 1870. Italian as a language itself was spoken by a minority of people at that time as well. So they wouldn't have had Italian accents.
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I don't mean Italian as in the language of the nation of Italy. I mean Italian as in the Italian penensula.
And you can't really use Ecypt as an example because in this time period, they'd be Greek
quote:So, tell me, what do the German and Italian languages have in common that naturally leads its speakers to form nation-states?
What in the world are you talking about? I'm talking about Germany forming a nation-state and Italy forming a nation-state. The only exception is with Germany, as they didn't include Austria. But there was a big debate at the time as to wether they should include Austria, but it was having so many problems of its own that they didn't want to deal with them as one nation.
But both nations were pulled together because they shared a common culture, and 75% of that culture was language. I say 75% (and I don't mean it's exactly 75% ) because that's how important it is. It's why France has a limit on non-French broadcasts in their country. It's why the Romans called non-Italian or Greek speaking peoples "barbarians," and it's why Beowulf is such an important text.
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posted
No one's arguing that language isn't important. They're saying that it doesn't matter what accent was used for the miniseries Rome because an Italian accent would be just as inaccurate as an English one. Since in Rome they actually spoke Latin. I suppose a Latin accent would be most accurate, but that's just getting ridiculous.
In fact it makes more sense to use English accents because the audience for the series is English speakers and English speakers are adept at distinguishing the differences in social level depicted by various english accents. If Italian accents were used the miniseries would be no more accurate and the filmmakers would lose that means of communicating information with their audience.
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posted
The RULERS of Egypt would've been Macedonian, you mean... obviously not every Egyptian spoke Greek in the 1st century BCE.
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quote:Originally posted by ArCHeR: I don't mean Italian as in the language of the nation of Italy. I mean Italian as in the Italian penensula.
The Italian penninsula wasn't unified (as we know it today) when Rome was an Empire, nor would they all have had the same accent within the Empire. What I was trying to say is that you can't call it an Italian accent when Italy did not exist until 1870. Even now, when they all technically speak Italian, Southern Italians sound different than Northern Italians.
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posted
Languages used by native Italians: Official language, Italian; Parts of Trentino-Alto Adige region are predominantly German speaking; Small French-speaking minority in Valle d'Aosta region, Slovene-speaking minority in the Trieste-Gorizia area.
Prior to WWII, the minority languages were much more commonly used in those regions. Since then, national television and radio broadcasts have allowed Italian to ever more greatly displace the native languages.
quote:Originally posted by ArCHeR: I don't mean Italian as in the language of the nation of Italy. I mean Italian as in the Italian penensula.
Italian is the language of the nation of Italy. If you want to refer to the ancient languages of the peninsula, you would probably mean Italic. Of course, when the Romans conquered the rest of the peninsula, they wiped out all the other languages so that only Latin survived.
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quote:Originally posted by aspectre: Languages used by native Italians: Official languge, Italian; Parts of Trentino-Alto Adige region are predominantly German speaking; Small French-speaking minority in Valle d'Aosta region, Slovene-speaking minority in the Trieste-Gorizia area.
Prior to WWII, the minority languages were much more commonly used in those regions. Since then, national television and radio broadcasts have allowed Italian to ever more greatly displace the native languages.
After the revolution, when they were picking the national language, they didn't pick the one that was actually spoken by the majority of people. Most of the places had dialects native to their region and still do today. The Veneto region still definately uses words that aren't used by the rest of the Italian speaking population. Example, calle for street instead of via.
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posted
It's worse than regional languages-- there are city-specific languages as well. (Napolitano, for example). Barese has its own tongue, and even the little Northern Italian city of Chivasso has Chivasese.
It's important to note that these aren't just small differences in pronounciation, but real. . . gulfs of linguistic variety.
posted
I wish I knew enough of any Italian language to appreciate it. My efforts are feeble at best, and laughable at most times.
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posted
Wait... at the time of the Roman Civil War, Italy was unified under Rome. In fact, this is directly after the conquering of Gaul, and long after the conquering of Greece. Not to mention a good deal after the Punic Wars that gave them North Africa and Iberia.
posted
I just have to add that everytime I see this thread title I see it as "Romeo, and the destruction of true Shakespeare." I mean obviously casting Leonardo DiCaprio was wrong, but did it completely destroy Shakespeare, or did 'O' truly kill the last shreds of true drama?
sorry, back to your regularly scheduled thread
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quote:More than that. Only English is spoken with enough different accents throughout the world to convey the feeling of the wide variety in regional differences between accents used by Latin speakers.
Actually, I would say that Spanish is just as diverse, if not more so as there is much less cultural contact between South American countries than between the nations of the Anglosphere. And there is *considerably* more difference in accent between a Spaniard and a Mexican than between an American and even the most provincial of Englishmen. The Spanish of Suramerica is nearly two hundred years older than the English of North America.
Mandarin Chinese would also fit the bill here, with too many accents, dialects, and conventions to count. And they've consolidated their language considerably under Communism.
The countless languages of Imperial China is one of the reasons they developed an ideographic written language- it didn't rely on any spoken language to be understood and could be entirely universal to those who could spare the decade or two it took to become really literate.
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