[MR] Persona Development

[Davitt il Bigollo da Pisa]

At 02:21 PM 5/1/2008, Steven Chang wrote:
>Ahh, so thats how it is, I guess its been a Burr under my saddle because
>I've been doing it all wrong. I guess if it isn't Brogue, don't fix it.

It's even worse than that. Lowland Scots 
(Edinburgh, etc) is a dialect of English 
(reportedly still spoken in the home by most 
Scots in that area). Highland Scots, spoken in 
the North, is a type of Geelic. The English we 
speak today, is based on what used to be the 
London dialect. So, if we really wanted to play, 
we would have to know several languages or 
dialects. I would have to know Tuscan, a dialect 
of Italian, and I don't know whether it's still 
spoken, as well as an old version of modern Italian.

I'm told that Elizabethan English is a hard 
accent for modern Americans, though there are 
recordings to teach it. Older versions of English 
are even more different from modern English. Get 
back to Chaucer (died 1400), and there are two 
pronunciations of his London dialect, one based 
on French and one on Anglo-Saxon, a Celtic 
language. A contemporary of Chaucer wrote "Piers 
Plowman" in a different dialect of English, and 
you can see that it is even more different from the modern English we speak.

And it's the same in other languages. In Eastern 
France the last German speakers are dying out. In 
Lorraine they spoke a "Low German" dialect, which 
I've variously seen traced back to Frankish 
(spoken by Charlemagne), or the language of the 
Allemands. In Alsace, a few miles to the south, 
the dialect is a variant of modern German, though 
someone who speaks modern German will have trouble.

In France itself, there are dialects. Breton is a 
Celtic language, and speakers can understand or 
be understood by the Welsh. Occitane has also 
been mentioned, though Provencal, spoken near the 
Italian border, is still different.

Most of these are no longer spoken, or no longer 
spoken by many people, and are understood only by 
scholars (and then mostly in their written forms).

Thus, "speaking forsoothly" is a compromise. It 
tries to get rid of the most distinctive 
grammatical structures of modern English (though 
not usually the accent), throw in a bit of 
vocabulary from the Tudors (Elizabeth I), and 
that's it, except for the very ambitious.

If you have an accent, you can just claim that 
it's the accent from a couple of provinces 
further East or West, and change the subject. 
Indeed, if I were to speak in a stage-Italian 
accent, I might give offense to someone. And it wouldn't be Tuscan, anyhow.

So I speak English with my New York accent, and 
if anyone asks, I'll say it's because I'm from 
Livorno, originally from Pisa, and that's how we all speak. Do you gainsay me?
:-)


--

Davitt il Bigollo da Piƒa
Goldƒmith's Agent in Livorno
Fa¢or in the lands of the Mughuls
Coral and Emeralds from Inde and Serendip

Checky argent and azure, two cheƒs rooks or in 
chief, a cheƒs knight or, a three-turret tower or in baƒe