This article is a hodgepodge, conflating English Received Pronunciation with "a British accent", England with Britain, and English with British. It would take a week to edit it to sort out all the misunderstandings and eject all the blind ignorance. Despite the "-ise", it were probly written by a yank.
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I think it's important to remember that this is more a trope for American media. British productions, of course, have "British accents," which is a term us "yanks" use to avoid saying "English accent" (because we speak English, with our own accents) "English English," or the pedantic "ERP." The point of this trope is that even in American productions they have it as a matter of course. Remember, this is an article about the faux-British "classical accent," not English as is spoken in the UK.
That being said, it is a very messy article and could use some cleaning up. But it needs to be about the classical movie accent, not UK dialects. If it really is that important, than we should just agree on a single term to be consistently used throughout the article.
Agreed. It also seems fairly biased against those of us who don't speak with US accents and thus get jerked out of our willing suspension of disbelief every time we hear an American accent in a setting where no American accent would ever have been used. American may be the default accent to some people, but to most of the world it means that every time a character with an anachronistic American accent opens his or her mouth it immediately becomes clear that it's a modern American actor speaking, not some real Ancient Roman.
@Uinen: Really? The Ancient Romans didn't speak English at all, so technically it is not any less correct to have them speak with an American accent than with any other. Which is kind of the entire point of the article.
I was going to whinge about the use of British for English. Imagine Caesar speaking like Gorbals Glaswegian !
Hal of the Modern English lexicon is Laitn in origin, with the King James English being closer to it then modern American. So using it for Rome isn't all that unjustifiable.
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This trope is more about accents than word choice.
Both English varieties are nowhere near as close to Latin as the romance languages anyway.
Edited by 174.29.37.238 Fight. Struggle. Endure. Suffer. LIVE.
Can we lose that bit about how Romanised Britons "founded the country of Wales"? That whole part just makes me want to weep blood every time I read it.
It's super effective.
- Firefly used this to a degree: all the lower-class characters speak with Southern American accents, whereas the higher-class characters, usually the crew's enemies, speak with softer American accents. Particular exceptions are Niska, who is vaguely eastern European, and the charmingly east-London Badger (played by Mark Sheppard).
- Given that Chinese is also shown to be a fairly widespread language in the 'Verse (though not native to any of the featured characters), this is likely less an example of this trope than an artifact of the languages and cultures brought from Earth That Was.
I have Firefly still on my to-watch list, but aren't they already speaking, you know, English? With American accents? How the hell does this fit?
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Good point. Like the Vorkosigan Saga, it's a (mostly) Eternal English setting and they've kept contemporary thoughts on what counts at a posh accent and what doesn't. Hmm, that would make it "not an example", wouldn't it?
Hodor
In film (as a friend in film told me) this trope is termed "the Classical Movie Accent." Might be a bit clearer of a name than the current one.
no such thing as a 'caribbean' accent, and finding that little piece of nonsense in there is pretty ironic considering that the trope is...bitching about accents
With a new monarch in Britain, should this now be called "The King's Latin" now?
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