I don't think i much enjoy languages beyond what i can use them for. Nor do i even really get proper language aquistion beyond monkey see monkey do repetition and immersion absorbation. I could probably never hang with you serious language geeks. Like unless the great vowel famine or whatsit of shakespear times starts affecting my ability to shit post or watch netflix i'm probably not going to make note of it. Wonder if this makes me a language barbarian? I can only look in at you modern word men using tools and lighting word fires and shit. Different worlds
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Sorry, sorry, I know the video was meant to be a gag, but historical jokes have to hit the sweet spot for me.
They have to be funny and accurate, If you only hit one of those I'll appreciate the intention but I won't clap.And don't feel bad Wolfwood, you can still sit at our table.
I actually learned about the great vowel shift because I learned about Shakespear's OP. I'm usually much more of a learning-a-language-by-immersion type of guy.Also, I talked about it so I might aswell leave a video here. Enjoy an old english accent.
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Saving the vid to my favourites, thanks! It's all very fascinating. I wonder if the pronunciation makes it any harder to understand, or is it entirely on the usage of archaic words. I heard someone that people who have English as a first language often find Shakespeare difficult to understand. The Hungarian translation has no such problem.
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From what they* talk in other videos, tons of people go up to them after the plays to tell them "My granma still pronounces these words, or letters, like you did in the play" or "In my hometown we still speak like that". They believe that since Shaskepear and his company were based in London, they ended up absorving, in one way or another, all of the accents in Great Britian.
Being a non-native but fluent speaker, I say people's troubles with understanding Billy Shakes is the vocabulary. After I got used to a couple of sounds uncommon in modern english, Shakesperean pronounciation became just another accent (altough a very lovely one) but I still need a diccionary. The guy knew all the words and even invented some expressions, so some words fell out of common use and some of them were not even common back then. I'd compare it to a rap song from the 90's, those already have expressions that feel out of date today, because rappers had/have no qualms in using everything they know to make a rhyme (words, expressions, figures of speech, references to literature, mythology or politics, etc)
*By "they" I mean this chap, actor Ben Crystal, and his father, a liguistics professor that studies this subject and was part of the original project to recreate a Shakepear's play as acurate as possible.
They seem to be the unoffcial flag-bearers of this aspect of Shakespear, the original sound and rhythm of his texts. -
Oh, right, for a sec I forgot pronunciation is irrelevant when you're reading the plays. From your post I take it that authentic pronunciation in modern theater is a rarity.
It's all too fascinating. Reminds me of a couple of videos where someone tried to demonstrate how people of Ancient Rome talked Latin.
Which in turn reminds me of a recent discussion I read. There's this video game, Thief, where a group of enemies basically speak a sort of pseudo-archaic form of English with a lot of "thees" and "thous". When it came time to translate these dialogs, the different languages came up with different solutions (some utilizing old bible translations of their respective languages to get that crispy "ye olde" feel). Believe it or not, there was even a Hungarian translation, with our no-longer used past perfect tense. A forums discussion on the topic had an (I presume Hungarian) guy saying that our language didn't really change all that much "in the past thousand years". The absolute first thing that came to my mind is this little gem.
The oldest known text fully written in Hungarian, basically. Now as a Hungarian I can safely say that understanding it is nothing short of a challenge not just because of the archaic words sprinkled all over, but because some prepositions and suffixes have such a weird placement and form that it's hard to piece together what the sentence would look like today. It also has that past perfect tense we no longer use but I find endearingly charming.
Now I'm fully aware that written texts are always a few steps behind spoken words in terms of actuality. I'm also aware that using this Hungarian in a video game would've been a bit too much (you do want the players to understand what the enemies are babbling about, mostly), but to say that the language hasn't really changed since we first said "Dibs!" on the piece of land located in the Carpathian Basin is a bit inaccurate. There's also an updated version of the text that's fairly easily understandable to today's average Joe Hungarian but still has that tome-y feel to it. I do believe the game's translation used some of the things found in this (although cannot say if they used this text as a reference), and I look back fondly on playing it.
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It's usually a special event, since most people expect to hear modern english when they go to a theather, but it seems even actors like to do it because it makes texts easier to read and interpret. Makes sense, right? It was written to be said a certain way without caring or guessing how the language would change over time. I could try my best to parrot my favorite infos and anecdotes of OP but you'll be better served with these short videos.
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!I've always like the bits and pieces of Shakespeare I saw, but when I found out about this I made a special room in my heart for it, even the prose sounds like a poem.
From what you describe of hungarian it's evolution sounds similar to portuguese, we can grab the first few texts and get half of it easily and the rest takes a bit of an effort. It's easier if we try to read it out loud because altough some spellings changed, the sound is always close to some regional accent. Stuff may sound old-fashioned but it is mostly understandable.
I'm talking about the european variant, my own. If you cross the ocean to south america, africa or even some spots in asia you get some very different accents because those in those places portuguese mixed with the local languages. Funnily enough, they always keep some grammar rule, word, or way of speaking that we've practically abandoned in europe.That last bit about the differences about spelling and sound reminded me about a funny Shakesperean fact. The man was well aware of the differences so he signed his name in with many different spellings but when read out loud it always sounded like Shakespear.
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I'm studying Korean again (stopped for a few months) and started studying Latin.
I've found a pretty nice Youtube channel called latintutorial and I've also downloaded Duolingo, although I expect I will get bored with the latter soon. The former, however, goes deeper into the grammar and nuances of the language and I find it absolutely fascinating.
" on the same channel. Suddenly, it all made sense. The Latin "r" is basically the same as the Hungarian one, so that's why I had virtually not difficulty pronouncing it.* This, in turn, got me thinking, that perhaps identifying a "Hungarian-English" accent can be done via the "r" sound one makes. It makes sense that a Hungarian studying English would not soften their "r"-s, at least not in the beginning when everything is new and a bit confusing. Similarly to how we tend to say "d" instead of "th", because we have to twist our mouth into strange shapes to be able to produce something resembling that wonderful sound.
Right at the beginning, with the pronunciation of the alphabet's letters, I came across something interesting. The video said that the Latin "r" is one of the trickier sounds to pronounce for those new (and not so new) to the language. I seemingly had no problem with it, so I went ahead and watched the video titled "On a different note, I'm still trying to figure out a way to keep my Swedish and Finnish from deteriorating too much in the time I'm not actively studying them. Perhaps I should go back to reading the news or maybe random articles.
*Note: as far as I know, this "r" sound is one of the last sounds children learn to make. Because it is kinda difficult when you haven't yet figured it out. Kids pronounce a sort of "y" sound (as in yes) until they do get the hang of it.
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For some reason my phone always asks if I'd like to read a webpage in French. You all type so pretty.
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Do programming languages count as knowing a language?
If so, I know mainly Java along with C++, but I'm still pretty average at them, so much to learn before I become a master.