Make a Vampire character who’s lived through several waves of the common language’s development and can’t let go if certain gramatical habbits from different time eras.
So like, thou ist a horrid creature, an absolute cur, but go off i guess
… can i use that phrase irl?
Absolutely you can and I encourage more uses of similar phrases that just completely fuck up the chronology of the english langauge. I wanna hear 15th century english mixed with surfer speak mixed with current age internet lingo like all the time.
Like this? Well my dude, seems like a weasel hath not such a deal of splean as you’re toss’d with. Chill already, you’re not valid.
You are an unrighteous, bastardly gullion. Heaven truly knows that thou art false as hell. When you die, I will face God and walk backwards into hell just so that I can beat your ass in the afterlife too.
I love the idea of a vampire who’s language travels back in time as they get pissed.
I grieve for thee in these trying times. Alexa play Despacito
Reading these is like literary whiplash
This whole post is gold, but the comment about the vampire’s dialect “devolving” into older and older periods when he’s angry stood out to me.
It’s a cinematic cliché for a person of any foreign nationality to revert to their native language when angry (I usually see it with Spanish-speaking characters), and my southern accent deepens as I get angrier.
It makes sense that an immortal character who saw the eras of his language change and evolve over time would speak more and more archaically as he got angrier.
Historical linguists decide to get especially ancient vampires pissed off in order to study ancient languages
are you telling me that if I get a 5000yo vampire angry enough I can directly test the glottalic theory?
you can make nearly any object into a good insult if you put ‘you absolute’ in front of it
example: you absolute coat hanger
as well u can just add ‘ed’ to any object and it’s sounds like you were really drunk
example: i was absolutely coat hangered last night
Meanwhile, “utter” works for the first (e.g., “you utter floorboard”) but somehow “utterly” doesn’t seem to work as well for the second (“I was utterly floorboarded”).
Utterly doesn’t work for drunk because it’s the affix for turning random objects into terms for *shocked*, obviously.
… huh. I thought that might just be the similarity to “floored”, and yet “I was utterly coat hangered” does seem to convey something similar.
I have to tell you, I am utterly sandwiched at this discovery.
Completely makes the phrase mean “super tired”.
“God, it’s been a long week, I am completely coat-hangered.”
Something is
Something is wrong with our language
Is it a glitch or a feature?
Feature
we don’t have anything like this in French and it offers a range of expressibility that I wish we could properly translate back. it is a feature, i concur
En Anglais, on ne dit pas “quatre vingt dix neuf”, on dit “ninety nine” qu'on pourrait traduire comme “Hurr durr, regardez mois, j'ai un système de numérotation fonctionnel” et je crois que c'est magnifique.
platoapproved asked:
Me, 300 feet from the ocean: I GOTTA WATCH THIS HOLD ON
platoapproved replied to your post “katherinebarlow replied to your post “katherinebarlow replied to…”
im also waiting eagerly and with dread for the deets
Apparently Erik Singer is controversial in the dialect coach community, a phrase I am writing here on my blog that really I think captures just how successfully I’ve burrowed into my niche interest lifestyle.
But the details of this were relayed to me in confidence, and in confidence I will keep them.
I think it’s valid for characters who have in lived a lot of places to have an accent that reflects those influences that doesn’t sound exactly like one accent from those specific places. (And there are regional variations!) In the book, he sounds Australian and a tiny bit Eastern European. I think that the main thing is for the actors to really commit, and from the little bits I’ve heard, they did. I also have my issues with Erik Singer, but that’s neither here nor there.
Yes yes yes Accents Chat!
The regional variations thing is something I think about a lot. I wonder if many people’s knee-jerk reaction against actors’ accents is because they’re just comparing it to one single gestalt they have. I remember many years ago a coworker’s friend bemoaning that Karen Gillan’s Scottish accent sounded fake, when she is in fact…Scottish. But she’s from Inverness, not Glasgow, so sounds different from say, James McAvoy. But these are both Scottish accents!
Oooooh wait, I’m nervous to have my husband spoken ill of, but like…what are the deets on Erik Singer.
katherinebarlow replied to your post “Hello I am here to ask for your hand in marriage after your many…”
As a dialect coach, I’d like to thank you for this post.
@katherinebarlow Oh my god thank YOU for your SERVICE! A real Professional, goodness if there’s anything from the trade you want the people to know, the floor is yours!
