[Malcolm Armsteen]

A useful primer (I know you know this, Andy, but others may find it interesting):

[Youngian]

So Roman emperors sounded more like Italians than British Shakespearean actors bringing some gravitas to a tacky expensive epic. Gore Vidal, who script wrote one of those Hollywood Roman epics, noted the Brits likes to play Greeks to America’s imperial Rome in real life as well as on screen. ‘The British should know better than indulging in such foolishness,’ Vidal concluded.

On a similar line I heard that there was no association between pirates and West Country accents before Robert Newton played Long John Silver in the 1950s.

[MisterMuncher]

I remember when Fallout New Vegas* came out, a few people got very irritable that the Caesar's Legion** faction in-game were pronouncing Caesar with a hard "c", and various other entirely historically correct but unusual pronunciations rather than the ones they were used to. Generally, the sort of people who like to tell you how very clever they are

*Post-apocalyptic video game, very retro-futuristic in aesthetic, with a good few hours of anyone's time.
**For a game that tended towards shares of grey for factional mortality, having no truly angelic or evil groups in-timeline (beyond random raiders, who were at best just canon fodder anyway), the Legion were a rare example of a genuinely evil faction with no real motivation beyond terror and dominance.

[Bones McCoy]

The thing that's puzzled me about reconstructed languages.
How do we know what they sounded like.

See also Mel Gobson (sp) in Braveheart.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

It's complicated...

Off the top of my head:

There are modern evolutions of dead languages (eg Italian from Vulgar Latin). Using the patterns which have been established in that language (or group of languages) vowel and consonant shifts can be established (the Great Vowel Shift, Grimm's Law et al).

This is also relevant to the Champolleon's translation of the Rosetta Stone by comparison with modern Coptic which gave him the phonetic values of hieroglyphs, given the known IE shifts and Grimm.

By transcription into a known contemporary language (the translation of Cicero into Greek gives [kikero] so we know that in Classical Latin the 'c' was a hard consonant.

By comparison with the donor language in the case of loan words (though this is much more in evidence in Modern English (RP)).

Onomatopoeia. The sounds made by animals and things do not change over time, so even if the symbols for the phonemes of those words no longer match (for example, if transcribed from Ancient Greek cats go 'fif' not 'wow' we have a phonetic value for those words in antiquity.

[Cyclist]

Malcolm has the brief version.

It's *very* complicated... and utterly fascinating. Stephen Oppenheimer goes into the reconstruction of dead languages and the (as yet inaccurate, but improving) dating of language shifts and splits in some depth in his excellent book "The Origins of the British - a genetic detective story", which I am about 3/4 of the way through, and my mind is thoroughly boggled!

https://www.bradshawfoundation.com/brit ... ritish.php

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Oppenheimer is good.

[Boiler]

I remember when Fallout New Vegas* came out, a few people got very irritable that the Caesar's Legion** faction in-game were pronouncing Caesar with a hard "c", and various other entirely historically correct but unusual pronunciations rather than the ones they were used to.

Certainly in modern Italian, c followed by a would render the 'C' hard: if followed by e or i it's pronounced as though there's an h between the two letters, but to harden it you write an h between them - see the Italian spelling of kilogramme, made necessary because the Italian alphabet doesn't have a k in it...

[MisterMuncher]

Which is why my teeth itch when a few folk of my acquaintance talk about their "Bee-an-chee" bikes.

And yanks who shorten Campagnolo to "campy".

[kreuzberger]

Brushetta, that's the one that tips me over the edge. That and fucking lar-taay

Those deeply irritating Galbani commercials on LBC actually make a good point.

[Boiler]

Brushetta, that's the one that tips me over the edge. [/i]

I have an almost-irresistible urge to punch the lights out of anyone who says that in my earshot - and especially when they try and tell me I'm wrong.

Okay, I only got a grade C for my O-level Italian, but...

[kreuzberger]

Without a doubt!

My Italian is self-taught, having had a wee but and ben in rural Liguria where no speaka da lingo is just not a viable option if you want to get something fixed or wriggle out of totally fictitious fine from the Commune.

It is about at that middling O-level standard but I learned it on the spot from native speakers although I have been dug up in restaurants too for the hard SHKH sound, invariably by some snotty little twat who has never been within a thousand miles of Naples. I am somewhat milder in my reactions these days and find that a brief Kreuzberg death-stare is probably enough.

It wasn't always the case.

[Youngian]

No wonder the blue wall is collapsing

[Crabcakes]

Brushetta, that's the one that tips me over the edge. That and fucking lar-taay

Those deeply irritating Galbani commercials on LBC actually make a good point.

What I can't bear is people (often Americans, but increasingly UK foodies as well) who are talking in a perfectly normal way and then when they discuss Italian food a hardcore accent appears from nowhere. For example I was listening to a podcast the other day and as an aside they mentioned risotto. Only the person who mentioned it pronounced it Ahrrrrrrrrizzoh-toh, as if pronouncing it in such an absurd way gives him special insight into a pile of damp rice.

I suspect if he asks for an espresso it sounds like he's in the process of biting his own tongue off.

[Youngian]

Tiresome TV chefs go full Joe Dolcie when making Italian recipes.

Noticed Latino American actors in cop dramas over pronouncing Spanish names.

[Bones McCoy]

Brushetta, that's the one that tips me over the edge. That and fucking lar-taay

Those deeply irritating Galbani commercials on LBC actually make a good point.

What I can't bear is people (often Americans, but increasingly UK foodies as well) who are talking in a perfectly normal way and then when they discuss Italian food a hardcore accent appears from nowhere. For example I was listening to a podcast the other day and as an aside they mentioned risotto. Only the person who mentioned it pronounced it Ahrrrrrrrrizzoh-toh, as if pronouncing it in such an absurd way gives him special insight into a pile of damp rice.

I suspect if he asks for an espresso it sounds like he's in the process of biting his own tongue off.

Meekro-wavvie

[kreuzberger]

Brushetta, that's the one that tips me over the edge. That and fucking lar-taay

Those deeply irritating Galbani commercials on LBC actually make a good point.

What I can't bear is people (often Americans, but increasingly UK foodies as well) who are talking in a perfectly normal way and then when they discuss Italian food a hardcore accent appears from nowhere. For example I was listening to a podcast the other day and as an aside they mentioned risotto. Only the person who mentioned it pronounced it Ahrrrrrrrrizzoh-toh, as if pronouncing it in such an absurd way gives him special insight into a pile of damp rice.

I suspect if he asks for an espresso it sounds like he's in the process of biting his own tongue off.

[MisterMuncher]

I had a head chef who did the heavy Italian accent thing.

Once he had a brigade over-pronouncing everything in suitable native accents it started to slip away. Haggis may have been the turning point.

[Boiler]

So apparently civil servants who work from home should have their pay cut because they are getting a de facto pay rise over their commuting colleagues.

I swear that very notion was the subject of a fucking Dilbert strip a few weeks ago.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Is that a Sunak idea?