They are obsessed with his voice, from what I have seen anyway.

Hockey and making fun of the US. My provinces excesses/obsessions are also weed and extreme sports(snowboarding/skiing/falling with style).
More of the way he speaks.

That is awesome. Never thought of Newfoundland slang before.


Thought you'd like that.

When I was over there, I only remember one time that I couldn't understand who I was talking to. I was trying to buy a cell phone and the guy just lost me with speed and brogueness. I remember the word "Nokia" specifically being damn near gibberish.

Robin Wiliams is great for stand up

Yeah a lot of letters get replaced or excluded when talking outside a formal manner, besides that it's just the accent.
I've often wondered what the whole world would sound like if they all spoke English, with all the different accents etc

Anyone found those Hollywood portraited French accents really annoying? My French teachers whether or not they are good in English, they don't talk like that.

Have you guys found other Hollywood accents that differed a lot with the real accents you know.

Mel Gibson is doesn't Scottish...

Kevin Costner's English accent was awesome. "Howdy, y'all, I'm from Nadding Ham."

I've had French teachers who didn't sound French either, compared to them many American actors aren't even that bad.

What often bothers me is that supposedly Dutch people in Hollywood films usually speak English with a German accent.

Yeah, it is annoying, but then again I'm not really objective. I'm not as annoyed by the fake accents as I am by the stereotyping of non-Americans in Hollywood movies, though. If a character has a vaguely European accent (be it French, German, English, Russian or whatever), half of the time you can bet they're going to be the bad guy. Really annoying after a while.

edit: an example of a phony French character with a fake accent would be "Michel" in Hancock, the scene is on youtube but I can't give a link because of the language used.

I'm annoyed that ancient Romans and ancient Greeks are always given English accents in films.

Julius Caesar should sound like an Italian - not like Daniel Craig.

I'm annoyed that aliens are always given American accents. They should sound like aliens.

Romans didn't speak Italian either, and I like Daniel Craig's accent.

edit: Ninja'd by someone with a better sense of humour than me.

I would rather have them speak normal, then having English speaking people running around doing there thing with a fake accent. If you want an accent make it authentic at least.

Their accent was close to Italian. I was part of a Latin camp where we had Latin poetry read to us with proper pronunciation. It has a pseudo-Italian cadence. Nothing like how it's taught. Semper ubi sub ubi.

If aliens learned English by listening to all of the TV programs we've beamed into space, they'd start off with a baseline American accent, wouldn't they? We've saturated the non-Earthling media market.

What's your definition of "normal"? English sounds pretty normal to me.

I've seen loads of WWII movies where the germans spoke american. I am sure that I'm not the only one who finds that sorta strange, and I doubt they do it for any other reason than making it easier for english speakers to understand, even though it means throwing realism out of the movie.

I can get over this though if the movie is good, just wanted to post this since we've already decided that ancient romans and greeks speak british, and aliens speak american. Can't say I'm too fond of movies where non-english speakers suddenly speak british or american, especially not if they are movies about actual historical events.

American, British, Canadian, and Austrailian... don't the Irish speak English too?

...Welsh, Jamaican, South African, Indian...

After re reading my posts I know what I meant, if someone speaks english they shouldn't try and give themselves a fake accent for a movie, but if some Italian guy could fill the part and he has the accent then hire him.

Given that I'm English, I meant normal for me is English spoken with an English accent.

They wouldn't be able to learn our language just from watching us speak. In order to learn any language, a conversation has to take place. You have to say something or hold up an object and have them respond to it. If you hold up a ball and they say the same thing every time you hold it up, you can safely assume that what they said was ball in their language.

/Geek Rant

Actually nobody knows for sure what it sounded like. Modern Church Latin is quite different from later Roman Latin, which was again very different from the Latin spoken in the late Republic. There is no such thing as a 'proper' Latin pronunciation, the best you'll be able to get is an educated guess made by linguists.

Uh. . .well. . .

We have computers than can break coded messages by using numerical algorithms. Some colleges are trying to apply them to ancient languages.

If aliens reached Earth they must have attained a technological level that enables faster than light travel. You'd figure they'd also have computers capable of deciphering our speech through context cues, pattern-recognition, and similar algorithms.

/uber-geek-counter-rant

EDIT:



I was taught that Latin was still a spoken language when early French developed. Some early Frenchmen wrote transliterations of Latin into French. Scholars 'know' how early Medieval French sounded, so they were able to piece Latin pronunciations together.

Additionally, since it formed the basis of all Romance language, once would guess it sounded closer to Spanish/French/Italian than Germanic/English.

I first saw Schindler's List in Germany, dubbed into German. It was really distracting when I finally saw the original version and all the actors were speaking English with fake German or Polish accents. But normally if it's done decently well I don't mind. If a movie's good I don't mind subtitles, otherwise I'd rather the actors spoke English so you can just focus on the story.

In the movie The Eagle, the director deliberately had Romans speaking with American accents and Britons using an English accent. Something about Americans being the new imperialists or something. They also used Scots Gaelic to stand in for Pictish. Not very historically accurate, but interesting to listen to anyway.

American isn't a language...

And there are tons of WWII movies that have Germans speaking English, but the best ones don't, like Saving Private Ryan.