Igor
What British accent does Sophie Ellis-Bextor speaks?
Please view here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4NlrDw2i4MThat's the question :) Actually, the Czars of what epoch are you asking about? In short, I think, we may speak about the dividing border-line of the mid of the 18-th century. Before that was in use the old-Russian language, and after for the reason of some globalization (not in the full sense of it, but in a kind of some influences) in came up closer to the modern one. So, the Russian Czars (Ivan the Terrible - from 1533, earlier were Princes) before that period had spoken old Russian language, with a bit different grammar, words, and pronounciation. We may track the grammar and old texts (just for your reffeence, there were even more Cyrillic letters in it, and were singular, duple and plural). But how had sounded the phonetic, that is the matter buried in ages. The same we may ask, how had spoken the ancient Romans (the phonec of "old Latin" in the Mel Gibson movie about Christ is a version of the morden Itaian ). I tried to search something sutable in youtubs, but could stop only on these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6BOrQ0QT3U and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAbT7qH6-yY. In the firstone a guy tries to read the "Saga of Prince Igor's Regiment" doing that by the old text. In the second - a grandma speaks in a language she used to suck with her mothers milk. If you pull up your imagination together with a solid solemnity of the voice, I think you may get the idea, how the Czars had spoken.
Starting from Peter III (1761) the Russian Czars had no Russian blood in their veins. So, if they spoke, they did it with a foregn accent (Gernam mainly). I think, their phonetic became sounded like pure Russian since Alexander I (1801). But that was almost the modern languare.
2016年4月3日 16:01
回答 · 21
1
Sophie was born and grew up in London - this is obvious from her accent. One typical feature of London speech that she has is the weakening, and in some cases even dropping, of end and middle 't' sounds. For example, the way she says 'thought' sounds more like 'thaw', ending in a 'w' rather than a clear 't'. She says 'button' with a glottal stop in the middle, so that it sounds more like 'buh-un'.
Speakers of American English often say 'The difference between US and GB English is that British people always pronounce their 't's very strongly'. If you think that's true, just listen to a Londoner talk!
2016年4月3日
I think, you may catch the idea of "Russian posh" watching movies dated before 40-50's. The actors of that time was still baring a fluff of "posh", as they were considered as an elite, lived on a good alovances, some were aloved to cross the "Iron Curtain", some even were from a sort of a low aristocratic breed (which they tried not to anounce as much as they could). So, they kept the traditions of the language, even if they were playing in their films roles of a proletariat. Now, the traditions are vanishing farther and farther away. The nowadays "elite" sometime even has started to use a sort of prison-criminal argo, their speach lost the way of solemnity. Here has appeared a lot of mockery intonations, just to make the language sound not seriously. People play with words, make a sort of puns, as the life is getting unstabile. So, the language mirrors the light attitude to everything.
Here I wanted to refer you to an funny 2 minute apisode from a movie. The plot is about a detective, who cought a pocket thief. The detecive (played by Vladimir Vysotsky) has a good clear Russian ponounciation (you may consider it as sort of "posh", if you like). The thief (played by Stanislav Sadalky) speaks as a criminal, but he also imitates here an individual articulation defect, pronouncing SF instead of SH, or TF instead of CH, and does it with a heavily blaring of all phonetic. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stn5Ae0fj3w
Vysotsky is famous for his songs - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPyVnM1MVQ8&list=PLsn39L4waDsZi9dMHtkRTjNFrhFfoMvA0
2016年4月7日
That's fascinating, Igor. So the proletarian revolution of 1917 did not kill off the posh accent of Czarist Russia.
2016年4月7日
I think, mainly the very phonetic of Russian did not change within last hundred years. Here is the episode with some words of Nicholas II: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpEEwZBcmJg on the parade.
His pronounciation here has not got got so much difference of what we can hear today in "good Russian". But some words and phrases are different. For example, here the Czar says (at the timing of 1:49) "Thank you, my dear fellow brathers for such a wonderful parade!" That sound in an old fashioned way today.
Actually, because we do not have audio records of how people spoke earlier, we can only guess, how they did it.
As for the upper class, people spoke it in way as it did the English aristocracy - in a posh way, grammatically correct with distinct pronouncing of all sounds and not using slang or expressions of the inferior classes. Some, having been learned also to speak French since their childhood, used to pronounce the R sound in a French bur way.
2016年4月6日
Isn't that fascinating? They used English! It's not very useful to have been executed, is it? Princess Marina lived in England until her death in 1968. She was alive and speaking the languages. That was more useful. The real question is: do people, or do you, know how the Russian upper classes spoke before the Revolution, and how different is that accent from today's "good Russian"?
2016年4月6日
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