Well?
Like they were all sucking on helium. This might be why the thought makes me giggle when I read that in the books.
I thought for sure there were examples of the High Speech in the books, but I can’t remember what they constituted off the top of my head.
I kind of thought they sounded like the West End of London accent, as opposed to the Cockney sound of the Low Speech. Or something like that.
As I recall, the High Speech is a kind of formal, grandiose English with a vaguely medieval flavor – phrases like, “Thankee-sai,” “Hile Gilead!” and “I cry your pardon, I have forgotten the face of my father.”
It’s also written in all caps. When Roland came to modern times, he had trouble reading our signs only because he had never seen lower-case letters before. I thought that was a neat concept, makes you go through the alphabet and try to figure out which letters would be hard to figure out.
Roland, you are like, so totally the last gunslinger, dude. You gotta, you know, like, find that guy. In black. The guy in black. You gotta find him. For, you know… whaddayacallit… uhhh… Gilead. Yeah, Gilead. You gotta find the guy -man- man in black for… uh… that thing that I just said. Okay? Awesome.
I always assumed it was a sort of bastard pidgin blend of mildly-archaic English and Elvish a la Tolkien.
What Drastic said. Like this: Quenya talk (.wav file)
In his novel The Folk of the Air, Peter Beagle has his thinly-disguised SCAdians speaking what one purist derides as “castle talk” – “It’s got no rules!”
Latin or old French (which had lots of Latin in it.)
Elvish? How cliche. Also doesn’t fit the series; the Gunslinger’s world is, or is somehow connected to, our world.
RickJay, the question is what we think it sounds like, not what it is or emulates. It’s a subjective question requiring a subjective answer.
I think it sounds like really bad roleplay. Anyone who has met up with “munchkins” in roleplay circles will know what I mean.
And our world isn’t connected to Middle-Earth??
Speak Middle English!
HUZZAH!