Do linguists specializing in ancient Germanic languages know enough to reconstruct a basic dialogue in any of the ancient Germanic languages? If so it was disappointing to hear only modern German being used in the series Barbarians in contrast to a pretty accurate usage of authentic classical Latin/Vulgar by the Romans.
I would think that a basic dialogue in Gothic could be done with some certainty. Gothic versions of the New Testament are known, plus a few other documents. Combine what is known from texts with reconstruction, and you have a pretty good idea of how the language was spoken.
The biggest problem is that there is very little documented of most of these languages. Old English, one of the best documented, has about 3,000 texts, comprising 3 million words. Gothic doesn’t have enough to completely reconstruct the language, mostly translation or glosses of the New Testament. Other languages have only fragments.
Loved Barbarians, but I can see why the producers preferred to have at least one dialogue language in the show that a German-speaking audience wouldn’t need subtitles for. Even so, AIUI, there are a few archaic Germanic terms used in the show, such as “Reik” rather than “König” for a tribal chieftain.
A Youtuber has done a video discussing the reconstruction of Roman-era Germanic and comparing it to the German of Barbarians, but I cannot speak to its accuracy.
Tell me about it. I was so disappointed forty-harrumph years ago to learn that my community college didn’t even offer a course in Conversational Ancient Germanic.
Just note that plenty of linguists have tried their hands at reconstructing very, very basic dialogues in proto-Indo-European.
I would assume this is because (1) modern German sounds sufficiently badass to English audiences to be associated with Barbarians, (2) the Nazi past means German, or German accents, have a tradition of being used for villains in films, which is close enough to depict Barbarians, but (3) you can still assume a certain degree of familiarity among at least parts of your audience with German to give them the occasional satisfactory “Hey, I understood a few words of that” feeling. Plus, German-speaking actors are easy to find.
?? Why should we assume that the language choices for the German series Barbarians were made primarily with English-speaking audiences in mind? The show was one of five new German series greenlighted by Netflix in 2018, and it was produced by a German company and helmed by German filmmakers.
The primary intended audience for the series is German-speaking viewers, and the dialogue of the historically-Germanic characters is modern German because that’s what those viewers will most readily understand. All non-German-speaking viewers are going to have to make do with subtitles or dubbing, and wouldn’t necessarily recognize the difference between modern German and ancient Germanic anyway.
You’re right about the part that for a German filmmaker, modern German is much less of a pain in the ass than ancient Germanic in terms of being comprehensible and easily memorized for modern German actors, though. But I very much doubt that the ancient-Germanic-vs.-modern-German decision was in any way significantly influenced by the issue of how English-speaking audiences would react to it.
J.R.R. Tolkien was keenly interested in reconstructing Gothic from existing Germanic languages. He composed at least one poem in his reconstructed Gothic language, Bagme Bloma. There’s no way to tell for certain how close his reconstruction is to actual Gothic unless more original Gothic texts were to be found.
I would disagree with that, but let’s just agree to disagree since we’re both just guessing. In my view, exportability to international markets was certainly on the producers’ minds. Also, the show has Latin dialogue for Romans, which to me indicates that the choice of language was deliberate and not simply a result of being a German production.
This tangent is getting more CS than FQ, so I’ll just say that I completely agree that the creators of Barbarians deliberately chose Latin dialogue for the Latin-speaking characters in the show. AIUI the Latin, unlike the German, is subtitled rather than dubbed in all versions of the show, and it’s very clear that viewers in general are supposed to experience the Latin dialogue from the “barbarian” perspective as a “foreign” language.
But I still think it’s obviously absurd to suggest that the creators chose modern German rather than archaic Germanic for the non-Latin dialogue primarily because they thought that choice would appeal more to English-speaking audiences.
As I noted, the average native-English-speaking audience member isn’t going to be able to tell the difference betweeen modern German and ancient Germanic well enough to make any of your suggested reasons for that choice a significant factor. The average native-German-speaking audience member, on the other hand, will understand the German much more easily than the Germanic, as will the native-German-speaking screenwriters, actors, directors, and pretty much everybody else involved in making the show.
Add to all that the fact that (and here we veer back into FQ territory) archaic Germanic dialects in general, including the (non-Gothic) one(s) these tribes would have spoken, are still comparatively poorly understood even by linguistic specialists. A truly historically accurate form of archaic Germanic for the purposes of this show would have had to be speculatively reconstructed at the cost of immense labor before anybody could even start to try teaching modern-German-speaking screenwriters, actors, directors, etc. to imitate it.
The notion that all those issues wouldn’t be self-evidently way more important to modern German filmmakers than the speculative hypothesis that English-speaking audiences would allegedly feel more comfortable with modern German dialogue that they can’t understand than with ancient Germanic dialogue that they can’t understand just seems… bizarre.
Just as an aside, I’ve never seen an English movie set in the Middle Ages where they use the accurate languages, Middle English and Anglo-Norman, even though both those languages are well-known from the historical record. Anglophone moviegoers wouldn’t understand those languages and they’d all have to be dubbed. I assume it’s the same for the makers of this series, made in Germany for a German audience.
I was just about to write the opposite, whereby I think Anglophone audiences in recent decades have come to expect for authentic and accurate portrayals of ancient/medieval life and languages. I’m thinking of Mel Gibson movies like “The Pasion of the Christ” or the Britiish TV series? “Spartacus”. Of course you can find fault with some of the usages of Latin or Greek or Aramaic etc, but neverthess, the trend (at least when it comes to American and British films) is for more authenticity.
Any movies or tv programmes set in England where Middle English or Norman French is used?
For example, I think all Robin Hood movies have been in modern English?
I don’t know offhand. I know that recent movies on the Vikings like ‘The Northman’ starring Alexander Skarsgård, have been quite well received by scholars for its fairly accurate portrayal of Vikings and the language used.
I agree Schnitte. From having spent some time traveling through Germany in the last several years, my impression of the Germans is that they are very cosmopolitan and outward looking. Manyn have traveled extensively and have had several years of education abroad in the US or Britain. Many speak English quite natively or near-natively and are of course exposed to all the trends you see in the Anglophone sphere. So that prompted me to wonder why there wasn’t some attempt to take a stab at some reasonable reconstruction of what Cheruci may have sounded like. I could have helped the series I think. I just feels like an anti-climax when I hear only standard German. Just to be clear I do enjoy reading, listening and speaking German. I just thought it would be a welcome change to hear authentic German as spoken by the Cherusci or any other tribe (of the classical Roman period) if possible.
Couldn’t those movie Vikings just speak Icelandic? I understand that, except for lots of new words, Icelandic is largely unchanged from Old Norse.
My sense is that the movie was committed to historical accuracy in every respect, including the language ie medieval Icelandic Norse. I know Icelanders can read medieval Icelandic fairly easily but I can’t tell you how different it is from modern Icelandic. Is is as far removed as modern English is from Old English or as close as it s to Shakespeare’s English? I don’t know. Icelanders learn the runes/Futhark in school, as do the Scandinavians.
Check out the YouTube channel of Jackson Crawford, an expert in Northern Germanic languages. He would disagree about the degree of similarity between modern Icelandic and Old Norse, a belief which is fostered by the tendency for modern speakers to pronounce Old Norse as if it were modern Icelandic.
Also the observation that modern Icelanders can read the sagas in the original creates a misleading impression that the language is more conservative than it is. They can read those texts because they learn to.