So I was watching Troy last night and couldn’t help notice one thing - The Greek accents in Troy weren’t the same as the Greek accents in My Big Fat Greek Weding.
How-a come they-a don’t-a speak-a like-a this in Gladiator? (Except for Maximus “The Spaniard” who should speeek like diis senior)
Or why is a psuedo-English accent the all-purpose accent for every occasion?
Long story short - three thousand years of linguistic drift can do a lot to the accent of a region.
The Trojan War took place around 1200BCE in Asia Minor. My Big Fat Greek Wedding took place around 2003 CE in America. That’s like asking why George W. Bush doesn’t sound like King George III.
Gladiator took place around 200 CE in Germany/Palestine(?)/Rome.
The pseudo-English thing. :Shrug: You got me.
The pseudo-english thing is a long time convention to convey that the story took place a lone time ago.
The actors are giving a you wink and a nod and telling you, “hey man, we’re ancients. You can tell 'cause we’re talking funny.”
Why, specifically, do you think an upper-class Roman citizen with a family estate in Hispania should speak anything, at all, like a sterotyped modern-day Mexican?
Why should they have a foreign accent when they’re speaking their native tongue?
I always thought the pseudo-English accent basically meant, “Dudes, this is serious. We are ACTING.”
Kindofa Shakespearean Theatre kinda thing.
Well, yeha. Think about it. For centuries, the only popular exposure English-speaking countries had to ancient Greeks and Romans was through Shakespeare and his ilk. If all you know of Rome is Julius Caesar, then of course you’ll think of them speaking with theatrical British accents.
Modern Greek and Italian characters speak in those accents because they’re Ethnic and Foreign. The Greeks and Romans in movies speak in British accents because they were Civilized. It’s like if you ever studied Western Civilization in high school. Western Civilization started with the Jews and Assyrians, then moved to the Greeks and Romans, then France and England, then just England, and then finally to the US.