I’m a little late to the party, but I’ve been watching Spartacus (the TV version) on Netflix. Great fun, lots of eye-candy for all, but their use of language is getting very annoying.
Does latin really have no synonyms (or pronouns, apparantly)?
No-one is ever weaponless, or without excuse, for example. It’s always “absent weapon” and “absent excuse” etc.
Is there no verb ‘to be’ in latin? Nobody is Roman, they “stand roman”, they ‘stand’ anything that they might otherwise be. They stand hungry, they stand a senator, and so on.
Characters never speak, or say, or tell anything. They only “break words”.
Oh, and they all seem to be absent pronouns whenever they stand breaking words.
If they were striving for historical accuracy in any other respect, I might let it pass. But probably not, because it’s so over-laboured.
[Mods, feel free to put this in the Pit, where it probably belongs, or even in GQ, although a factual answer to the historical question of latin vocab seems irrelevant in a modern entertainment.]
I’m like you - I came to this series late, and I’m currently about to start Season 3.
I don’t know if the language is accurate or not - my guess is not - but personally, I love it: it adds to the show’s bold, exaggerated sense of heightened reality. It’s a live-action comic, far above our ordinary human vernacular. These are strong, decisive, manly men and womanly women - who has time for pronouns when you have faces to slice off?
Besides, where else could you hear lines like “Put cock in ass”?
I noticed that they never say “Thank you”, they say “Gratitude”. They never say “I’m sorry”, they say “Apology”. Also the lack of articles (a, an, the,). I think they tried to replicate some of the quirks they picked up from a freshman-level Latin class that their ex-roommate once took.
My theory is that they try to portray everything from the point of view of a slave, where you are a stranger in a strange land, and even your closest companions speak in what, to you, is a foreign language.
One way of building a unique, distinctive fictional world is to have its characters speak in an unusual way. It’s the reason for the lack of contractions in Damon Runyon, the cowboy speak on Firefly, or basically every line written by Tarantino, Wes Anderson or the Coen Brothers.
I loved the show. To me the mannered speaking was a way of showing it was set in ancient Roman times while still being easy to understand by an English speaker with no knowledge of Latin.
Fair points, Alessan, (I held back from noting they have no synonyms for ‘cock’, being unsure of the finer points of etiquette here, but by gum they say ‘cock’ an awful lot too). And I stand in gratitude to mbh, I was momentarily absent memory of those additional examples
But I loved the language of the Coen’s True Grit, for example, and similar idiosyncratic styles in books and films/tv. Spartacus and his cohort, unfortunately, just annoy me.
There’s a Star Trek: Voyager episode (one of the better ones, in that it doesn’t suck) called “Nemesis” in which Chakotay gets entangled with a humanoid species who speak affected English that is noticeably different from modern standard, though perhaps not as elaborate as Spartacus (let alone Shakespeare). I liked it; it’s actually jarring and distracting when alien characters casually use English idioms.
I agree. If you tried to have the characters speaking what sounds naturally to us, they’d be using modern idioms which would be wildly anachronistic to the setting.
Oh, I’m not disputing the funtional and aesthetic purpose of constructing an internally consistent patois in period pieces or to portray alien civilisations (although as noted, they weren’t really going for historical accuracy or even realism with Spartacus). I’d just like to see it done with the flair of the remake of True Grit rather than something half-remembered from, as noted by mbh, “a freshman-level Latin class that their ex-roommate once took”. And really, even then, my gripe is that they seem to have decided on a couple of phrases that will do the work well enough and then repeat them ad nauseum.
As an aside, I spent a couple of years as a pro PBM GM (quasi-mediaeval setting) and had to keep constantly in mind that so many of the phrases I might type would be, as you say, wildly anachronistic. But there’s plenty of room between glaring modernisms and tiresome repetition of a handful of “that sounds latiny” phrases generated one afternoon in the writers’ room.
I’ve never seen the show, but it sounds like the writers are trying to use Latin-derived words instead of Germanic ones. Probably to remind you that they’re speaking Latin and what you’re seeing is a “translation”.
I love the use of language in Spartacus, it’s one of my favorite aspects of the show. It makes it sound surrealistic and foreign in a way that’s immersive, and yet eminently understandable. If the show used modern, traditional dialogue it would lose a lot of atmosphere.
Incidentally, the show is really good, for anyone who hasn’t seen it. The first 3 or 4 episodes is kind of rough - you get the impression that it’s just going to be mindless violence porn - but it really takes off with intrigue and politics and becomes a legitimately very good show, definitely worth watching.
I don’t know, the gimmick sounds good to me. Or at least I’m happy to hear they’re actually making an effort. I do recall, however, someone once complaining that the show (I think it was Sparticus) had a slave’s head was tatooed with “FUGITIVUS” which was an anachronism because u and v were not different letters in Roman times. These days, we mostly write even classical Latin with ‘v’ when it is used more consonantally, but in those days it would have been “FVGITIVVS” or more likely just “FVG”, since as far as I know they didn’t bother with spelling entire words on tombstones, much less a slave’s head.
