天天用英语365天第115天
Ethan老师
1、It’s easy to gloss over today, because movies have captured a few different accents that aren’t really present today.
2、Today this accent is sometimes called the Mid-Atlantic Accent, which is deeply offensive to those, like me, from the actual Mid-Atlantic region of the United States.
3、Financial and cultural elites began constructing their own kind of vaguely-British institutions, especially in the form of prestigious private schools. And those schools had elocution classes.
4、The entire concept of an elocution class is wildly offensive to most of the modern linguists I know; following the rise of super-linguist Bill Labov in the 1960s, the concept that one way of speaking is “better” or “worse” than another is basically anathema.
5、European settlers throughout New England on the east side of Vermont's Green Mountains tended to stay in closer touch with Boston, which in turn stayed in touch with Southeast England through commerce and education.
6、The upper-class New England accent of that time shares some things with modern New England accents. The most obvious of those is non-rhoticity, which refers to dropping the “r” sounds in words like “hear” and “Charles.”
7、...and others all decided to teach their well-heeled pupils to speak in a certain way, a vaguely British-y speech pattern meant to sound aristocratic, excessively proper, and, weirdly, not regionally specific.
8、The book that codified the elite Northeastern accent is one of the most fascinating and demanding books I’ve ever read, painstakingly written by one Edith Skinner. Skinner was an elocutionist who decided, with what must have been balls the size of Mars, to call this accent “Good Speech.”
9、She’s what’s known now as a linguistic prescriptivist, meaning that she believed that some variations of English are flat-out superior to others, and should be taught and valued as such.
10、Her influence was felt in filmmaking in a very roundabout way. Film began in New York, only moving en masse to Los Angeles in the mid-1910s. Skinner was born in New Brunswick, Canada, but studied linguistics at Columbia and taught drama for many years at Carnegie Mellon, in Pittsburgh, and Juilliard, in New York City, all highly elite schools.
11、Though the idea that speaking roles killed her career in film is not entirely accurate (there were plenty of other factors, ranging from drug problems to insane pressures of film studios), it’s certainly true that her career took a nosedive around the time audiences heard her voice, possibly creating a cautionary tale for newly heard actors.
12、Speak With Distinction is incredibly dense, but it’s also very thorough. You can see very clearly, right there on the beat-up pages, why Katharine Hepburn speaks the way she does.
13、She cracks down on the most obvious of regional cues, railing against what’s now called the “pin-pen merger.”
14、...you can replace one accent with another, but the idea that there is some perfect, unaccented variety of English is a myth that’s long been squashed.
15、The film craze of Mid-Atlantic English was short-lived. By the late 1960s, the New Hollywood movement, complete with innovative, gritty directors like Francis Ford Coppola and John Cassavetes, began to depict the world as it was, rather than the fantasy lives presented by earlier films.
