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Accents
Apr 7, 2009 20:17:45 GMT 10
Post by wordy on Apr 7, 2009 20:17:45 GMT 10
So, if Tortall etc. were based after real-life countries, what kind of accents do you imagine all these places would have? Remember, they'd probably have to make sense regarding the pronunciation of the people's names etc.
Do you think Tortallans would have a british accent? Would certain parts of Tortall/fiefs have Welsh, then?
What about the Yamani and Copper Islands?
Do you read the books picturing a certain character with a particular accent?
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Fate
Squire
Posts: 1,333
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Post by Fate on Apr 8, 2009 7:47:45 GMT 10
Yamani is without a doubt Japanese. Pierce even uses Japanese words (ex. Hoshi = star, Inari = goddess of rice/fertility/agriculture) for the Yamani.
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Post by Anaroriel on Apr 8, 2009 8:09:01 GMT 10
I see Tortall as more German actually. *shrug* For whatever reason. Maybe it's all the medieval German literature I've been reading lately.
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Accents
Apr 8, 2009 12:08:50 GMT 10
Post by nicolasophie on Apr 8, 2009 12:08:50 GMT 10
I always got the impression of Tortall being a weird mixture of English/Irish/Scottish/Welsh, depending on the region. Tammy talks about the commoners from the north of Tortall (Coram, amongst others in the Beka Cooper world) having a "northern bur", while the white people from the south (not the Bazhir) tend to have vowel pronunciations that i associate with england.
Terrier's good like that - Tammy mentions several different 'accents', I had fun trying to say them out loud and go "hmmm what does this sound like".
Carthak i always associated with Carthage, so i'd think a mixture of stereotypical African accent wtih a mix of mediteranean/egyptian in the accent. Does that make sense?
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Accents
Apr 8, 2009 12:34:25 GMT 10
Post by boosette on Apr 8, 2009 12:34:25 GMT 10
I'm pretty boring - I read "hear" most everyone with a generic USAian Midlands accent, and people with Tammy's dialects as having different regional Southern drawls.
Copper Islanders "sound" by turn Nigerian and northern Indian*.
*from India, not Native American.
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Accents
Apr 8, 2009 12:53:03 GMT 10
Post by Lisa on Apr 8, 2009 12:53:03 GMT 10
I think it's tough to say, honestly - Tammy didn't really bring concrete cultures into anything until LR, when Sarain was based off of a Mongolian/Cambodian hybrid.
Think about it - Tusain and Maren and Tortall are supposedly "cut from the same cloth", but King Ain likes to hang out with his wives in his pleasure gardens, according to ITHOTG. Doesn't sound like it's much like the Tortall we know.
Carthak and later the Yamanis and Copper Islands were culturally clearly ripped off, though, and I usually hear the appropriate accents if I take time to think about it. However, like Candice, I hear everything with a generic USAian accent (the same as Tammy's, incidentally, since we're roughly from the same region. She went to the same high school as my boyfriend. ^.^)
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opalgirl
Sergeant
I also answer to Val.
Posts: 1,574
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Accents
Apr 14, 2009 4:15:13 GMT 10
Post by opalgirl on Apr 14, 2009 4:15:13 GMT 10
Tortall/Maren/Tusaine = it's hard for me to think of them in real-world accents, since I know (even though the books are printed in English) that their languages would have developed differently than Europe's. But I try.
Coastal Tortall - eg. Legann, Caynn - probably has speech patterns and dialect very similar to New England and Canada's Atlantic coast (my home, yay). Verene, in Terrier? Phrases things the way we do. So, very rapid speech, not necessarily 'proper' sentence structure, dropping of vowels (especially 'e', for some reason), Scots/Irish/French influenced, mostly.
To the north and the mountains - eg. Trebond - is difficult. I always heard Coram as a bit Scottish, but that wouldn't make much sense, with Scanra being blatantly Scandinavian. Unless northern regions of Tortall are based on Scotland. Which would explain the 'burr' described.
- Scanra is Scandinavian, even though I THINK Tammy wanted us to associate it with Germany, a bit, too. Or that's what I got.
- Galla confuses me. Politically, I think it's in a position a bit like WWII-era Poland, being stuck between Tortall and Scanra, but we don't know enough about it to figure out an accent. It's mountainous and Daine says most of her people, in northern Galla - being close to Scanra - are blonde and blue-eyed. So, the Netherlands-ish? In ROTG, Daine is said to carry a lilt, whatever that might mean.
Tusaine and Maren are probably a bit of a general 'central' accent - eg. Midwestern US, being 'plains.' Probably likewise for the parts of Tortall that are not explicitly north or south.
- Tyra? Augh. Tyra is difficult. Tammy sez she thinks of it as a merchant's country and drew on Venice for inspiration... but we haven't seen anything of it.
- Sarain is so a Cambodia/Laos hybrid, with Mongolian horse lore. I would imagine the K'mir dialect sounds rather like languages native to those areas, so Thayet and Buri probably carry an accent like that.
- the Yamani Isles = Japan. (Yaman? Japan?) That doesn't need commentary.
- Carthak lifts bits and pieces from everywhere - ancient Eygpt, Carthage (duh) and Bablyon, along with Africa. With the Empire beingg implied as so *huge*, it's hard to pin it down to one accent. A city-dweller like Kaddar probably has a different one than a tribesman in one of the provinces. And there would be mixing of tribes and languages and accents, because of annexation. (See also: the real-world lasting influence of French colonization on parts of Africa.) There are Arab influences here, too.
- The Bazhir have always struck me as rather like the Bedouin, with horses instead of camels. Their language and pronounciation would probably sound closest to real-world Arabic.
/will stop now.
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