People move the accent on certain syllables around. Part of the “rhythm and phrasing”. Words come in and out of fashion. As to phrasing. “Bees knees”.

I’d say you can’t separate those from accents and dialects. Rhythm and phrasing are what helps identify a Canadian accent from the vanilla US dialect.

An English person can tell what part of England someone is from simply by accents which are rhythm and phrasing. Same language.

But imagine listening to Beowulf in the original English and then passing a test on the content. I don’t think it could be done. It’s always evolving, the past is left behind, and newer brains are trained in newer versions of the language.

Shakespeare is hard to understand unless one has read it first. And yet it’s still performed “in the original”, but only for the affecionados. Unintelligible otherwise.

What ticks me off is when they speak in phony accents to remind you the characters are not speaking English. If you are watching a room full of Nazi generals, you don’t need to be reminded they’re speaking German. And nothing sounds sillier than the “Biblebabble” they put in the mouths of the characters in Bible movies so they’ll sound authentic. In “The Last Temptation of Christ”, all the characters speak in colloquial, ordinary, American-accented English, even though presumably they are really speaking in Greek, Aramaic, Hebrew or Latin. It works. In “The Passion of the Christ”, Mel Gibson has the characters speaking in Aramaic and Latin and the subtitles are printed in English below. It really makes you feel like you’re really there.

In movies like “Robin Hood”, everybody adopts this silly medieval English speech, even though the English language didn’t even exist then. The Merry Men spoke Anglo-Saxon, and the Sheriff of Nottingham and Prince John spoke Norman French. All the characters were probably fluent in both. Modern English and French speakers would not understand either.

Definition of LUSTRUM: 1 – a period of five years.

But that still doesn’t explain the rhythm and cadence of the speech, the phrasing and timing. Think “Forties Bomber Crew” dialog. Sure, its stylized military technical talk, and an attempt is made to showcase an ethnic, class and regionally diverse collection of accents, and it is peppered with swell period slang. But overlaid on that is a quick, snappy, wisecracking delivery that may or may not reflect the way real people spoke at the time. Its something that must be
listened for, it would not be noticeable if you were just reading the script.

I wonder if our parents spoke that way. I don’t remember. My mother had a Bronx Jewish accent til the day she died, and my father supposedly had a Spanish accent, but accent is not what we’re talking about here. I have read some of their wartime letters and other writings, and I am amazed how articulate and eloquent prose writers they were, considering they were only high school graduates–a secretary and a sheet metal worker.

They wrote in English, to not draw the attention of wartime censors.

Let’s explore this a bit more scientifically–we have recordings of men doing the news going back almost a century. Picking a genre controls for content as a factor in speech patterns.

Edit: Ah hell, embedded YouTube videos have stopped working because of https encryption. You’ll have to click the URLs instead of using the player (I left them embedded in case it’s just me or my browser or my computer or my karma or something.)

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BU3fS22ZI9M[/youtube]
USS Macon crash 1935

Hindenburg newsreel, 1937
[youtube]CgWHbpMVQ1U[/youtube]

Edward R. Murrow, 1954:
[youtube]vEvEmkMNYHY[/youtube]

Walter Cronkite, 1968:
[youtube]Nn4w-ud-TyE[/youtube]

Brian Williams, 2011
[youtube]WnxC7yiezN8[/youtube]

I hear a steady evolution (or maybe “devolution” is the word) toward decreased formality, along with relaxation of grammar rules.

Another set of samples comes to mind if you want to study the evolution of British (recorded) speech: Dr. Who episodes from 1963 to the present. Or, back on this continent, the “Weekend Update” segments from Saturday Night Live, from 1974 to the present.

The effect I’m trying to describe here is different. I can hear a movie playing in another room and tell you within 20 years or so when it was made, even if the text being spoken contains no clues as to its time of origin. I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, unambiguously, except to say “they are talking in an old style”.

As for the differences between USA and UK audio, I’ve always found it so annoying I assumed it was differences in the technical properties of their audio engineering gear. Some of my Brit TV CDs sound so muffled and garbled I have to distort the tuning and balance of my audio equipment to understand the dialog. OTOH, their recorded music sounds excellent. I doubt they are really behind us in this area, and always assumed it was a transcription issue when copying their signal to our standards, sort of like the scan frequency on the two video signals being different. My copy of “Smiley’s People” is so difficult to understand I have to run the audio through the tinny TV speakers with the treble boosted way up instead of my Bose Wave Radio. I can understand the dialog, but now the background music is distorted.

One of his best friends, besides Broderick Crawford and Henry Fonda was a defrocked Roman Catholic priest who also worked in the movies. Now, believe it or not, his job was to be available on the sets in order to suggest wording or phrasing in case someone found the script deficient. He was supposed to come up with a way of saying things which would be more acceptable to the major folks.

I would imagine his personal stamp is on a number of scripts. And there had to be others like him. They may have influenced, or brought on, various ways of saying things which were a bit out of sync with the original dialogue.

Just a thought.

But you’re also right about the influence of technology, and here, of microphones.

When I first joined up with my high school radio station in 1970, we got some training in how to speak on the radio; that is, how to effectively “work” a microphone. Microphones then were good, better than used in those old films, but they were still prone to distortion when hit with certain sounds. We were taught to avoid a puff of air when pronouncing “P”, because it overloaded the mic and produced a breathy percussion; tap the lips together instead. The “S” sound was similarly problemmatic, prone to loud hissing, and we were taught to minimize it, even directing the air downward from the mouth and away from the microphone. Generally we were taught to exaggerate the motions of our mouths in service to clearer diction. The end result was the distinctive speech patterns of a radio or TV announcer.

Microphones are much better these days, with none of the problems that required speakers to compensate; and actors and announcers today tend to speak more naturally, and be less self-conscious of having to “work” the microphone.

Another observation I’d make, speaking of microphone technology, is that different shops had different audio standards. The BBC has long had a “Radiophonic Workshop” that developed special sounds and technical standards for audio, and it gives BBC productions their own distinctive sound. Not necessarily for the good: Americans complain they can’t understand British actors, and I think it’s partly because the BBC audio standards shortchange the high end. British audio has sounded flat for decades, but lately it’s a lot more understandable (or maybe I’m just watching enough British TV that I’m finally able to understand their muttering). British actors, too, aren’t having to work as hard to compensate for the shortcomings of the audio system.

The focus on technology isn’t to say that patterns of speech haven’t evolved culturally. Our parents’ generation definitely did speak in a more refined, modulated tone, with better grammar and diction. And it came about without constant examples of recorded speech to mimic; they were taught to speak that way in classrooms and at home, for the most part.