Chris I am delighted that someone is interested in this. I will try to do it justice in the few minuets I have before work.

I truly believe that it is one of the reasons you see so many people slip out of character on the streets. There are many of us who are accurate enough to pass for fair workers that are not. I have done this on and off for years. I can tell you that many of my dressed appropriately friends cannot carry a conversation and do not work fair. Unfortunately I am a person who can’t get a whole lot past the niceties, directions, or a few snips of gossip with out creeping forward in mannerisms.

The magic bits are taught at every BFA class I have taken before the N CA. Fair. I love the sheet that Linda use to use for mixing Elizabethan cusses. I’m sure you know the one. But you need something more to do more than survive at fair.

I love the idea of turns of a fraise sheet along the same lines. I’m thinking about the wonderful link to the Appalachian Language that was posted in Kurt’s post on BFA. This gave great examples of complete sentences that were used on a regular basis and conveyed much meaning with great color.

I think that part of this is just as simple as learning what people often spoke of. This allows for the small talk to fill the street. It helps the newer people who are trying to better them selves to find things to speak about with those that they don’t know that well.
It would help in engaging the patrons as well in that you could share some tidbit from the day.

However I think that the need goes further, at least for me and mine. How do you manage to catch up with that friend you haven’t seen in 5 years because she’d been away or your paths just haven’t crossed? How can I learn how her real life is going on the street with out saying, “Ho! Hay Beth! How’ it been going? What ya been doing?” More often than not I wind up ducking into some private spot to catch up.

Last year I had a man approach me while I was in the back bails of a play. He wanted to know more about the fair, costuming, is everyone in velvet paid and the others not. You’ve heard the questions. He was very interested and specific, down to which class is this or that. I could not carry the whole conversation in BFA. I didn’t have the sentence structure, and in some cased the knowledge to keep it up for a 10-minute conversation.

Perhaps I’m showing my weakness. Perhaps I was feeling fatigue as I hadn’t been at fair in nearly 10 years and bang I find a couple who really wants to know how it works. It nags at me.

However this is a subject that I have heard other people bemoan here on other tribes. They are in character and someone comes up and wants to talk out of character. Some of this may be rudeness. Some of it may be that they simply don’t have the skills to do otherwise. Of course if you are playing a specific person personal life has to wait.

"couldn't remember which side of the Middle/Modern line we were on,"

We are "Early Modern English" during Elizabeth's and Shakespeare's time.
Some dialects of Middle English are pretty readable; others are a litte rough, unless you've got some German and French, and even then they can be tricksy. I've come to enjoy "Gawain & the Green Knight" better in the original, for instance, than I do even in Tolkien's translation: but it's not what you'd call a quick read. It's been helping me with the alliterative Morte d'Arthur I happened across up at the Folsom faire's book sale, though.
And one day I hope to plough through Beowulf in the original. But that, as yet, remains a fond dream. (Hwaet!)

No biggie. And of course it <i>is</i> a spectrum, no one can point to a date where English suddenly became, or stopped being, Middle.

I have actually heard linguists use the "do you need a dictionary" rule as a definition of the boundary, though.

I was taught to imagine that you had marbles in your mouth to learn to speak form the back. For me this works.

That's Cat... our deep-throater!

She's all talk, tho.








*hides*

This is a poem I recite in the streets quite often (BTW it is period and it is by Davies) (Copied directly from my edition of "The Poems of Sir John Davies"; thus the spelling)

A Lady faire two suiters had,
A courtier and a cuntry swadd;
The Courtier first came lepping in
And tooke the Lady by the chin,
The cuntry swadd as he was blunt
Came tooke the lady by the elbow.

(Translation for those whose EME might be lax:

A Lady fair two suitors had
A courtier and a country Suede;
The Courtier first came leaping in
And tooke the lady by the chine,
The country suede as he was blunt
Came took the lady by the elbow
)

On my recitation I usually adjust my accent a bit, a bit closer to the traditional BFA:

I send my voice to the back of my throat.
Had reseambles the the Head from Roger Grey's class (Cryin' Baby "A")
"Faire" is more Fehr
"Courtier" toward "Cehrtee-ehr
Leaping becomes "leppin'"
"First" = Fahrst
By = Buh-eye

If I don't do this the poem doesn't work. Meter and rhyme wise. And (In my opinion) the more country accent adds to the verses more "earthier" and simple subject matter.

"Especially since that is no longer widely accepted by linguists"

What is? I'd love to know. I had thought that the more recent stuff out there, used by the RSC, etc., sounds pretty close to what we've been doing. I recall somebody posting a link to some audio, but can't recall what thread or how long ago.

Thank you for that. I would've said it if you hadn't.

Actually vowel sounds are one of the things I think we have to re-evaluate somewhat based on David Crystal's work.

What we have "traditionally" done at Faire is -- strictly in terms of vowel sounds -- actually not too bad a rendition of the West Midlands 16th-century English he was focusing on for the Globe Theatre's experiment with original pronunciation.

One major difference I've become aware of is that BFA tends -- erroneously, I think -- to apply the same sound to ALL vowels spelled the same way, regardless of their position in the word.

For example, I was taught to pronounce "water" in BFA with the first syllable "wat" pronounced to rhyme with "cat" (which is correct), and with the second syllable "-er" pronounced to rhyme with "air" (which is wrong). David Crystal's research leads him to think that the vowels in UN-STRESSED syllables, like the "er" in "water," were pronounced in the 16th century very much as we pronounce them today: they are all what linguists call a "schwa", a sound like "uh." So it would be "WAAT-ur", not "WAAT-air."

Personally, I'm much more interested in trying to study and reproduce something that approximates 16th-century English for our characters, rather than going for the quick-and-dirty "cover" methods that make us sound sorta kinda exotic without necessarily being historical.

When I say this, I sometimes get the reaction that that would be far more work than most Faire workers are willing to put in -- but I actually don't think it's that hard. And as the actors at the Globe found, Elizabethan English really <i>is</i> pretty understandable to modern people when you speak it clearly (even though the spelling sometimes makes it hard to decipher the written form).

I see my job as a teacher as trying to help people manage that "time warp." I don't think anyone can do that in an hour and a half, but with several classes spread over the years, plus lots of practice -- yeah, I think it's quite possible.

***<I'm not too insistent on the Appalachian accent >
Especially since that is no longer widely accepted by linguists.***

Sorry to be so late in responding to this, but the holidays got in the way!

Altho Rebecca is correct in the above statement, it is still a popular urban legend. here's what I dug up..



According to “The Story of English”

The Appalachian Mountains are the home of hillbillies, old-time American Whites, whose traditional speech – a feared, damnedest and plum right – is sometimes, mistakenly, thought to be a relic of Elizabethan English. Two of the most typical of these old mountain people are the storyteller Ray Hicks and his wife, Clara…

Professor Cratis Williams, who has been called “the father of Appalachian studies” and has devoted years to a study of speech in that region, considers that the Appalachian people are “the best storytellers in the world”, a tradition he attributes to their Scottish past.

According to Williams, the talk of these hills is now a jumble of Scots-Irish, English and German.



“Word Myths, debunking linguistic urban legends” goes into a deeper explanation.

“Mr. Hicks spoke in a dialect scholars describe as Elizabethan, even Chaucerian. – New York Times Obituary 4/27/03”

The idea that one speaks a purer form of the language is a compelling one. There is so much talk of the decline of the English language, how bad grammar is coming to dominate modern speech, that it is a matter of pride to speak “the Queens English”, or at least the English of Tom Brokaw.

But what if you come from an area that is noted for its rustic and “ungrammatical” speech? Well, in that case you promote a myth that your rustic dialect is actually a purer form of English from ages past and you associate your dialect with some of the greatest poets of the English language.

Zell Miller, U.S. senator from and former governor of Georgia, defends his Appalachian dialect in his autobiography, “The Mountains Within Me”:
“It no longer bothers me to be kidded about my mountain expressions. In fact, I have come to regard them as status symbols because who else do we have running around in public life today who speaks the language of Chaucer and Shakespeare as distilled, literally and figuratively, by two centuries of Georgia Mountain usage?”

“If Shakespeare could have been reincarnated in 19th century Choestoe, he would have felt right at home. The open fireplaces, spinning wheels, handmade looms, Greek lamps and good, if sometimes ungrammatical, Elizabethan English would all have been quite familiar to the Bard of Avon and, with the exception of having to adapt to homespun clothes, he would have little difficulty assimilating into mountain society.”

Other writings promulgating this myth date back to 1915…..

The Southern Mountains have only been inhabited by Europeans since about the 1790’s. By this date Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, Marlow, Bacon and Raleigh had all been dead for almost two centuries. John Dryden had been dead for about one hundred years and Geoffrey Chaucer had been dead nearly four hundred years.
Further, early settlers of Appalachia did not come from the London literary elite represented by these writers. They were predominately Scots-Irish, which meant they were…. poor farmers and peasants, many illiterate. Their speech was about as similar to Shakespeare’s as a modern Belfast dockworker’s is to the speech of today’s Queen Elizabeth II.

Those who promulgate the myth often point to specific words, pronunciations, or grammatical patterns in Appalachian speech that are found in Shakespeare but not in the modern Standard English. Among the most commonly cited to defend this myth are the words ‘afeared’, meaning afraid, ‘to learn’, meaning to teach, and ‘holp’, a past tense of help. All three words appear in Shakespeare, but have been lost to today’s Standard English.

Thank you very much. Helpful.