HERE COMES THE LILT MAN
When interviewing a linguist, transcription is an adventure. I must begin with an expression of enormous gratitude to LWLies’ own Marina Ashioti, for dealing with exchanges such as this:
“I took the phonology of modern Icelandic English and extracted some features from it. There’s a process called devoicing: so Zs become Ss, Vs become Fs, Ds become Ts. That gives you a base, and if everyone does that, it’s easier than trying to get the more obvious characteristics which are very different – what’s called a palato-alveolar fricative. They would say ‘eyeshland,’ well, ‘eyeshlant,’ so it’s a T at the end instead of the D. We have consistency words, like ‘ghot,’ which takes you away from ‘gawd.’ Another word which, strangely enough, happens a lot in The Northman is ‘bloht’ which is ‘blood’ and then there are ‘slayfes,’ and ‘sun,’ which is a round vowel rather than ‘son’.”
This is Brendan Gunn, speaking on how he and director Robert Eggers developed the accents for an English-language Viking epic. In addition to his work with individual actors, it’s Gunn’s job to decide, in large part, how much disbelief a film’s audience is asked to willingly suspend. The sound of would have to find a happy medium between Richard Fleischer’s 1958 epic , in which Tony Curtis plays a Norse warrior who sounds oddly like a guy from the Upper East Side of New York City named Bernard Schwartz (Curtis’ birthplace and birth name), and a subtitled film in which everyone speaks a dead language.
