TikTok version: www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8howmYJ/

Thanks! I’m actually primarily posting on insta and TikTok, so my posts are a little ahead there. I just started throwing some of them up as shorts on YouTube this week to see how they’d do there. (Answer: not that well, at least so far 🫤)

This specific video? No. Khoisan languages? Sure! Those are click consonants, and I agree—they are wonderful! youtu.be/4e6DLwEVb6I?...

...esp the ones you'd expect, while a number of others, esp KIT & function words are...completely 'unchanged' (I'm assuming here) from the actor's normal speech. And that just strikes me as wildly implausible. I'm just not buying that Richard III sounded so perfectly contemporary in all these places

I don't actually feel like that worst-case-scenario is the case here. I think the actor's doing a good job making sense of what he's got. It's a bit more subtle—my own ear is just not buying the fact that in this historical reconstruction, a number of salient features are very noticeable...

So it often results in a kind of cut-and-paste job, a Frankenaccent, stitched together out of mismatched parts. There's no internal logic to it, no rhyme or reason, no overarching shape and feel tying it together

The problem with sound substitutions, of course, is that an accent is (much, much, much) more than just swapping out a few sounds—EVEN if they happened to be a perfect match, which they almost never are. An accent is an organic whole, a coherent system, with all the pieces interwoven & interrelated

One example would be take your own PRICE vowel (if you're American) and use it in FACE words—so instead of saying 'take,' just say 'tyke' instead—and tada, you're Australian! "Tyke my wife, please!" (Let's not worry about the other words right now—just making a quick point about how sound subs work)

It feels like an outmoded approach to accent coaching often called 'sound substitution': take sound x from your own accent and substitute for sound y, repeat for a few other sounds, and presto! A new accent!

I've seen disagreement between historical linguists about exactly when English began to acquire relaxed, mid-centralized sounds for KIT, with (I think) Wells arguing for a late date and Minkova and others arguing for a much earlier one. But this just...sounds wrong

So for example every KIT token (is, it, diminution, in, midst, his, with...) sounds perfectly modern. Ditto with DRESS (less), TRAP, etc., and basically every unstressed/reduced vowel. (I definitely have questions about 'of.')

I have questions about the accent/performance. I'm going to assume that the phonetic values for the "interesting" phonemes (happY, STRUT, PRICE, /x/, FACE, GOAT, FLEECE) are more or less on target. But these seem to be basically the ONLY sounds that aren't perfectly aligned with contemporary ones

More about the project here: avoiceforrichard.co.uk/about. The great David Crystal "worked to produce the phonology of King Richard's speech and has refined it to 95% accuracy." Not clear who coached the actor

Longer clip, with facial animation, here: www.bbc.com/news/article...