![]() ![]() ![]() After all, the legionaires would have had their own slang, the equivalent of that used by soldiers in later wars. Only gradually do we realise that they are, in fact, Roman legionaries stranded 'behind the lines' in darkest Celtic Britain. Glance, American GIs during the Vietnam War. It was handled superbly in Alan Garner's Red Shift, where one section opens with a conversation between, at first I have a lot of sympathy with that point of view. ![]() How do you represent the speech of historical characters? One school of thought is that you have your characters speak in modern English because the people of the past didn't think of themselves asīeing 'historical.' They were right up to the minute fashionistas, and they spoke right-up-to-the-minute Latin, or Aramaic, or Anglo-Norman or whatever. So I've been grappling with one of the big, perennial problems of writing historical fiction. What has this to do with the Sterkarms? Well, one of the things I've been doing as I've rewritten the Sterkarms over the past year, is to make the Sterkarm's speech more archaic. ![]() As, of course, it is, since the Black Country dialect, like many other despised English dialects, preserves a lot of In translation, it becomes quite Shakespearean. ![]()
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