RP prosody joke
« previous post | next post »
In comments on "Affected brogue", 12/19/2024, Benjamin Orsatti and others put Bernard Mayes forward as a quintessential RP speaker, including this advice:
[I]f you'd like to listen to, say, 150 consecutive hours of Bernard Mayes (the man narrates my dreams now), you can do what I'm doing and borrow "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" audiobook, Blackstone edition from your local library.
This seemed like a good way to use one of the Audible credits that I've somehow accumulated, so I downloaded Mayes' narration of volume 3 of that work, all 39:03:05.09 of it. Listening to a few minutes of it, I was reminded of a joke that I (believe I) heard from Michael Studdert-Kennedy:
The archetypal Englishman, being forbidden by custom to wave his hands, waves his larynx instead.
I don't have time this afternoon to give this quip the rigorous evaluation it deserves, but as a wave of the hand in that direction, here's a histogram of deviations in semitones from the median F0, taken from a 2-minute sample of Mr. Mayes' narration:
So basically an octave up and and octave down from the median, for a two-octave range…
Here's the sample:
For those who have trouble decoding some of Mr. Mayes' words, as I did, here's the text:
In the revival of the empire of empire of Rome, neither the bishop nor the people could bestow on Charlemagne or Otho the provinces which were lost, as they had been won, by the chance of arms. But the Romans were free to choose a master for themselves; and the powers which had been delegated to the patrician, were irrevocably granted to the French and Saxon emperors of the West. The broken records of the times preserve some remembrance of their palace, their mint, their tribunal, their edicts, and the sword of justice, which, as late as the thirteenth century, was derived from Caesar to the praefect of the city. Between the arts of the popes and the violence of the people, this supremacy was crushed and annihilated. Content with the titles of emperor and Augustus, the successors of Charlemagne neglected to assert this local jurisdiction. In the hour of prosperity, their ambition was diverted by more alluring objects; and in the decay and division of the empire, they were oppressed by the defence of their hereditary provinces. Amidst the ruins of Italy, the famous Marozia invited one of the usurpers to assume the character of her third husband; and Hugh, king of Burgundy was introduced by her faction into the mole of Hadrian or Castle of St. Angelo, which commands the principal bridge and entrance of Rome. Her son by the first marriage, Alberic, was compelled to attend at the nuptial banquet; but his reluctant and ungraceful service was chastised with a blow by his new father. The blow was productive of a revolution. “Romans,” exclaimed the youth, “once you were the masters of the world, and these Burgundians the most abject of your slaves. They now reign, these voracious and brutal savages, and my injury is the commencement of your servitude.”
J.W. Brewer said,
December 20, 2024 @ 6:17 pm
There's an old joke about RP speakers (usually but not always attributed to Dylan Thomas) that goes something like "he spoke as if he had the Elgin Marbles in his mouth." It just now strikes me that Mark Liberman is exactly the right scholar to have a good empirical sense of what a spectrogram of someone who actually had such objects in his mouth would look like and thus how valid or invalid the joke is as confirmed or disconfirmed by spectrograms of RP speech.