he would have probably been taught to speak rp at drama school, I imagine. that's what it sounds like to me. i'll start by saying I don't know where you're from, so excuse me if I over-explain myself or don't explain myself properly. incidentally, I am a born, bred, "and buttered" Londoner, so that's the stance I come from.
by "local accent" it just sounds like an average kind of middle class/rp accent to me, which would be perfectly acceptable for someone lower(?) middle class like ebeneezer. watching it now, I don't hear anything different from that. he drops the odd T and H, and it doesn't sound false, and nothing he's said stands out as unusual to me, anyway. and you can usually spot a mile off if someone is putting on the normal London accent (what some people might incorrectly call, "cockney" - cockney is not an area or place).
can you explain the, "ah" sound a bit more? for example, a word he might have said. I've recorded the film, so i'll probably keep it for a week or so.
re the gilbert and Sullivan comment, no Londoner would naturally rhyme, "classes" with "masses", I just think that's a G&S quirk, using that visual rhyme, lol (not sure if I explained that well enough).
btw I also get what you mean about finney's Lancashire accent, and am familiar with his usual accent.
but, in short, bearing in mind finney was a Lancashire lad, who will have been taught to speak rp in drama school, I think he's doing a fairly normal London accent, a little on the middle class side (which I think I would say is my normal accent, although my background is definitely working class!). so i'm saying he did a great job of it. it sounds about 95%+ natural to me.
but hey, that's just my opinion.
merry Christmas.
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boll-weavil
7 years ago
I'm rather inclined to take the view expressed above considering that it comes from a genuine Londoner.My own view is that as long as it doesn't interfere with the dialogue, I don't mind. There's no indication of what accent Scrooge would have had, only the intonation of his voice, as in 'cold and caustic as ever'.There are bigger issues out there. Look at the BBC English of the Cratchit children in the Sim version for example.Perhaps a viewing of the children in the 1938 Reginald Owen adaptation might also be of interest with their American accents not even vaguely concealed.We don't really know how strong accents were in Victorian London but I totally agree that Finney gets the message over.
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ccoutroulos
7 years ago
I'm an American from New York, though I have a mostly "General American" accent with a few northeastern traits. (For example, I distinguish between "merry," "marry" and "Mary"; say "yumor" and "yumid" instead of "hyumor" and "hyumid" and don't distinguish between w and wh, except of course where the latter is pronounced as "h" (as in "who").
By the "ah" sound, I mean the sound that speakers of RP would use in "pass" and that any English speaker (so far as I know) uses in "father." In most cases (other than "father" and borrowings from foreign languages), the use of this sound in current RP is a comparatively recent development. (That's why most Americans don't use it in these words. Some of us do use it in "aunt," probably to distinguish it from the insect, but most of us pronounce the two words alike.) According to Daniel Jones, an English phonetician who is well worth reading on the subject, the "flat" sound (as in "cat") in these words was still an alternative in RP until fairly late in his lifetime, when it became obsolete. There are still cases where RP speakers fluctuate (e.g., "mask" and "lather").
Merry Christmas to you too and a happy new year.
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ccoutroulos
7 years ago
I realize I both oversimplified and overelaborated. Words like "palm" and "far" would also have the "ah" sound anywhere. Words like "wash" would have either that or the sound of a in "warm." (For those who care (and as if you didn't know).)
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Unibrows of the world, unite!
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