Funetik Aksent: Difference between revisions

 

{{examples}}

* In the English language translations of the ''[[Hellsing]]'' manga, Father Anderson speaks with an immensely thick brogue, which is especially funny seeing that he speaks completely normal Japanese in the original (along with the Germans and other characters who were given accents in the English adaptation) - as normal as a character voiced by Norio Wakamoto can be.

** Also funnier yet if you know the sound of a real Glasgow accent well, and Anderson's voice is most definitely not one. What it is, in fact, is a poorly-guessed imitation by someone who's never met a Glaswegian.

* The English translation of the [[Excel Saga (manga)|''Excel Saga'' manga]] gives Sumiyoshi, his sister and father a Geordie accent that's written this way.

 

* Until well into the Silver Age, this was pretty standard for foreign or immigrant characters of any kind - yes, even if they were ''heroes''! Take Mademoiselle Marie, a [[La Résistance|French Resistance fighter]] in a series of [[World War II]] adventures put out by DC in the 1950s. Marie was an [[Action Girl]] and looked every bit the part with her tight skirt, [[Sweater Girl|even tighter sweater]], [[Nice Hat|bright red beret]], and Sten gun - but all this was undercut somewhat because the letterer insisted on writing ''all'' of her lines as if they were being spoken by Pepe Le Pew.

* A buttload in ''[[X-Men (Comic Book)|X-Men]]'', such as Gambit and Rogue, courtesy of [[Chris Claremont]].

* In ''[[Strontium Dog]]'', Middenface, and occasionally other Scottish characters, speaks with an accent so thick it is sometimes incomprehensible. Wulf has a Norwegian accent, which is much easier to follow. Welsh and Irish accents also turn up occasionally, but those are mostly implied by the characters' vocabulary.

* [[Fantastic Four (Comic Book)|Whah? Aw, why didnja mention the Thing yet? It's Clobberin' Time!]]

 

* In ''[[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic]]'' fanwork, many authors will utterly butcher Applejack's Ozark accent.

* This is often done to characters who speak with strange accents in nonwritten mediums, and usually not well. In the ''[[Transformers Animated]]'' fandom Blitzwing gets the short end of the stick, with half his consonants reduced to 'v' and 'z'.

* In the bizarre 1990s-vintage ''[[Ranma ½]]'' fanfic ''[http://archives.eyrie.org/anime/Ranma/Narrabundah/ Narrabundah 1/2]'' by Erac "Ratbat" Sigma you will find a vast amount of Scots and Welsh accents transcribed phonetically, on top of [[Egregious]]ly [[Gratuitous Japanese]], obscure Anzac slang, and some just outright bizarre character speech patterns.

 

 

* Anthony Burgess plays with this at some length in ''[[A Clockwork Orange]]'' in which the central protagonist, Alex, speaks a heavily Russian-influenced patois in which individual words are Anglicised ( "horrorshow", meaning "excellent" or "very good", is derived from a Russian word normally transliterated as Hara-sho, for example) and the whole dialect is generically referred to as "nadsat", a Russian suffix used in forming numbers in the same way you would use "-teen" in English, although Russians don't call teenagers that. Much of the book is written in Nadsat, which flows much better than you might expect. Kubrick wisely avoided most of this in the film.

* Jumps in and out for Scotty in differing books of the ''[[Star Trek]]'' franchise fiction, depending on the author. Sometimes his accent is spelled phonetically, other times its presence is just noted in the prose. The same goes for Chekov. (William Shatner in particular favors "vw" for Chekov's 'nuclear wessels' accent, which is somewhat difficult to read.)

* Frances Hodgson Burnett's ''[[The Secret Garden]]'' has Dickon, whose broad Yorkshire dialect is rendered so faithfully as to be incomprehensible at times.

 

* Oddly enough, [[Led Zeppelin]]'s name is an example of this - the misspelling is to emphasize that the word is pronounced like the metal lead, and not like the verb "lead".

** Their 1973 reggae song "D'yer Maker ("joor-maker")," which represents the lower-class British English pronunciation of "Jamaica," but probably had many Americans wondering why the song was named for someone who made dyes.

* Similarly, the [[Iron Butterfly]] classic "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" (supposedly the "stoner" pronunciation of "In the Garden of Eden").

 

* This was once very common in [[Newspaper Comics]]. ''[[Li'l Abner]]'', ''[[The Katzenjammer Kids]]'', ''[[Krazy Kat]]'', and ''[[Pogo (comic strip)|Pogo]]'' are some of the best known examples (indeed, ''The Katzenjammer Kids'' remains the archetypal example of a bad, broken German accent in the English-speaking world, and comparisons to it are made by those who have never seen the original). As time went on and dialect humor fell out of favor, most mainstream comics have stuck to proper English.

* In the Scottish newspaper comic ''[[The Broons]]'' ("The Browns") every single character speaks like this- in a thick Scottish accent.

* Invoked in a series of ''[[Dilbert]]'' strips in which Dogbert temporarily becomes a [[Animal Wrongs Group|militant animal-rights activist]]. He protests in front of a store with a "Fur Sale" sign, until the owner informs him that he's not selling fur; the entire store is "fur sale" (for sale). Dogbert retorts that incorrect spelling offends him just as much.

 

* In ''[[Pygmalion]]'', Eliza's dialogue is at first spelled phonetically. Shaw got sick of writing it that way and, with an explanatory note, switched to standard spelling partway through:

* Alfred Jarry's "Ubu" plays have Ubu and his wife's peculiar accent written into the dialogue - an accent made up by the author. This has made translation of the texts tricky, to say nothing of placing the accent. The most famous example is that of "Ubu Roi"'s first word, 'merdre,' which is the French word for 'shit' with an added extra R.

* ''The Dark of the Moon'' by Howard Richardson does this, too. Because it assumes that the actors are not from Appalachia, everything is done in phonetics. What's ''really'' annoying is that the lyrics in the script are written phonetically, while the unaccented words are written under the notes in the sheet music. Also, the "he" in "you ain't got no man to make you he bride" should probably be pronounced like "heh," but the way it is written, it should be pronounced "hee." Rednecks have terrible grammar as well as atrocious accents, apparently.

* [[Gilbert and Sullivan]]'s ''The Sorcerer'': "Oi tell you true which I've never done sir/Oi loike you as oi never lik'd none sir"

 

* Orcs and Orks in ''[[Warhammer Fantasy Battle]]'' and ''[[Warhammer 40,000]]'', with a Cockney-like Accent.

** For added amusement, note that the way it's written works equally well as a [[Deep South]] or Redneck accent. (Except for the part where they call you a "[[Football Hooligans|daft git]]".)

* Cultist-chan: "Hwee are captooring waffles fhor khay-oss."

* Similarly, the ''[[Serenity]]'' RPG has everything in cowboy-speak. If possible, assets and flaws are named after actual lines from ''[[Firefly]]''.

 

* Most of the characters in ''[[Chrono Cross]]'' have accents in the English translation, in order to add variety to what would otherwise be interchangeable snippets of dialogue spoken by whatever characters you happened to have in your party at the time. This was an attempt [[Translation Convention|to come up with an English equivalent]] to different ways of speaking Japanese.

* In ''[[Final Fantasy VIII]]'', this may account for Ultimecia's bizarre "Kursed SeeDs! You will not stop me from achieving Time Kompression!" speech patterns. May be a somewhat dubious way of making her sound [[Lzherusskie|"Russian"]]. Or may be just [[Xtreme Kool Letterz]].

* ''[[Persona 3]]'' has Bebe, a foriegn exchance student who speaks with a French accent. He also throws in [[Gratuitous Japanese]], which makes for very confusing dialogue.

 

* ''[[Girl Genius]]'' has the Jägermonsters ([[Super Soldier]]s transformed by Mad Science) with silly "Germanic"-sounding phonetic accents. Even more bizarre given that, although the comic itself is written in English, the main characters are [[Translation Convention|actually speaking in German and Romanian]] (as confirmed by the Foglios on [https://web.archive.org/web/20130719132919/http://groups.yahoo.com/group/girlgenius/ the Yahoo Group fanforum]) and the only British character speaks ''without'' any phonetical accent.

** It probably IS [[Fang Thpeak|the pointy teeth]]. It is very difficult to speak properly when one cannot close one's mouth without fangs poking out, as anyone who's ever been a vampire for Halloween can attest. Though it seems the Jäger accent is [http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20030326 infectious] and have spread around: even in Mechanicsburg it's not common, but Higgs (sometimes) and [http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20081029 a local woman] talk like this despite having normal human teeth.

* In the ''[[Alvin and The Chipmunks]]'' episode "Dear Diary" the Chipettes' babysitter not only speaks in this type of accent, but also '''writes that way''', setting up the conflict in the plot.

 

* Read many forums on 'talk like a pirate day' an be sure ya sorery wretchers bain't so cussed blinded tha cha cannaugh make 'eads er tailses uv wot we's been sayings.

** [[LOL Speak]]. Givz hedakes bi lokin at it. Er.. gives headaches by looking at it...

* Xenophobia in the early 20th century confectionery industry (from [https://web.archive.org/web/20110809005342/http://www.nicholas-whittaker.com/st/st01.htm here], and well worth reading): 'Perhaps the British could hardly be blamed for distrusting foreigners, especially when confronted with adverts featuring cartoon Frenchmen snakily hissing: ‘Vill you try mine nougat?’ (Any accent would do, it seemed, even if inaccurate).'

 

* When John F. Kennedy held his speech at the Berlin Wall, he had a note with the foreign language sentences: "Ish bin ein Bearleener" and "kiwis Romanus sum". Correct German and Latin spelling is "Ich bin ein Berliner" and "Civis Romanus sum".

** Note: the Romans pronounced the letter "v" as "wuh". E.g. ''servus'', "slave", was pronounced "saer-WOOS".

* We'd be spared all this nonsense if everyone just learned to read the [[wikipedia:Ipa|International Phonetic Alphabet]].

** For example, 'chocolate cake' becomes 'chokorēto kēki" (which sounds more like 'chocoretoh cakey' written in ''English'' phonetics) but spelling varies with individuals' own pronunciation.

*** [[K-On!|Chokoreito keiki desu yo!]]

* In Spanish, differences between dialects of the language can be either: variations in the grammar, dialects having unique words proper of them, or variations in the locations of the tonal syllable in a determined word. The latter one meaning that, when wrote, the same word can have the tilde(graphical accent) in different syllables(or be missing in one of the writings) depending on the dialect.

* American native-speakers of Spanish who went to school (that is, first learned to write) in English will sometimes write Spanish using English phonetics—the h vs. j thing, for instance. Left uncorrected, this can be a problem if they later take Spanish (foreign language) Class and [[Face Palm|lose points for spelling.]]

** But [[Family Guy|it's noo-kyoo-lur, dummy, the "s" is silent!]]