Aye ! Arse and Bloody !

Well the dialogue is translated too, technically speaking, so we end up in the same place. None of these people are speaking or writing in English, so total faithfulness is out the window. The best you can hope for is a form of English that sounds appropriate for the time and place.

Most of these translators are scholars working on stuff they really care about, not hired hands, so at the very least I trust their best guesses. And what they get wrong, someone else usually corrects in a later edition or a footnote.

gothicangel said:

A bit late in the discussion, but you do see this in Roman HF (especially Simon Scarrow), and I hate it. Not so much that its British, but that it sounds too modern. I prefer to research Roman swears and get a little creative (I have a book on Classical Latin profanities). Perhaps it is worth going back and looking at the language your characters should use. My WIP at the moment has a cast of mainly Jewish characters, and sometimes I have to stop myself from them blurting out, 'Jesus Christ' or 'Lord/God' in a swear which would be blasphemous to them.

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I really found it hard to get into Scarrow for that very reason. It was jarring to have Romans calling each other mate and sunshine, and using other colloquialisms that reminded me of my north London raised boyfriend at the time

My rule of thumb is that most profanity and insults stem from the universals, so bodily functions, sex, animals etc. Or as my Greek drama professor once memorably said in a lecture on Aristophanes, anything related to pissing, shitting, fucking or farting Targets for insults are also universal, like physical attributes, intelligence, parentage. These things vary surprisingly little from culture to culture, and across the centuries.

I have a character in my ancient Egyptian novel who is very coarse and foul mouthed, and I have so much fun with his dialogue. I think my favourite was when he called someone a 'goat-fucking aristo-cunt'

(And yes, the play on words there is heavily reliant on its translation into English, but I gave myself a pass on that coz it made me laugh)

btw, I think I have the same book on Roman profanity as you

onesecondglance said:

Off topic, I once read a translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey that was modern, brisk, and unflinching - I particularly remember the passage where Polyphemus is blinded for it's brutality. But I can't remember the translator! Possibly Robert Fagles?

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Don't like Fagles either. My favourite is the Martin Hammond, because it just translates the words in strong, clean prose that preserves an accurate sense of the meaning without trying to imitate the style or get fancy with language.

morngnstar said:

Nope. Latin, Gaelic, and Greek are so unlike English that it would be impossible to say what dialect of English is more like them. That's like asking whether a squirrel or a chipmunk is more like a brontosaurus.

As far as whether British or American English is more like Old or Middle English, someone once told me that what they spoke in Shakespeare's time was more like an American accent. Remember, there's no reason why British English should be closer because Shakespeare lived in England. When the first colonists came to America, they had the same accent as the English. Over time, both accents changed. What I heard is that it changed more in England.

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More like a distinct southern hillbilly accent. There really is no suich things as an American" accent. It's believed this particular accent has not changed here, or only imperceptibly so, since Shakespeare's time because for most of history, it lived in isolation.

Chris A said:

Hi! I am writing a HF novel set on the X century and in the middle east.
This is middle age right before the crusades.

Some of my characters would say things as "Aye"; refer to the ass as arse and say "bloody" whenever something goes wrong (among other similar terms).

One of my beta readers was severely frustrated because the characters sounded (to her) "british" even when did not live in an english speaking country.

My reasoning to use these terms is to provide the reader some sense of being in the middle age; although my intended audience is american.

To illustrate below is an extract:

"Ma'am Mariam, you can do with the bloody kingdom what you please. You can wipe up your "arse" if that gives you any satisfaction, or worse hand it to this snake of L for him to fuck it..."

What are your thoughts of using these terms for characters that are not in an English speaking country?

Tx for your help!

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That actually sounds very, very close to modern English. Even "arse" is a still used word. I can't really see any difference at all between this, and how people speak now.

If you aren't an expert at languages it's best to find examples written by experts, and do as they do. You can't make it up, or do only what your ear tells you to do, or it will never ring true.

Jamesaritchie said:

That actually sounds very, very close to modern English. Even "arse" is a still used word. I can't really see any difference at all between this, and how people speak now.

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!!!

I'm sorry, but which part of Britain did you last visit? Coz I really don't know anyone who talks like this. People do still use arse and bloody (although the latter is becoming less and less common, often substituted for the more coarse 'fucking' these days), but not in the way the OP has used them.

I might call someone a bloody pain in the arse, tell them to mind their own bloody business, or say do whatever you bloody well like, but you really need an ear for the way Brits use profanity and slang. I think you need to watch more Brit films and TV

this site might prove useful: http://historicalthesaurus.arts.gla.ac.uk/
It tracks approx 800k English words, their derivatives and meanings