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Two women recall coming of age in Victorian London (1970) [video]
- toomuchtodo 4y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv6V1yHvJyo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv6V1yHvJyo
- davesque 4y agoI'm always completely fascinated by the change in language style between now and then. They're speaking the same English; it's not like a different dialect or anything. But the manner in which words are strung together is completely different and rather poetic sounding to my ears. These women were, of course, citizens of the 20th century. But I assume they formed many of their speaking habits early in their lives during the 19th century.
- sammalloy 4y agoRichard Pogge at Ohio State touches briefly upon this problem in his astronomy lectures as an analogy to trying to communicate with a putative extraterrestrial culture. We can barely communicate with our own species just a few generations removed. Have you ever tried to talk about technology with your oldest living ancestors (such as your grandparents)? I have, it’s a comedy of errors.
- personjerry 4y agoThere's a classic science fiction novel, The Forever War, which explores this idea as well - because of relativity, when the soldier returns from his battles he is speaking almost entirely a different language. Edit: Corrected from Starship Troopers to The Forever War
- NortySpock 4y agoI think you are thinking of The Forever War by Joe Haldeman.
- personjerry 4y agoYes! Thanks for the correction
- hnzix 4y agoThe Languages Of Pao by Jack Vance is another classic science fiction novel that explores the impact of language on anthropology (the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis). For example, the warrior caste speak a dialect that encourages aggression.
- euroderf 4y agoAnother one is Babel 17.
- golem14 4y agoAlso along these lines: Return from the stars by Stanislaw Lem. Spoiler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_from_the_Stars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_from_the_Stars
- mhh__ 4y agoThere's also '39 (the queen song) where the relativistic travellers come home and find everyone they've ever known or loved are long dead.
- ghaff 4y agoAlthough I know people who are grandparents who are probably far more technologically sophisticated than a lot of teenagers are. More generally though, there is just a lot of culture, ways of doing things, lived experience, etc. that are--if not bubbles--more disjoint between different ages and other demographics than not. It's probably really hard for a teenager or young adult in western society to really imagine a world before the internet, smartphones, home computers, etc. and all those imply. You had to watch whatever was on one of three channels at a specific time of night?
- WalterBright 4y ago> You had to watch whatever was on one of three channels at a specific time of night? True. But then again, far less TV was watched. There was an occasional good show, the rest was filler that was pure drivel. There's a reason kids played outside with their friends in those days. There was nothing to do in the house. The stations would broadcast a test pattern at night.
- tragomaskhalos 4y agoLooking through and old tabloid newspaper from the early '80s I was amazed to see that the TV listings was just a bare half page showing the names of the programmes, and that was it. Nowadays you have endless recommendations and reviews of what's coming up, and endless analysis of what's been on (e.g. just last night was reading the House Of The Dragon episode recap in the Guardian). What was most striking is that I don't remember TV being so low-key in the culture, nor how it crept up in importance, despite living through the change. Edit: Briton here.
- ghaff 4y ago>What was most striking is that I don't remember TV being so low-key in the culture, nor how it crept up in importance, despite living through the change. TV was anything but low-key in culture. In fact because everyone watched a show at the same time, there was much more cultural synchronization/watercooler talk with respect to shows like MASH or Seinfeld. What did change beginning with maybe the Sopranos was that (a limited slice of) TV became more high culture and displaced film to a certain degree in that regard. (And streaming enabled the sort of serialized drama that was hard to pull off in a fixed time slot broadcast world.) >the TV listings was just a bare half page showing the names of the programmes, and that was it. True, but in the US, TV Guide magazine was I believe the most subscribed to magazine in the country. That's where a lot of people got more detailed (though relatively still quite limited) information from.
- cm2187 4y agoThat's massively hyperbolic. I can walk the streets of Rome and understand most of what was written 2000 years ago on the walls, and I was always a mediocre student in Latin, just the latin-derived languages are close enough.
- sammalloy 4y agoYou’re right, but when you try to explain a cell phone to the most learned Roman, how far do you think you might get?b I’m guessing they will try to have you locked up, or worse.
- ginko 4y agoEh, just tell them it's a magic trinket that allows you to see and hear others with such a trinket from far apart. It's not like the average person of today's understanding of cell phones is significantly more sophisticated.
- OJFord 4y agoIt's not particularly prominent here (as far as I can tell anyway), but worth noting I think that often some (to a lot) of that is clipping and similar artefacts from the microphone (et al.) used at the time. I agree though, and why should it happen really? Every next generation's slight defiance of the (then) norm? It's tempting to call ours a more relaxed English, but I don't think that's right, it only seems that way by comparison to something else we'd have to adopt consciously.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wahern 4y agoBefore smartphones, television, etc, language was a much more significant source of entertainment in itself, and so people invested much more time in word play, or employing more descriptive and emotive vocabulary and phrases. I think this is why, for example, not too long ago you typically saw more colorful language in rural areas, especially before television became such a ubiquitous past-time, but after more modern entertainment like film became common in the cities and suburbs. This seems still somewhat true in less developed areas around the world, where "back country" folk sometimes have a peculiarly rich vocabulary and manner of speech compared to their counterparts from more urban, modern areas. Imagine if we spent (intentionally or unintentionally) all the time we spend today learning to identify and applying pop-culture references to instead improving our vocabulary or using more expressive speech patterns. Or to put it another way, before mass consumer popular culture, expressive speech was the popular culture--stories, jokes, songs, turns-of-phrase, or just gossiping, but unlike those things today you had to add the flourish. Maybe it's just all in my head, though.
- LAC-Tech 4y agoMaybe it's just all in my head, though. What you said makes perfect sense to me.
- maegul 4y agoInteresting. I don't have quite the same impression. To me it feels like they're generally well spoken but with a decent amount of a casual or conversational style. In essence, I'd bet it's a relatively clean and efficient use of the language where you could probably transcribe their words and not need to make many corrections for written publication. Fewer fill words ("like", "umm" etc) and pauses and relative fluency with their selection of meaningful but not bombastic words.
- doingtheiroming 4y agoThe both sound middle class.
- doingtheiroming 4y agoIt’s wonderful. I love the word “slurring” for sliding. It describes the way a cart might move through mud perfectly.
- cm2187 4y agoYou observe the same in French. The quality of the language of people interviewed in the 40s is almost flawlessly superior to today's french literature. And every generation from there has been a step down, I don't think there is an exact cutoff. It seems to me that it affects all social classes and levels of education. I am not sure why.
- henriquemaia 4y agoI read your comment and, though I understand the sentiment, sometimes even feeling the same myself, I don't quite agree with it. Just think: who would be interviewed in the 40s from the previous century? Just a few, highly selected individuals. So what you have is a very biased sample. Compare that to what we have today, and the noise is obviously much, much stronger. We are almost drowning in information, everyone can virtually host their own show, and so on and so forth. But once you weed out the noise, and select the gems, they're still there, still shining. Our time is just that, our time. We are different, for sure, but not less qualified language wise.
- verisimilitudes 4y ago
- becquerel 4y agoIf you think there weren't songs as raunchy as Anaconda back in the 40s, 30s, 20s or even the 1500s, I have a bridge to sell you.
- Retric 4y agoPlenty of average people where interviewed for one reason or another and the difference is still generally striking. Here’s some interviews with former southern slaves for example: https://www.loc.gov/collections/voices-remembering-slavery/ https://www.loc.gov/collections/voices-remembering-slavery/
- 4y ago
- rejectfinite 4y agoA better language instead of the americanization and slang for modern English. As someone who is not English I would rather listen to those old women than any modern man.
- adam-a 4y agoIt is a dialect of course, basically RP. They are both middle-upper class Londoners and the accent still survives to some degree. You can tell when the one lady sings the "cockney" song, she imitates the working class accent of the area which also you still hear a bit in East London.
- ohthehugemanate 4y agoOther posters here are bemoaning the degradation of language, kids these days and their hippity hoppity music and tock tick videos, and so on... But we should bear in mind that one of these women was a professional novelist, and the other, one of the first professional typists. Meaning they both had a much higher sensitivity to the use of language than the average Joe on the street. They were professionally more literate and intentional in the use of language than the average. A better comparison would be modern professional writers or speakers. Or if you prefer, compare modern tiktok speech to those "cockneys" who sang the bawdy song. I am not discounting the terrible effect on the English language of the kids these days, of course. We are all entitled to our expression of "ugh" like the magistrate in her story.
- LanceJones 4y ago"Mud brushing" their skirts for hours. Ah, the things we are convinced to do from a social expectation standpoint. In terms of what she saw on the streets of London -- mud and fog -- my understanding is that London rarely sees fog, and that "fog" in the 1890s was actually smog.
- walrus01 4y agoa large part of the "Mud" was almost certainly horse waste, one of the same reasons why traditional new york brownstone townhouses have their entrance up a set of stairs.
- euroderf 4y agoBrown stone indeed.
- thriftwy 4y agoMoscow had mud on the streets as late as early 2000s. Turns out, only with careful urban planning can you make sure that soil is undisturbed and any extra water gets into drainage. By default you will get mud on the streets in wet climates (and dust in more arid ones).
- arethuza 4y agoWhere I used to live in the New Town of Edinburgh there was a boot scraper built into the stone just to the side of the front door. NB The New Town is quite old, but not as old as the Old Town :-) https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/728/ https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/728/
- Neil44 4y agoI thought about the smog too. Probably from the coal fires, gas lamps and the like. And now we’re worrying about dust from tyres! Things move on eh.
- jmkd 4y ago> Ah, the things we are convinced to do from a social expectation standpoint. Shopping for new clothes for hours because our perfectly serviceable old ones are less fashionable. Cleaning sneakers for hours to ensure our streetwear look is on point. Queueing up for hours to take selfies at an influencer hotspot. etc
- mistermann 4y agoTangential, but this is a great channel by an old school amateur film maker who posts lots of great old videos that you can't find elsewhere, two of my favorites: Vietnam vet: https://youtu.be/tixOyiR8B-8 https://youtu.be/tixOyiR8B-8 Mountain clog dancers: https://youtu.be/cs2j8f7H2WY https://youtu.be/cs2j8f7H2WY
- reidjs 4y agoThat recollection of the vietnam war should be required watching for all Americans, thanks for posting it, what a pointless war.
- nervousvarun 4y agoFYI certainly not at the level of "required viewing" yet...but this is a very popular and highly seen interview...there's a far more popular YT video of the same guy that has 19M views: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tixOyiR8B-8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tixOyiR8B-8
- IndigoIncognito 4y agoThe BBC Archives are great, including British Pathé
- 2143 4y agoI was just thinking. Somebody born in the 1870s and who went on to live for a 100 years would have seen: - people going around on horses and donkeys with carriages and everything getting replaced by motor cars - invention of aircraft, jetplanes, and even supersonic aircrafts that obsoleted ocean-liners - moon landing - two world wars - decline of the British Empire - telephones - computers - germ theory It's too much. I wonder what the world would be like if I survive till the later parts of this century.
- conception 4y agoyou’ll probably see.. -a moon landing -two world wars -decline of the nato empire -the end of telephones -hopefully not the end of computer technology cause by the world wars but… -germs striking back
- golem14 4y agounlikely to see WW3 _AND_ WW4 ...
- Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago> - decline of the British Empire https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpohrKaos2o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpohrKaos2o There's a long but very good interview done with the philosopher Bertrand Russell in the 60's, and a point he makes in it was that in the early 1900's the idea that the British empire and specifically their navy would be supreme forever more was widespread. And I suppose pre-WW1 they might have had a point - he said the people at the time didn't view "land powers" like the Prussians as being terribly threatening to their global status. Another takeaway from it, was that he was very particular about how his kids were educated, these days, we mostly give it to abandoning them to cultural groupthink rather than having any critical input into how their taught.
- pm215 4y agoWas being particular about education a widespread thing back at that time, or is it just that Bertrand Russell was a serious philosopher and intellectual and so rather more invested than average in the fine details of his childrens' education ?
- ncpa-cpl 4y agoSome years ago I was asked to record interviews with older family members for a class in collage. The result was something similar to this interview, those college interviews have become family memories.
- tomcam 4y agoSo much better-sounding than the affected “trans-Atlantic“ accent we Yanks used roughly until Robert DeNiro.
- tomcam 4y agoMy city is now best known for Microsoft headquarters, but in those days it was a logging town. The roads and sidewalks were made of “skids”, aka logs. Skid Road later became “skid row.” Falling in the mud was a preoccupation of everyone but especially the ladies in their Victorian dresses.
- jmkd 4y agoThis is a majestic video. The elegant elocution of these ladies helps reveal much about the parallels between then and now. Theirs was a time of enormous change in society, morality, identity, gender, poverty, industry, technology, religion and so on. Just as ours.
- lawlorino 4y agoThe second woman on the video, Berta Ruck, has her own Wikipedia page. She was quite a prolific author in her day https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berta_Ruck https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berta_Ruck
- kwere 4y agospaking about 19° century, there is a yt channel "life in the 1800s" which takes old black&white videos of that time and adds/restore audio/color: https://www.youtube.com/c/Lifeinthe1800s https://www.youtube.com/c/Lifeinthe1800s