More on Movie Accents

Where were we? Oh.

Movie accents are indeed very tricky. The one historical epic that I thought got the tricky business of the subjective feel of accents in now dead languages was "Alexander the Great."
And critics roundly panned it for doing so. These were American critics, so I supposed they thought that everyone in the ancient world should sound like Johnny Carson, or Charlton Heston or something.

But consider: the Macedonians all had Irish accents, the Greeks all British accents, and Angelina Jolie an accent all of her own.

This makes sense: the Greeks, especially the Athenians, were the arbiters of all good taste in things linguistic and the modern British seem to feel the same way. The Macedonians were a mountaineer people who spoke Greek so poorly they could barely convince the Greeks they were speaking their language! At least according to the Greeks. And Queen Olympias, she of the really odd accent, was a foreigner to the Macedonians. She would have spoken Greek with a most peculiar accent.

So one thing Oliver Stone got right, was not appreciated by the American critics.