Subject: In-universe accents and the phonological history of English
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Posted on: 2020-12-01 15:18:22 UTC

Note: Pronunciations are represented according to the International Phonetic Alphabet.

When an audio-visual work is set somewhere where the work's original language was spoken, as well as a few centuries past, it is not uncommon to update the characters' accents for clarity's sake. Even Uru and Myst V: End of Ages, set in the modern day, have Yeesha speaking in an unrealistically modern dialect of English--she would actually, in-universe, be speaking in whichever late seventeenth century dialect her father learned from his grandmother†. Of course, MREDURE is no stranger to the Literary Agent Hypothesis.

I got started on the tack because one of the charges in "Mara-thon" was having "hull" and "full" rhyme in English as Captain Jack Sparrow spoke it. Well, the put-strut split‡ did not happen everywhere in the English-speaking world, and little was known of Captain Sparrow's backstory at the time the fic was written. It did seem possible, albeit unlikely, that he may have pronounced the words as "hʊl" and "fʊl" in-universe. Not that that excuses any of the Suethor's other innumerable (and often greater) blunders.

Thoughts?

† Even part-Ronay like Atrus and Yeesha have longer natural life spans than we do.

‡ Early Modern English /ʊ/ often developed into /ʌ/ (or in some dialects /ɐ/), but this change was often--though not always--blocked by preceding labial consonants and/or following /l/, /ʃ/, or /tʃ/

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