US: Vikings - anyone else watching this ?

Soldato
OP
Joined
20 May 2010
Posts
3,040
Location
World
BTW FutileBreadMachine

If you time traveled back to the era this show is set in you wouldn't be able to understand anyone in england ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_English_language

maybe he can understand english people from it basically being Germanic :p

the dating of Ragnar's death has been alternatively stated as 840 or 865.
guess that explains it then?

BTW there was once a documentary on the bbc where some guy showed how using Germanic English he was able to communicate fairly well with modern men in Holland , Germany etc
I guess there languages didn't change as much as the English language did

Maybe you would like the show to be authentic and have the English people not speak an English language we can understand one that is not to different from the language the Vikings spoke? one that more than likely allowed some people to communicate because most languages in Europe were fairly similar at the time

I was thinking he could understand English because he asked the captured Priest to teach him it .... anyway

JafIhEa.jpg
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
20 May 2010
Posts
3,040
Location
World
The villians on Spartacus were the "love to hate" kind, where even though they were *******s, they were entertaining *******s. Batiatus is a fan-favourite character even though he is the season 1 main villain. Crassus was also a respectable and worthy opponent. Did you not feel sympathy for Batiatus when he got beaten to a pulp and peed on? And when Lucretia got stabbed and her baby killed and she crawled to Batiatus as she was dying?

Regarding the language on Vikings, I know full well the language was different to now, that wasn't my point. I was wondering how he learned such good English over such a short time. Anyone who's learned a foreign language knows it takes ages to keep up with what people are saying even when you know the words. Perhaps in the show the time period is far longer than indicated, but it seems like only a month or less since they returned (needs a montage!).

I am very interested in the relationship between languages and I know there are many shared words between English, German, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages. I was waiting for Ragnar's men to start recognising some words used by the Englismen. I understand Afrikaans, German and Russian to varying degrees so it's interesting spotting things like mother is Mutter in German, ma in Afrikaans, moeder in Dutch and mat in Russian.

Things are more interesting in episode 4, but they went and killed off the best viking, the big blonde guy who was the viking chief in The Thirteenth Warrior (which was an awesome viking movie, even with Antonio Banderas playing an Arab). I would have preferred him in the lead, the actor playing Ragnar is so softly spoken, even when he was on trial and might have been put to death.

His smiling all the time might be down to something I read about him being called Lodbrok, which means hairy-breeches, because he sowed sone hairy breeches to wear whilst fighting a dragon and he always smiled when he sewed.
I see they used brok for breeches, whilst Dutch uses broek and Russian uses bruki.

Sorry, long post!


You need to pay more attention , time periods in this show are in months
Did you not notice is was winter in one episode and then spring/summer in another ?
The priest's hair and beard growing pretty long ? no just for men in those days
 
Back
Top Bottom