2023-02-21
30 分钟From New York City, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.
I'm John McWhorter at Columbia University.
I teach linguistics, among other things.
And my book just out this fall is Words on the Move,
Why English Can't and Won't Sit Still Like Literally.
Why do people seem to talk funny in old movies?
It's getting to the point where old movies,
if we consider that to refer roughly to American film before about 1965,
are increasingly distant in time from us.
These are people who are mostly very dead and their speech sounds downright exotic to us,
especially the further back you go.
And the question is, why?
Why are they talking like that?
Well, there are three main things.
wonder why people in old movies are talking like that.
What we mean is something that's going on with the R's.
And linguists call this R-lessness.
And what it is, is that you drop or vastly distort your R's at the end of syllables.
Instead of corner, corner.
That's a lot of what makes somebody seem like they talk like that back in the old days.