I mean, it's already a classic of historical films, but filmed in the languages of their time, instant best historical film of all time, no contenders.
I know it couldn't have fit with audiences but whatever. One can dream. :P
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http://archiveofourown.org/works/4914646
What if Coulson met The Avengers again?
I'll admit, that that does sound intriguing. Not particularly necessary (IMO) but it would be cool to see, at least from an experimental perspective.
shareYo Meepo, I wonder why the audience even liked it in english. I mean they usually get angry, when Germans in WW2 flicks are speaking english.
share[deleted]
It would have been stupid, because nobody knows enough everyday spoken Latin to write a script in it. We have just enough scraps of it from sources such as graffiti scratched on walls to know that it was radically different from the literary language which is the 'Latin' that we know. Writing everyday conversation in Latin is like an alien trying to write English everyday conversation with only philosophical tracts and eighteenth-century novels as source material. (And that's even before we tackle the question of how exactly it was all pronounced - another thing we can't know for sure.)
It makes sense to have Germans in war films speaking in German, because if you get a native German-speaker with a reasonable grasp of how their own language has evolved in living memory (and thus can avoid modern slang etc.) to write their lines, you can be reasonably sure that's how those characters would have spoken. But if you write a film script in Latin, you're making your characters speak a language that nobody in real life ever spoke - so it's actually less 'period authentic', not more so.
But if you write a film script in Latin, you're making your characters speak a language that nobody in real life ever spoke - so it's actually less 'period authentic', not more so.
That would be like saying a film set in Medieval England would be more historically accurate for the actors to be speaking French, because we don't know how Old English sounded or was pronounced.
It's still the same language, just a different dialect.
That's a very informative response, thank you. I didn realize how little I knew about languages. Im sorry if my reply isn't very substantial, but it seems like you're a lot more knowledgable on the subject than I, and I'm probably going to go read up about Middl English and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight now.
But I do have one question. You know how the movie Passion of the Christ was spoken in Hebrew and Latin by the actors... Does that mean that the form of Latin they spoke in the film was actually incorrect?
~ I'm a 21st century man and I don't wanna be here.
Doubly if not triply so! Not only for the general reason that to create Latin dialogue you either have to have your Roman grunts conversing in literary Latin or invent slang for them, but also because:
1. Gibson made the choice to have the dialogue written in Church Latin, which derived from Late rather than Classical Latin. So it is at least a couple of centuries too late for 33 AD.
2. Latin was very rarely spoken by anyone in the Eastern Roman Empire anyway; the language of officialdom and commerce there was koine ( = everyday colloquial as opposed to classical) Greek. It is incredibly unlikely that Jesus spoke Latin; he would have had just no reason to learn it. But as a Nazareth townsman he might very well have known koine , and if he and Pilate spoke to each other directly they would have done so in that language (every educated Roman knew Greek of course). If Jesus had had no koine they would have had to have an Aramaic-koine interpreter.
Gibson has never said why he made these choices but the general belief is that he went for Church Latin to promote the status of the Latin liturgy, he of course belonging to a fundamentalist Catholic sect that has never accepted the Mass in the vernacular. Making his Passion film in Greek, and thus making it obvious to the world that it was a language Jesus never spoke, would have been something of a blow to the aims of his church!
Juba's homeland was a Roman territory, so he would have known Latin. The German, not so much.
shareInteresting idea. At least as an option on a DVD/BRD-edition. I mean: You can get all the Asterix-comics in Latin, so why not a Latin soundtrack for a film like "Gladiator"?
However:
If the process of reading Latin back in school is any indication, this would mean that it'd take me at least four hours to take in Gladiator. To me, translating Latin texts always felt more like tackling a math-problem - not like reading a text in a foreign language.
There are however people who don't have that problem. One of my Latin-teachers was in some kind of "Latin-lovers" (har-har) society whose members would only speak to one-another in Latin during their meetings. Even when my command of Latin was at its best (a looong time ago), I couldn't have dreamt of doing that.
S.
Isn't the poor man's way of accomplishing this watching a version of it dubbed into Italian?
It will never happen of course. They would either have to get the original actors back to ADR their lines in Latin or they would need to get some scholars/professors who already speak Latin to do the ADR.
The studio will see this as an unnecessary expense and rightly so.