Description

How the Edwardians SpokeBBC 4 Sun 6 May, 21:00-22:00  60mins  Voice coach Joan Washington tells the story of a remarkable discovery of recordings of British Prisoners from the First World War discovered in Germany, giving an insight as to how people spoke at the time and how accents have changed over the years.Travelling to the hometowns of some of the prisoners, she meets with the families to play them the recordings of their relatives, made nearly a century ago. AVI File Details========================================Name………: How the Edwardians Spoke.WnA.aviFilesize…..: 449 MB (or 460,794 KB or 471,853,056 bytes)Runtime……: 00:58:51 (88,283 fr)Video Codec..: XviDVideo Bitrate: 937 kb/sAudio Codec..: 0x0055(MP3) ID’d as MPEG-1 Layer 3Audio Bitrate: 123 kb/s (61/ch, stereo) VBR LAME3.97frame Size…: 608×352 (1.73:1) [=19:11]How the Edwardians SpokeA (slightly ponderous) documentary on a set of rare sound recordings of British and Irish POWs from World War I. First recordings are just after 10 minutes in. I liked the way the speed of the shellac recording is calibrated by matching an A note on the last groove to the A from a tuning fork. At 23” or so there’s a recording of a man telling the parable of the Prodigal Son, where the difference between the ‘a’ in father and the ‘a’ in man is quite striking. At about 35” there’s an nice example of the problems associated with interpreting material like this: another recording of the Prodigal Son story (a set text for the German academics who were interested in English accents) is played to a woman who knew the solider speaking, with interesting results.