Sunday, 29 March 2015

voice-over speaker on Mrs Bach

I recently watched the film Written by Mrs Bach broadcast by BBC Four. Amongst the academics who were interviewed on the issue of whether Anna Magdalena Bach could have been the composer of several pieces generally attributed to Johann Sebastian, there were two German specialists on Bach. They made their comments in German and accordingly had to be translated. Listen to this extract of the voice-over speaker and tell me if, like me, something strikes you as odd in her enunciation.

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16 comments:

  1. Mariano29 March 2015 at 19:00

    You mean a lisp?

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  2. Kraut29 March 2015 at 19:28

    Mariano, no - not exactly what struck me.

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  3. Sidney Wood30 March 2015 at 10:51

    Sounds like simultaneous translation, a little flat and halting as she keeps up with the original speaker (and being a German original, she has to wait for the verb at the end before she can move on), carefully articulated.

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  4. Kraut30 March 2015 at 11:35

    Any other suggestions?

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  5. Sidney Wood30 March 2015 at 22:06

    Are you thinking she might be a native German speaker?

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  6. John Maidment31 March 2015 at 07:40

    She is quite capable of producing word-initial v+ dental fricative, but uses [d] at the beginning of several instances of the word 'that'.

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    Replies
    1. Kraut31 March 2015 at 08:07

      What about her TRAP vowel, e.g. in the word 'family'?

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    2. Sidney Wood7 April 2015 at 22:18

      What about it? sounds fair enough to me

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    3. Kraut8 April 2015 at 19:45

      It sounds more like a German /ɛ/ to me rather than the RP/GA /æ~a/.

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  7. John Maidment8 April 2015 at 23:06

    It certainly isn't very close to present-day GB /a/ for the TRAP vowel.

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  8. Kevin28 April 2015 at 22:28

    I'm surprised by John's comment. To me, the speaker's TRAP vowel in "family" and "fact" sounded practically indistinguishable from present-day GB /a/ -- certainly it wasn't at all like the stereotypical German realization of, say, "handyman" as what sounds, to British ears, like "hendymen" -- and I wouldn't have taken her for a non-native speaker except for some over-enunciation and separation of the "little words", together with such instances of word-final devoicing as "girlss" and "memberss".

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  9. Ed5 July 2015 at 14:38

    The realisation of /u:/ in "school" gives away that she's German.

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