Yes! It sounds like something straight out from a movie. It sounds scripted. It's fascinating that people just spoke like that, I don't know, with more... soul?
It probably is scripted to an extent. Someone linked to outtakes where it's clear they had the subject say the same line multiple times, so it's clear the conversation wasn't entirely off-the-cuff.
If all you need is to be intelligible to the (same, small group of) people you see every day, then a local, short-lived argot will suffice.
If you're talking to people in the next village, town, state, country, continent, and/or planet over, regularly, you're going to need a more stable form of spoken comms, and coordinated evolution is more challenging.
Much as small island populations tend to evolve and diverge more rapidly than large continental ones.
Hi, as someone who has a very limited knowledge in the English language, I'd be very curious to see the old farm's talk be rewritten with modern way of speaking/word choice? I'll appreciate it!
I tried to rewrite it below in what I think would be a modern colloquial way. (This is a difficult question because some things might be different based on region or social class, not just because of the time when it was recorded.)
Quite a few years ago, I'd rather not say exactly how many, but, well, I was born in the first half of last century, so you can guess how old I am.
And now I'm in the, eh, pretty far along in the next century.
Oh yeah. We live in a world of change.
The trees are just like they were when I was a boy, only bigger.
The sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
But when I was a boy, we didn't have the telegraph and we didn't have a telephone.
Of course, none of the electric lights, or any of the other stuff that's popped up to annoy us, or help us.
The good old days had a lot of good things, you guys shouldn't think you're somehow living in the best time in the history of the world.
We're safe, but it's no better than what our parents had, and I don't think it's much better than what our grandchildren will have.
Yep, that's Hudson over there. Nice little city.
Well, I remember very well, looking out my window. I'd see anywhere from 10 to 20, almost never less than 10, sailboats on the river. Now I don't see more than one every three months.
Very few steamboats. Whenever anybody went to New York then, if they wanted to go the modern way, they'd take a steamboat. If they wanted to go cheap, they'd go on one of those river sloops.
Do you know what work is? You don't? Well, work's doing something you have to do. When you're doing something you want to do, like to do, that's play.
And now I exercise a little, but I don't call it work. I don't call this work. This is play. You see how nice that is?
Very, very difficult question. I tried to do a more drastic rewrite and got stumped.
A lot of what makes him sound old is the subject matter. I don't think I've heard the word "steamboat" more than two or three times in my whole life.
Another thing that made it tricky is that a lot of what he says sounds totally normal for modern American English, it's just a little... poetic? The bit about fathers and grandchildren would fit right into a modern speech or essay, for example. I might find it odd coming from a friend in casual conversation though.
There's something about the way he sees his place in the world too. He's a part of it, not a separate thing in it, if that makes sense. That perspective is something that I think has become rare.
Great question. Made me think quite a bit about how context-dependent language is, and the myriad ways just a few sentences can communicate so much more than their literal meaning.
>> Another thing that made it tricky is that a lot of what he says sounds totally
>> normal for modern American English, it's just a little... poetic? The bit about
>> fathers and grandchildren would fit right into a modern speech or essay,
>> for example. I might find it odd coming from a friend in casual conversation though.
Oh, I had the same feeling. And guess what? From time to time, I got emails from people who write like that, and others are in other styles. Some write emails that are very "user-friendly" for non-native English speakers, some write poetic sentences.
You can’t just drop the lower bound. For example, on my fathers side, people born in 1850 are only four generations away. While my mothers side it’s nearly 6. My wife’s family is closer to eight or nine.
