Lo-Fi, language and Merlin
I've been thinking lately about Americanisms/American spelling in Merlin fics. Modern!AUs set in Britain clearly need to avoid them, but for Merlin itself? Should we all really be pulling out armour and colour?
I'm curious because I've never written any show that registered as deeply and peculiarly British to me, refraining by active and willful ( Read more... )
I'm curious because I've never written any show that registered as deeply and peculiarly British to me, refraining by active and willful ( Read more... )
can I make an argument that the archivist dude
That guy is the show trying to be cute: Geoffrey the librarian/chronicler. As in, you know...
And I must admit I missed the reference to statutes entirely. Because I was distracted by the pretty. Because I am shallow.
is there anything Latinate in the history of this corner of Madeitupistan? What about law French?
I do get the feeling the show must be set in the post-Roman era. And one thing that interests me is that if you do accept the 6th-century dating, then it's nearly contemporaneous with Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis (not that it could have had any influence but it does say something about the state of Roman law at the time). Official Roman control would have been absence for--what?--one or two hundred years? So you'd be dealing with "Anglo-Saxon" law, which interestingly tended to be written in the vernacular--and not Latin--but like most Germanic law showed a strong indirect Roman influence in content, particularly regarding certain aspects of property law (or so I've been told by a law professor here--Richard Epstein, in fact, weird as that entire conversation is in retrospect).
But by the time you get to the early 7th-century laws of Æthelberht of Kent, which must have been issued some time after the arrival of Augustine's mission, you already have the influence of early Catholicism and the church establishment. (Though what the status of ecclesiastical courts are at this time I can't say.)
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