Commodore Oakius wrote:I have to say my first exposure to HH was listening to War of Honor, on audio tape, abridged, by MB. I adored it, and I think she did better reading and pronouncing then others, but I am biased because I started with her.
That being said, I have listened to all the HH books on audio, and only actually read 2 of them. I find it easier to do so then to find time to read, and it allows me to use my reading time for other things.
Now for a short "Rant":
I dislike all the a foreign accents that have crept into the readings. The way I understood the Honorverse is that each star system, while usally settled by a group predominated by a certain ethinic group, all spoke standard, and that, except on backwater, or extremely isolated places, standard was the primary language. So when people from Neuvo Paris started speaking with a french accent I was kinda irked. I was thinking that the mixing of people would have created new accents, not maintained accents from 2000 years previous. I have always thought that these polities were amalgams of people from many people immigrateing to them for the past 2000, or less, depending on the age of the colony, years.
I know that Haven was loosly based on the French, espcially the rein of terror, for many years, thus Neuvo Paris, and Manticore on Britain, but I thought that was just because of the historical political correlations. I never believed that it was meant to have maintained the accents from 2000 years ago.
Am I alone on this feeling? Or do others share it?
Actually, David Weber has indicated that the various planets do generally have recognizeable accents of various kinds.