Inside A.C.T.

Posted by Cait Robinson, Publications Fellow Black Watch performs at the Armory Community Center now through June 16. Scottish accents are among the most difficult for American English speakers to understand and imitate—even Apple’s famous Siri application is unable to make out Scottish users . Scottish dialects are heavily influenced by Gaelic, Norse, Scots (a Germanic language still spoken in parts of the Scottish Lowlands and Ulster, Ireland), Old English, and German and are divided into five regional subsets. Most Scots pronounce consonants just as speakers of standard British or American English do. Exceptions are r , which is rolled, and ch , which, at the end of a syllable, takes on a guttural German sound, as in “loch.” This guttural sound also surfaces in words like “daughter” or “night.” As in spoken American English, Scottish English often drops the final g on verbs: walkin’ instead of “walking.” Adjectives ending in “ed” are pronounced with an “it,” as in spottit (...

Posted by Cait Robinson, Publications Fellow L to R: Caroline Lagerfelt as Clytemnestra and René Augesen as Elektra in Sophocles' Elektra. Photo by Kevin Berne. Elektra continues through November 18. Learn more about the production and order tickets . To understand the role of women in Elektra , it is valuable to consider the classical concept of feminity. The Greeks viewed women ambiguously: though responsible for bearing children and propogating the human race, they were also descendents of Pandora and therefore members of a separate "race of women," less physically and mentally capable than men. Women were also considered more sexually voracious and predisposed to infidelity, naturally threatening to the order of the household, or oikos , which was their domain. Many texts from antiquity compare women to domesticated dogs—though they serve man and share his household, they forever hover between wild and tamed. Athenians were preoccupied with dividing wom...