Corrected entry: When Indiana Jones is told about the tablet discovery by Donovan, Indiana says the three knights who find the grail during the first Crusade are French. When Indiana meets the last knight at the end of the movie, he speaks perfect English, and with an English accent.
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Correction: He's also almost 900 years old and imbued with power by God Himself. I think a simple language would be no big deal at all.
LorgSkyegon
How is he imbued by power from God?
lionhead
How else do you explain him being almost a thousand years old?
LorgSkyegon
Drinking from the cup. How does that make him speak English?
lionhead
The Grail is imbued with the power of God because it held the blood of Christ. One would think that since he is essentially the God-appointed guardian of the Grail, he would have any knowledge needed to guard it.
LorgSkyegon
Thats a lot of assumptions. The cup grants immortality, that's it. It doesn't make you a polyglot.
lionhead
He's the appointed guardian of the Holy Grail, an artifact that grants eternal life and is protected by miraculous and physically impossible traps. The guardian is given whatever power needed to keep the Grail in the chamber.
LorgSkyegon
He doesn't have to do anything to keep the cup in the chamber. The seal does that.
lionhead
I suppose you can make the case about God giving the knight the ability to speak English, but why in an English accent? I would think he'd speak in a French or American accent.
Mike Lynch
Why? An American dialect is no more neutral than an English one. People who speak with a French accent do so because they are still using rules and habits learned speaking French when trying to speak another language.
Because languages and the people who speak them change over time, especially that long of a period, by the immigration and emigration of people, influence of other languages, etc... What he would have spoken then would have been Old French, not modern French. While they do share a modicum of similarity, they are not mutually intelligible due to changes in grammar, syntax, and word use. Old French, for instance, contains far more influence from the Germanic Frankish language and Celtic Gaulish than modern French.
LorgSkyegon
A French accent from 900 years ago would sound nothing like a modern French accent. In the same way, what we consider to be a modern proper English accent is actually a fairly modern phenomenon designed to distinguish upper from lower class people.
LorgSkyegon