"The Empty Hearse" Serbian scene

[xbbvbxbdc]

So, you all remember the scene from The Empty Hearse when Mycroft and Sherlock are talking about what Sherlock has been up to for the last two years. When they mention Serbia, is there a tiny bit of resentment towards Serbia and Serbian people involved in the dialogue between two brothers or am I overreacting?

[Carol the Dabbler]

Hello, miravedere -- welcome to Sherlock Forum!    Congratulations on jumping right into the discussion!
 
I haven't seen TEH for a while, so I checked Ariane DeVere's transcript.  Are you talking about this scene?
 

MYCROFT: You have been busy, haven’t you? Quite the busy little bee.
SHERLOCK: Moriarty’s network – took me two years to dismantle it.
MYCROFT: And you’re confident you have?
SHERLOCK: The Serbian side was the last piece of the puzzle.
MYCROFT: Yes. You got yourself in deep there ... with Baron Maupertuis. Quite a scheme.
SHERLOCK: Colossal.
MYCROFT: Anyway, you’re safe now.
SHERLOCK: Hmm.
MYCROFT: A small ‘thank you’ wouldn’t go amiss.
SHERLOCK: What for?
MYCROFT: For wading in.  In case you’d forgotten, fieldwork is not my natural milieu.
SHERLOCK: “Wading in”? You sat there and watched me being beaten to a pulp.
MYCROFT: I got you out.
SHERLOCK: No – I got me out. Why didn’t you intervene sooner?
MYCROFT: Well, I couldn’t risk giving myself away, could I? It would have ruined everything.
SHERLOCK: You were enjoying it.
MYCROFT: Nonsense.
SHERLOCK: Definitely enjoying it.
MYCROFT: Listen: do you have any idea what it was like, Sherlock, going ‘under cover,’ smuggling my way into their ranks like that?  The noise; the people.
SHERLOCK: I didn’t know you spoke Serbian.
MYCROFT: I didn’t, but the language has a Slavic root, frequent Turkish and German loan words. Took me a couple of hours.
SHERLOCK: Hmm – you’re slipping.
MYCROFT: Middle age, brother mine. Comes to us all.

I've never interpreted any of that as resentment of Serbia and/or Serbians (more like the brothers resenting each other!), but then I'm not certain which lines you're talking about.  If you could specify, then I'm sure we'd all be glad to give our opinions.

[Arcadia]

Hi miravedere, welcome! I don't have anything new to add to what Carol said, but I look forward to hearing more from you!

[Boton]

Hi, and welcome!  Join the crazy - the more the merrier!  

 

I might comment that part of that dialogue was supposed to be a set-up so that they could make a reference to an ACD line about the "colossal scheme of Baron Maupertuis."  So there's definitely a bad joke in there.

 

I also didn't pick up any resentment toward the Serbians, but maybe you can point it out so I can look again.

[xbbvbxbdc]

Thank you all for your answers. I was talking about these lines:

 

"MYCROFT: Listen: do you have any idea what it was like, Sherlock, going ‘under cover,’ smuggling my way into their ranks like that?  The noise; the people.
SHERLOCK: I didn’t know you spoke Serbian.
MYCROFT: I didn’t, but the language has a Slavic root, frequent Turkish and German loan words. Took me a couple of hours.", 

 

specifically when Mycroft says "the noise, the people". Was he reffering to Serbia and Serbians? What do you think?

 

 

[Caya]

Hi miravedere and welcome!

 

As for that scene, I took it as Mycroft's general reluctance to leave his club (where, remember, talking is forbidden). Remember how desperate he sounded when on the phone during Les Miserables? :lol:

[Boton]

I agree with Caya.  I heard it as "[any] noise, [any] people," not specifically Serbians.  And then I thought Sherlock's Sherlock's comment about speaking Serbian was a response to "smuggling my way into their ranks" -- kind of, "I didn't know you had the skills to even do that" jab at Mycroft.

[Arcadia]

Yep, that's how I heard it as well; people in general annoy Mycroft, not just particular people. They even reinforced that idea in The Six Thatchers, when Sherlock was showing him the photo of the baby, and Mycroft says (and I paraphrase) "I don't get along with them." "Babies?" "No, people."

[xbbvbxbdc]

Now that you say it like that... Yes, I should have supposed that that was just Mycroft being himself.  :D It makes sense. Thank you, people! 

[Carol the Dabbler]

Glad we could help!    Looking forward to hearing more from you.

[elbafo]

What I found funny (and I read this somewhere else... sorry for not giving credit here) but Mycroft, as the apparent competent linguophile, pronounces "Maupertious" as "Maw-per-shus" instead of "Mopper-twee."

[Carol the Dabbler]

Is that perhaps the (correct) British pronunciation, though?

[elbafo]

Is that perhaps the (correct) British pronunciation, though?

I think it's French. And, my apologies. It's spellt "Maupertius" not "Maupertious". I may have heard the pronunciation on my audiobook version of ACD's Sherlock Holmes. I can't remember the name of the narrator, but he sounded British. I also have the Stephen Fry-narrated version. I'll check that particular adventure where Baron Maupertius is mentioned, and hear how Fry pronounces it...

[Carol the Dabbler]

I believe you're right, that the official pronunciation is French style. But there are a lot of words that come from French but are not pronounced that way in the UK, at least by some people. Admittedly, Mycroft would seem to be a person who *would* use the French pronunciation, just to show off. But as I recall, he had to glance at the report to get the name, so he was not particularly familiar with it, and therefore gave it a more generic European pronunciation?

[Carol the Dabbler]

Oh, wait a minute, I just realized something -- the "twee" pronunciation would be appropriate to a name ending in -tuis, whereas the "shuss" pronunciation would make sense if it were spelt -tius.

 

Google reveals that there was a prominent French mathematician with the -tuis spelling (and therefore the "twee" pronunciation). But the -tius ending is a very common misspelling of his name (it even occurs at least once in his Wikipedia page).

 

The Baron, however, is a Conan Doyle reference from The Reigate Puzzle. I'm not at home now, so can't check my books, but I'd be particularly interested in seeing how the annotated Reigate spells the name, and what sidenote it might have.

 

If ACD used the -tius spelling, then the Baron did not have the same name as the mathematician, and Mycroft's pronunciation was correct. But if ACD used the -tuis spelling, then either the script had it misspelt or MG misread (and therefore mispronounced) it.

 

Does anyone have a print Reigate handy?

[elbafo]

Ah, yes, you're right. I've misspellt it again!

 

From The Reigate Puzzle:

 

The whole question of the Netherland-Sumatra Company and of the colossal schemes of Baron Maupertuis are too recent in the minds of the public, and are too intimately concerned with politics and finance to be fitting subjects for this series of sketches.

And I listened to Stephen Fry's narration. He says it with a delightful French accent "Moe-peh-twee".

 

I guess we'll never know what was in the script!