beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

The more I read about language the more the single weirdest assumption in fantasy seems to me to be that everyone can talk to everyone.

I mean I've read fantasy series where they travel systematically around their planet and just... talk.

It's like DnD rules assuming Common is a thing, or a thing for humans at least. Like, for a game rule or to not slow the story down, sure, but...

Yesterday I looked up Sifu, because I was pretty sure subtitles were lying to me sometimes about what they were actually calling someone, since I can recognise the sound of Sifu but it wasn't always there when they said Master. And there's a bit of a discuss about if Master or Teacher is a better translation, which I suspect is complicated by language drift in the English translating classes because we still use Headmaster sometimes but very seldom is he or she head of the Masters ie Teachers, unless in very posh schools or at certain levels, or possibly not this year at all. I just looked up Eton and they still use Master, Lower Master and Head Master, as well as a couple of Deputy Head Masters. So, posh, still in use. But if you look up Head Teacher on wiki you see variation in naming conventions even in English speaking countries that are still in contact, adding Rector and Principal, with differences in geography and class. But none of them have the same word elements, roots, as Sifu, which has two ways of writing it on the wiki, one of which uses the word element Father. Skill father? Skilled tutor? Skilled person teacher tutor father are all in there. School teachers might be in loco parentis on occasion but the connotation isn't there generally. And it don't lead in English to the other words for other students, where they're a family under one master-father and form a lineage that matters like a family tree, and subtitles argue over who is older brother. There's also overlap with religious titles in a way teacher and master mostly loses. So subtitles have to pack a lot in to match it, and on the whole don't. And I don't know what other words are being used the times it isn't Sifu but still says Master on the subtitles. And then on wiki I found a whole page of honorifics where one syllable takes a sentence to translate and I have no idea about any of that. And that's just the forms of address for one person in one language.

Yesterday I looked at some Japanese too, Sensei and all that, and then honorifics there, which made me think the fantasy 'verse I'm working on has had a bad translator try and fold all those word endings into just masculine and feminine, because Lady and Gentleman are definitely distinct from woman and man and girl and boy, and maybe the translation baby talks everyone? But then I saw Japanese pronouns and I don't know where to begin.

Pronouns can have person, gender, number, clusivity, formality, and also geographic location to the speaker in ways I did not grok and might have got wrong. And I just read about reflexive possessive forms, which would disambiguate "she gave her her book". And then there's cases. And... many other things. And gender doesn't mean people gender it means a language category that linguists use that isn't just male female neuter but can be like animate inanimate or arbitrary ones or having word endings specifically for cold blooded animals or ANYthing. That's a lot of work to cover by I you he she it we they. The tu vous distinction isn't the half of it. Y'all isn't sufficient. Stuff gets fiddly.

I mean I did a poll to decide what gender neutral pronoun to use alongside he and she, and it came up They because of not recognising the invented neutrals, even per or ze. So okay. But. Really. To write about civilisations that actually exist and preserve their pronoun distinctions? There could be *so many*. SO MANY.

And some readers would bounce off being asked to learn a thing or wonder what was the point, but I've seen an entire short story plot built around not grokking the thou you distinction, so the thing would be to make there be a point.

If your main character is going around using baby's first pronouns and not understanding formal informal or just assuming we is always inclusive, they better hope they're cute, cause that could go poorly.

But then just when I thought I had some interesting ideas about just that one part of speech, I went to look up native american pronouns, vaguely aware there's a lot of languages there because big continent

and

*Keanu woah*

It turns out there are more language families in California, on its own, than in Europe.
I'm a couple paragraphs in to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and brought up short by language diversity again.

And I kind of knew there was more diversity than I tend to think of, because Europe conquered and colonised and it started with Europe, so just on these islands you've got English but also the languages of all the bits England tried to eat, which depending on source googled and argument they're having makes up 11 to 21 native languages. I could think of Welsh and Scots and Gaelic and Cornish and thought that was many, but I'm quite a bit short off the top of my head. And I'd forgot to count sign, even though I remembered to put a sign language in my fantasy 'verse. But. Still. I'm used to pretty much everyone speaking Common/English.

In North America there are or were 25 languages that are their own language families. And more than 300 languages in 57 families. Britannica doesn't distinguish between living and extinct languages, which seems a bit creepy to me, but that is Many. And then there's the most North bit, Eskimo-Aleut, which goes across into Siberia. Fewer language families, but what happens is everyone can understand their near neighbours, but by the time you've crossed the whole geographic range, the edges could no way understand each other. Which makes sense. But means Eskimo is Inuit and Yupik, and Inuit is a language with a dialect continuum which calls itself Kalaallisut, Inuktitut, Inuktitun and Inupiaq, which means 'real person', according to the encyclopedia, which I guess is the subtext on a lot of other language us vs them. And sorting out how many languages there are is therefore a big argument in itself.

And some of these currently have a number of fluent speakers smaller than my town.

What if you could only talk to your town, unless you went to school and learned Foreign, but Foreign lumped you and all your neighbours in together as being vaguely the same. And Foreign turns out to be a lot more languages than even your neighbours talk. And...

... we're inventing other worlds that are monolingual?

I can only blame Babel. It's easy to imagine a world that never built that tower. Kind of hard to come up with a reasonable diversity of language groups.

Universal translators and Speak Language spells and Common to the rescue.

But then it feels colonialist and creepy, because I know we (England) have tried to wipe out opposition by wiping out the words for it before.



I know we can't all be Tolkien, but it seems to me important to strike a balance.


And yet I know my imagination doesn't even stretch very far across the isle I was born on, let alone around the world. So I come up with Midlands and two different language groups across the mountains and feel quite clever, but I'm... really not.

*sigh*



Plus there's the Banestorm. GURPS speak for the storm that took Dorothy to Oz, weather that whooshes you somewhere very else. Importing groups of people from other universes wholesale would make worlds of difference to language diversity, especially if they didn't have to stay the same place on the globe, and why would they? Logically have to get along when Foreign is patchworked into walking distance and you're all equally new here is one of the cornerstones of storytelling based on that trope. And you'd end up with linguistic diversity being very key and plotworthy.

I mean I can just imagine other Englishes where we had different patterns of invasion or religion and kept different tongues to talk to the continent with. But it takes me a few minutes to imagine an island that's considerably more Welsh. And that ought to be easy. And if you're importing from elseworlds, well, that's a lot of alt histories to reflect linguistically.


Do you ever just look at whole vistas of story you are not really capable of and
*big sigh*
?



But. Languages. I'm uncomfortable with the implications if they aren't properly plural.

The s in vision started to bother me.

… I’m reading Avengers fic, it came up.

But it’s not quite like other s sounds, so I just kept looking at Viz or Vis as abbreviations and they’re not quite right.


So I looked it up

http://teflpedia.com/IPA_phoneme_/%CA%92/

wait, does that work? It’s a sort of curly z. ʒ

It says other words with the s-in-vision include

equation, usual, seizure, luxurious, genre and beige

which by my count means spelling it with an s, t, z, ge and half an x.

Unless it’s a translation, then it’s zh.

English!

So now Viz, Vis and Vision will continue to bother me

but in a more informed way.

Am currently frustrated by trying to look up a half remembered thing I read about twenty years ago. I know which library I was in but it seems unlikely they’d have the same books by now even if randoms were allowed to go dig for things. And I can’t remember if it was a book or a magazine anyway.

I think I remember reading about words that don’t translate easily between languages, specifically words for feelings. Like, there are languages where there are more or less words for love. But I was looking for words for anger.

I remember reading there was a word for the feeling of being angry at an ill person for something they only did because they were ill. It was part of a list of words for anger, and each word seemed to have a different appropriate response. Like, you can’t modify behaviour caused by illness without them getting well again, so it’s a particular sort of frustrated-angry that leaves you only trying to get them medicines or chicken soup or something.

I do not know if this was a real word, or indeed a real thing I read, and I don’t know where I’d start looking for it anyway.

But it seems like it would be a useful word, if it did exist.

I was looking for languages that might be difficult to learn without a babelfish.
There's lists of difficult languages, and they all have like Cantonese and Finnish and Icelandic on them.
But http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taa is spoken by about six thousand people and has all the sounds. All.

Taa has at least 58 consonants, 31 vowels, and four tones (Traill 1985, 1994 on East ǃXoon), or at least 87 consonants, 20 vowels, and two tones (DoBeS 2008 on West ǃXoon), by many counts the most of any known language. These include 20 (Traill) or 43 (DoBeS) click consonants and several vowel phonations, though opinions vary as to which of the 130 (Traill) or 164 (DoBeS) consonant sounds are single segments and which are consonant clusters.

I have been listening to sound files and *blink* a lot. Difficult!
Heh, now I want to throw Daniel Jackson at it. It would take a bit more than an episode methinks...

Using anyone's language to mean aliens gets creepy. So, no stealings someone's language to be secretly from another planet. But something with clicks and tones and all the vowels ever would be very hard to figure out for an English speaker. If they could hear the differences at all.

I was thinking, if there's people who make their living by putting a language into a babelfish and passing it on, they might want to have some particular difficult language to make sure they stay in business. Like, a trade language would usually be one made of simple parts all the people can understand, but if you're doing some kind of special initiation pay us a bundle course you want complicated parts only the special people will ever learn. But that don't seem likely to work for more than one generation. Kids learn everything.

I was also thinking if the whole language sounds like Ak Ak Ak to the British guys then the actors can fake it easy and there's some movie jokes in it.
... my fic no has actors. But then everyone has to read it in their heads.

( Read more... )

But I don't go saying this stuff directly to people. I don't know where the line is between 'needs saying' and 'background irritation'. It's just one word, in one quote, which made sense in context, in an annoying kind of way.


But you add it all together and you get language where the insults are about making bad words out of neuroatypical, disabled or queer.

I could really live without that, you know?



I tried once reworking insults for a future SF setting, reworking the swear words so they made sense in context. If you take out the religion swears as totally irrelevant, and the sex swears because sex isn't a bad thing, and the sexual orientation swears because everyone can do who they want, and the race swears because race is just neutral, and the disability swears because there isn't any disability any more (or there is and nobody puts moral weight on it), you very nearly run out of swears. You're left with words for body parts or body fluids or excrement. And a PG rating for language. And a language only suitable for utopia.

Which, you know, I could live with.