Langugage & Dialects?

[Tellon]

I know most folks here don't do anything about this topic, but it is a very interesting one

-- Say we talk to some small speck of a planet, and we "kinda" understand them -- heck, even the translator gets say 1/2 of it -- but, all of a sudden, some clerk knows your dialect and can translate easily ...

Kinda like learning Chinese -- WHICH DIalect are you learning? most of the time, it's Mandarin -- but what if your stuck in Hunan province or on Taiwan -- the dialect is totally different ... Same thing with even other races -- say the Vilani -- after several thousand years of space exploration -- having HUGE tracts oif space -- and the long night taking centuries --

Dialects and "lost" toungues WILL happen --

Say we come upon a planet that speaks a standard Marches dialect -- I'll bet ya, that Core, or Terra or ANtares wont speak that dialect -- and will have thier own -- Can your translator be fitted with hundreds, or thousands of dialects -- so you can talk to those people correctly?

Yes, I know -- we're using the Galactic Standard" language -- :yawn: -- we might have a standard language to work with all the languages -- say an Imperial version of Esperanto -- and people that I know of *might* know it -- but definately only a handful actually use it.
And the "standard" will be concentrated around the Starport, right? ... but go outside and talk to the locals -- then it could get fun .. lol

in MTU, each planet (if the pop is low enough) uses thier own dialect -- while the more heavily populated ones sure have many dialects -- so then .. How many "languages" will your character know -- a merchant/broker would be wise to know say 3 or 4 depending on the planet and people ...

And also -- how well do you know it?

One can understand the gist of say "Come here" -- but something complicated -- say confusing directions from a local who is using slang (even for somebody using 'english', it can be a pain .. lol)

or how about the stressful times of combat --

Your shouting orders to the gunner to shoot the guy on the left -- but the word is confused by the gunner -- for the target above (which happens to be a friendly) -- can you see how confusing & dangerous it can be --

So I think this area has been overlooked -- and so I am wondering who (if anybody) actually dealt with language issues in thier games?

 

[aramis]

Several issues:
1) post-"universal literacy" languages drift very little, and tend to drift around a core "classical" standard. Russian and Spanish, for example, both have had high rates of literacy for centuries, and 500 years has seen new words added, but almost no drift from the meanings of archaic versions.
Even some pre-universal-literacy cultures have had linguistic anchoring... mose of the slavic tongues are nearly fully intelligible due to the linguistic effects of church slavonic being used as a liturgical language in the Catholic and Orthodox churches by a literate priesthood, and its use as a lingua franca between areas, and as a publishing language for science and history works.
Heck, modern Greek is intelligible with Koine greek from ca. 2000 years ago.
2) Post-radio cultures have seen a reduction in dialectical differences. The US and UK both have seen a diversity drop in mainstream dialectical differences in the last century, between both formal standardization for spelling (1870's in the UK, 1910's in the US) and radio (and TV) being predominantly one dialect (London, NY).
3) Post-AV-Recording cultures should see a further reduction in diversity over time.
4) the more trade and traffic, the less severe the dialect. Modern Jamaican English is more intelligible than 1930's, and trade and tourism have increased in the same time frame.

So, to get worlds with unintelligible dialects, they most likely will not be high-tech on-the-trade-route worlds; the unintelligible dialects will be predominantly on xenophobic, self supporting, and low tech worlds with repression of written language.

 

[Vargr]

So, to get worlds with unintelligible dialects, they most likely will not be high-tech on-the-trade-route worlds; the unintelligible dialects will be predominantly on xenophobic, self supporting, and low tech worlds with repression of written language.

Those were some very good points Aramis.

As it happens, I am kicking about with a "lost colony" planet where the natives speak a language Third Imperials wouldn't understand (there are actualy two main dialects). The world falls under most of the traits you pointed out in the bit I have quoted.

Supression of the written language does not exist de facto, but the world boasts an appalingly low level of literacy that the authorities seem quite keen on mantaining. Some of the linguistic derivation between the two dialects was government-driven in their attempts to have a "high language" and a "low language" for the poor and uneducated.

And yes, a Xenophobic trait is present, but curiously the world has been isolated for so long that no one will trully realize this facet until First Contact happens.

 

[Tellon]

1) post-"universal literacy" languages drift very little, and tend to drift around a core "classical" standard. Russian and Spanish, for example, both have had high rates of literacy for centuries, and 500 years has seen new words added, but almost no drift from the meanings of archaic versions.
.

What do we say for French -- which has had literacy since the 1200's -- yet has gone thru iirc, like 5 or 6 set of sound changes .. thus dialects have come and gone. English has gone thru say 4 since OE of the 10th C -- in fact every country has thier own seeming "rate of change" -- thus -- change happens linguistically --

Just look at some calls for alphabet changes to be made -- in Germany and other countries --

Now, we can "postulate" that we are dealing with constant communication, travel, etc, etc -- thus nations will change linguistically slower --

-- But we're dealing with planetary systems -- where a traveller will take probably a good 50 - 100 years to travel from one system to another -- but the time the traveller makes it to his location -- we can easily have enough time for a legit sound cgange in the language to occur. We can use English changing within 1 generation -- as see the writings themselves to see how the changes affected it.

So with relative isolation -- let us say we have colonists getting to the planet -- travellers getting back -- we could easily see say a 200 - 250 yr turnaround; thus the "home" planet in that time WILL have changed ,,,

 

[robject]

What do we say for French -- which has had literacy since the 1200's -- yet has gone thru iirc, like 5 or 6 set of sound changes ..

For longer than that, if you count Late Latin, and quite a bit of fragmentation as well as sound changes (consider all langues d'oïl, per exemplo...).

 

[aramis]

But France did not have widespread literacy. France was notorious for illiterate peaasants until the late 1700's; the nobility (1:1000 or so)were often literate

Russian Peasants often could sound out written words; local priests taught basic literacy (in Slavonic, rather than Russian). About 1 in 5 to 1 in 10...

Muslims and Hebrews were often literate to the 80% or more of their populations.

 

[rancke]

I do try to introduce language as a factor in some of my adventures. But one must always keep in mind that some players and referees simply don't want to deal with that particular complication.


Hans

 

[Tellon]

But one must always keep in mind that some players and referees simply don't want to deal with that particular complication.

Yeah, agreed ...

 

[sayatmenace]

It's an article of faith in the SF and 'futurist' subculture that radio/television/etc. slows or even freezes the rate of language change. I don't know of any actual linguists who believe that. But for purposes of Travelling, I wouldn't feel constrained. Respecting genre conventions is important, maybe moreso than fetishizing 'accuracy'.

 

[Keklas Rekobah]

My Cr0.02...

From the Wikipedia article:

In a language or dialect, a phoneme (from the Greek: φώνημα, phōnēma, "a sound uttered") is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances.

How many phonemes will be recognized 3500 years from now, especially after the assimilation of Vilani, Terran, and other Humaniti cultures? Not to mention the sounds that the Vargr may have introduced! Even now, there is no one set of phonemes that can be agreed upon.

Of all the sounds that a human vocal tract can create, different languages vary considerably in the number of these sounds that are considered to be distinctive phonemes in the speech of that language. Ubyx and Arrernte have only two phonemic vowels, while at the other extreme, the Bantu language Ngwe has 14 vowel qualities, 12 of which may occur long or short, making 26 oral vowels, plus 6 nasalized vowels, long and short, making a total of 38 vowels; while !Xóõ achieves 31 pure vowels, not counting its additional variation by vowel length, by varying the phonation. Rotokas has only six consonants, while !Xóõ has somewhere in the neighborhood of 77, and Ubyx 81. French has no phonemic tone or stress, while several of the Kam-Sui languages have nine tones, and one of the Kru languages, Wobe, has been claimed to have 14, though this is disputed. The total phonemic inventory in languages varies from as few as eleven in Rotokas to as many as 112 in !Xóõ (including four tones). The English language uses a rather large set of 13 to 21 vowels, including diphthongs, though its 22 to 26 consonants are close to average. (There are 21 consonant and five vowel letters in the English alphabet, but this does not correspond to the number of consonant and vowel sounds.)

My point is that not only will a given language itself change, but the phonemes associated with that language will change as well. And since the English alphabet is essentially phonetic, I propose the hypothesis that in 3500 years the 'Alphabet' of the 3rd Imperium ('Galanglic') may well have many more characters than the 26 we currently have.

A person removed from the current era and placed on Capital in 1115 might recognize only a fraction of the characters in use; and even then, the sounds they represent to the Imperial public might have nothing in common with what the time-displaced person is familiar with.

 

[Tellon]

A person removed from the current era and placed on Capital in 1115 might recognize only a fraction of the characters in use; and even then, the sounds they represent to the Imperial public might have nothing in common with what the time-displaced person is familiar with.

Agreed --

But as Sayat mentioned that is very true. The SF/Futurist community is loath to deal with realism about subjects such as linguistics .. Obviously were all going to speak middle american (US) english 3500 years from now.

 

[rancke]

But as Sayat mentioned that is very true. The SF/Futurist community is loath to deal with realism about subjects such as linguistics .. Obviously were all going to speak middle american (US) english 3500 years from now.

No more than Tolkein's hobbits were supposed to be speaking English. Realism is all very well, but writing books in languages that might realistically be in use 3000 years in the future would be silly. Almost as silly as supposing that the author expected us to believe that people would be speaking Middle American 3000 years from now.


Hans

 

[Tellon]

No more than Tolkein's hobbits were supposed to be speaking English. Realism is all very well, but writing books in languages that might realistically be in use 3000 years in the future would be silly. Almost as silly as supposing that the author expected us to believe that people would be speaking Middle American 3000 years from now.


Hans

LOL -- true.

 

[Keklas Rekobah]

So we are left with a conundrum.

Should we (a) assume that all space aliens and future beings will speak perfect English As We Know It, (b) assume that the story-teller has somehow translated everything into EAWKI, (c) insist that writers invent languages that are both internally consistent and totally unrelated to EAWKI and them use them whenever appropriate, or (d) stop whining about it and just enjoy the story?

I vote 'd'.

 

[robject]

So we are left with a conundrum.

Should we (a) assume that all space aliens and future beings will speak perfect English As We Know It, (b) assume that the story-teller has somehow translated everything into EAWKI, (c) insist that writers invent languages that are both internally consistent and totally unrelated to EAWKI and them use them whenever appropriate, or (d) stop whining about it and just enjoy the story?

I vote 'd'.

We all know the Traveller answer - empires are largely economic, so you have to know enough of the lingua franca to trade if you're in the interstellar trade sector. More if you're in the interstellar service sector. But if you don't deal with people outside your own city or country [etc], there's no pressure to speak Anglic.

 

[robject]

My point is that not only will a given language itself change, but the phonemes associated with that language will change as well. And since the English alphabet is essentially phonetic, I propose the hypothesis that in 3500 years the 'Alphabet' of the 3rd Imperium ('Galanglic') may well have many more characters than the 26 we currently have.

This is fun stuff here. For a semi-useless data sample, check out the history of the alphabet. 3500 years ago we didn't even write down the vowels. Sure, the Minoans did, because they had their fancy-pants syllabary, but their system had its own issues.

For another example, check out Devanagari. It has a nice phonetic abjad, including some sounds English speakers don't differentiate. For example, Hindi has more than one "Sh" sound, and they can recognize it just fine. But you won't see two "versions" of every "English sound" there.

Heck, Devanagari seems like a good upper limit to me. 37 consonants, more or less, and 12 vowels.

I wish we kept theta, chi (for ch, not kh), and edh. And I wish we had a letter for sh.

 

[aramis]

Properly, we do have letters (in latin alphabetics) for ch and sh: č and š respectively.

We als have Ðð and Þþ for hard and soft th, and ẖ for the aspirant h-ish (german ch).

We even have sz: ß.


We just don't use them much.