Any chance of a new voice?

This applies to all DW's writing but really broke into my consciousness reading the Safehold series in succession.

Everyone chuckles and has a wry sense of humour. There are several phrases** that get used ridiculously repetitiously by people of all factions. One clique speaking the same would be easily overlooked but when everyone on a pre-steam planet speaks the same way... (also the same as Honor Harrington and others)

I love DWs stories (more FURY!! -I read honorverse and others avidly but think Fury is your best so far) but this is an area that could definitely use some work. It's only going to be more irritating now I've noticed it consciously.
Apologies to anyone who finds the books less enjoyable after reading this.


* I hate the mangled names and don't bother to remember them
** some time ago but I'll read the new one quite soon so I may come back with examples.

You don't hate the mangled names half as much as the guy who has to use voice-recognition software to write them. I've heard him discuss it. But he thought they were necessary to the milieu and time-gap he was trying to create. Then he was stuck with them.

dreamrider

dreamrider wrote:You don't hate the mangled names half as much as the guy who has to use voice-recognition software to write them. I've heard him discuss it. But he thought they were necessary to the milieu and time-gap he was trying to create. Then he was stuck with them.

dreamrider

Well, I sometimes have to ask why, in the Honorverse, all the sector names (well, not all, but you know what I mean) start with 'M'. I get turned around over "Maya Sector" and "Meyers Sector". Okay, Maya is Smoking Frog, right? Meyers is Meyers (and McIntosh, I think), right?

(Then again at one point lately, (Haven) President Eloise Pritchart (I had to look that spelling up) gets the Battle of Manticore mixed up with something else, but that's gotta be a typo.)

Timlagor wrote:This applies to all DW's writing but really broke into my consciousness reading the Safehold series in succession.

Everyone chuckles and has a wry sense of humour. There are several phrases** that get used ridiculously repetitiously by people of all factions. One clique speaking the same would be easily overlooked but when everyone on a pre-steam planet speaks the same way... (also the same as Honor Harrington and others)

Well, in the case of Safehold, everyone had the same culture imprinted on them. That is, all the Adams and all the Eves who were mind-wiped and imprinted with the legend of the archangels so they basically have the same accent. You could argue that they should have developed regional accents. Perhaps they have, and I just missed it. The old as dirt example of an accent is from the book of Judges:

Judges 12:5, 6 (KJV)
“5 And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay;
6 Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.”

The Ephraimites couldn't say Shibboleth like the other Israelites so they stood out. I guess it's like how people in Tennessee and North Carolina don't say dog, hog, and fog alike. (Some people in NC keep their spare tires in the boot of their cars, BTW, but that's not a shibboleth.)

For whatever reason, the Safeholders don't have accents. Perhaps because they developed sailing ships so fast. Again, perhaps I missed it.

Is that what you meant by "a new voice"?

But then in LAMA, there's a yokel messenger who was told to repeat himself due to accent and being out of breath.

There are accents on Safehold. If I remember correctly, one of Nimue/Merlin's concerns when she first wakes up is mastering the current and local forms of speech eight centuries after her last conversation.

In terms of 'real' language evolution, it takes about 500-800 years, on average, for one language to "evolve" into another one that is not intelligible by speakers of the first (The Horse, The Wheel, and Language by David W. Anthony). For example, think of the changes in English from Chaucer's time to today. So if the real world is a corollary, Safehold should have descended into Babel by now. However, there are other factors. One, there is the very unnatural circumstance of the entire planet being colonized in one process, rather than the language community migrating outward from one point of origin. Also, the planet was uninhabited, so there was no borrowing from local native languages in different parts of the planet to create regional variations. Plus, there is the universally used 'writ,' which is a stabilizing factor much the way Latin was for the pre-reformation church, or the Arabic of the Qur'an is today. So it would ring true that there are regional variations of language on Safehold, but they are pretty much mutually intelligible.

I think what the original post was asking about, however, was the author's voice, rather than the dialogue per se. With a body of work this large, it is inevitable that some repetition occurs ('a lung-filling breath,' anyone? Still and all...) While some features of dialect or phrasing do turn up again and again, I like that... hunting for it is like finding Easter eggs. (Try highlighting all the uses of alliteration in War Maid's Choice!) I would have to conclude that the prose is good enough that I don't mind the repetitive quality of the voice. Unlike, for example, David Eddings' "Mallorean" series, which I also really loved. If I had read the phrase "Garion and his friends" one more time... that book was gonna get flung across the room!

I've read most of Mr. Weber's novels, as well as many of his collaborative works. I think we (the readers) get a better mix of "voices" in the collaborative works, but I don't really have any problem with his solo style. I find it rather comforting, actually...so long as I can distinguish the speech of one character from another within the same novel (which is generally the case).

Polyglot wrote:...
In terms of 'real' language evolution, it takes about 500-800 years, on average, for one language to "evolve" into another one that is not intelligible by speakers of the first

Strangely enough, this is only true of the "mainstream" version of the language. Splinter-groups (for example, the Acadians) tend to remain "more true" to their original dialect over time, for some reason...