Language on Safehold

I'm not exactly sure why you discount "rehearse". Re- in that word is not a prefix, so I don't see why you say this is a morphological boundary. As for other words, how about mayhem?

And I still don't see any evidence that Safeholdians mentally interpret "jihad" as "holy war", so there is no reason they should wonder why the word has nothing in common with "holy" or "war".

These are precisely the sort of questions and thinking the Inquisition is designed to stamp out. I seriously doubt any church scholars are going to pursue such an course of study. Probably the only ones brave (or foolish) enough to study such a thing would be the College on Charis.

Without the presence of other languages I doubt anyone would be able to deduce that English (Terran or Safeholdian) is made up from multiple different word sources as even a skilled linguist/phnologist has no base of reference to judge from. Even the most insular english speaker will have heard some foreign languages such as french or polish or chinese which are obviously a very different type of language.

As for the different "languages" on safehold it would be blindingly clear to any scholar in that relegious environment that the differences are due to faliable mortal man corrupting the pure langage of god he was gifted with at the creation. As to why the language of god seems so strange with so many different sounds he would apply occams razor and because he KNOWS that god is true would assume that it his insufficient grasp of the language of god rather than that his language is built out of several random compononets he has never seen.

Finally Linguistics and linguistic analysis like this has only been a thing for the last 100 or so years after modern communication and recording technology became a thing. Prior to that it was not a focus of scholarship despite the fact we knew that there were many languages because of the legend of Babel, which there is no mention of in a safehold context.

Like many things safehold related we need to compartmentalise an awefull lot of what we know as well educated people on Terra and ask what would be deducable when your info source for ancient history is the radically insufficient information available from the writ and the testomonies which everyone considers to be tue in every way. Labouring under those limitations much of what we know is impossible to deduce without concluding that the entire history of your planet is a lie.

SWM wrote:I'm not exactly sure why you discount "rehearse". Re- in that word is not a prefix, so I don't see why you say this is a morphological boundary. As for other words, how about mayhem?

Actually, rehearse does have a morphological boundary after the "re-". It comes re+hersen ("to harrow again").

Mayhem is a good example. It does come from Norman French, so is technically not an Anglo-Saxon word, but it has been Anglicized sufficiently to probably count.

And perhaps as a subsequent poster notes, without ever having heard another language, no Safeholdian would ever think that any words in their language didn't belong. To me, jihad is obviously not an English word. But that is perhaps because the possibility of another language is self-evident to me. I keep reading these things and keep thinking, "How do they not notice this?"

But in reality, the most perplexing question for me remains how that damned 'y' is pronounced.

Tryptan Felle wrote:

SWM wrote:I'm not exactly sure why you discount "rehearse". Re- in that word is not a prefix, so I don't see why you say this is a morphological boundary. As for other words, how about mayhem?

Actually, rehearse does have a morphological boundary after the "re-". It comes re+hersen ("to harrow again").

True, in Middle French it was a prefix. But in English it is not. And someone who does not know that ancient etymology of a dead language would certainly not recognize it as a prefix. Therefore, for a Safeholdian (or even a modern English speaker), I think rehearse is a valid example.

But in reality, the most perplexing question for me remains how that damned 'y' is pronounced.

Yeah, that's a puzzler! I usually mentally pronounce it as "ih", but clearly the original pronunciation in the names it is used in were pronounced in various ways, from "ee" to "ih" to "eye". Multiple phonemes converged together into the modern Safeholdian "y".

Tonto Silerheels wrote:Tryptan Felle wrote:
Yeah, I guess my thinking was something like this:...

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. That was interesting.

We had another discussion some time ago about a similar topic. The originator questioned near-words. Words like nearoak. He asked wouldn't someone question what it was that the nearoak was near?

I think they have actual Earth oaks too though, so it's no stranger than names like "false nettle" are for us.

EDIT:

Tryptan Felle wrote:And perhaps as a subsequent poster notes, without ever having heard another language, no Safeholdian would ever think that any words in their language didn't belong. To me, jihad is obviously not an English word. But that is perhaps because the possibility of another language is self-evident to me.

Yeah, I think that's it.

Now maybe if things had gone on another 500 years without Merlin's intervention, and languages had diverged further so people started seeing Charisian and Harchongian and whatever as actually separate languages rather than just regional differences in pronunciation, THEN maybe people would start noticing.

I'm not sure that would happen that way though, because the existence of the Writ, Testimonies etc. might act as an "anchor" preventing the languages from changing much further - to the point where it became unreadable.

cralkhi wrote:
Yeah, I think that's it.

Now maybe if things had gone on another 500 years without Merlin's intervention, and languages had diverged further so people started seeing Charisian and Harchongian and whatever as actually separate languages rather than just regional differences in pronunciation, THEN maybe people would start noticing.

I'm not sure that would happen that way though, because the existence of the Writ, Testimonies etc. might act as an "anchor" preventing the languages from changing much further - to the point where it became unreadable.

Yeah, that's a good point, unless they had their equivalent of St. Anselm. In the Middle Ages, everyone wrote in Latin (or what they called "Romance") but pronounced it with regional variation. But they all believed they were speaking the same language. St. Anselm published a guide as to how Latin ought to be pronounced. When this happened, people realized that they were not, in fact, speaking the same language, and "Romance" turned into Spanish, French, Italian, etc. The existence of the Biblical text in the Latin Vulgate continued to provide an anchor for ecclesiastical and academic language, but not for the ordinary people.

Though, perhaps Safeholdian English (what do they even call their speech, by the way?) might go the way of Arabic diglossia, where there is one version that is written and another that is spoken. The spoken versions would diverge as much as the Romance languages did but since those versions would never be written down, they would live under the illusion that they were speaking one language. Most Arabs I know consider the spoken variant "slang" or some kind of corruption of Modern Standard Arabic in spite of the fact that most linguists consider them to be languages, or dialects about to become languages. But Arab resistance to that idea is strong because of the diglossia and perhaps such a thing would happen on Safehold as well.

Tryptan Felle wrote:Though, perhaps Safeholdian English (what do they even call their speech, by the way?) might go the way of Arabic diglossia, where there is one version that is written and another that is spoken. The spoken versions would diverge as much as the Romance languages did but since those versions would never be written down, they would live under the illusion that they were speaking one language.

I think they call it simply "speech". That's probably one of the problems - Safeholdians never had multiple languages the way we did and do, so it's possible that the very concept of "language" is alien to them. Probably someone (aforementioned sailors and traders) may realize that different people speak differently, but I don't think they actually came close to calling this in any way other than "they speak differently/funny". Remember, it's Nimue by whom we learn about dialect differences. Nimue grew up in world with languages, so she knows what languages and dialects are. Safeholdians probably don't. They probably simply think of language as speech, "communicating by sounds" and writing, "communicating by symbols". It's questionable whether they even have word "language" in their vocabulary.

The other thing is that Jihad is not the only "unenglish" word - Safeholdian uses some Japanese (Rakurai, seijin and some more) and nobody questions origins of those. Also, names differ - Harchongese have more Chinese-like names than anybody else and nobody seems to wonder about that either.

Somebody also mentioned before that we we don't know how Federation English sounded. Looking as how now there are more and more Chinese, Hindi and Arabic people, with more and more cultural influence from Japan, it may be possible that what we know under the name of "Federation English" may be some sort of Englo-Arabi-Hindi-Chino-ponese - similarly to how modern English formed. They may be merged so deeply we would not recognize which word comes from what language.

As for pronunciation problems, we also don't know how Safeholdians pronounce words. Again, language changes, so as we now have "though" and "tough", they may have them spoken with only minor speech differences (like "sleep" and "slip"). And they may speak Jihad in more English-like way - ji-ad.