Spoken Languages In The Honorverse ...

cthia wrote:For the sake of this discussion, I think it is highly relevant. IMO.

Actually, for the sake of this discussion, all the statistics are irrelevant. It is obvious that every denizen of the Honorverse is born with a universal translator implant.

Weird Harold wrote:

cthia wrote:For the sake of this discussion, I think it is highly relevant. IMO.

Actually, for the sake of this discussion, all the statistics are irrelevant. It is obvious that every denizen of the Honorverse is born with a universal translator implant.

Not exactly Harold. No one understood the language spoken by Santino, Young, High Ridge, Janacek and most Solarians. Stupid doesn't translate well. Most listeners are like "WTF?"

Poor Andrea Jaruwalski "WTF are you saying sir?! That does not translate! Or compute!"

DW long ago addressed this topic in the books. Due to computers holding the written language constant and recording devices holding the spoken language constant and the defacto that most of the early colonies came from the western hemisphere english standard became the defacto language.

He addressed this in HotQ and SoSag

cthia wrote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_l ... e_speakers

What? No tlhingan hol? Scandalous.

Relax wrote:DW long ago addressed this topic in the books. Due to computers holding the written language constant and recording devices holding the spoken language constant and the defacto that most of the early colonies came from the western hemisphere english standard became the defacto language.

He addressed this in HotQ and SoSag

It's better arm-waving than usual.

In fact, by the time of the Honorverse, it would be possible to have accurate, real-time mechanical translation. The basis has already been laid down; unfortunately it's currently stuck in academia somewhere in Australia - they don't seem interested in publicizing it. Or at least, the don't seem to be very effective in publicizing it outside of professional linguists who are interested in semantics.

The above is actually real. See https://www.griffith.edu.au/humanities- ... e-homepage if you want to do some real digging - the material is not simple.

Relax wrote:DW long ago addressed this topic in the books. Due to computers holding the written language constant and recording devices holding the spoken language constant and the defacto that most of the early colonies came from the western hemisphere english standard became the defacto language.

He addressed this in HotQ and SoSag

You beat me to it.

There hasn't been a drift in the spoken language (like in the Safehold universe) because they had access to audio records of 'proper' pronunciation.

That would mean that the English spoken in the Honorverse would be almost identical to what is spoken today (based on the timeline presented for the colonization program), so Honor reading CS Forester wouldn't be any more complicated than it is today (once you get a handle on all the 18th Century naval and sailing parlance).

jtg452 wrote:

Relax wrote:DW long ago addressed this topic in the books. Due to computers holding the written language constant and recording devices holding the spoken language constant and the defacto that most of the early colonies came from the western hemisphere english standard became the defacto language.

He addressed this in HotQ and SoSag

You beat me to it.

There hasn't been a drift in the spoken language (like in the Safehold universe) because they had access to audio records of 'proper' pronunciation.

That would mean that the English spoken in the Honorverse would be almost identical to what is spoken today (based on the timeline presented for the colonization program), so Honor reading CS Forester wouldn't be any more complicated than it is today (once you get a handle on all the 18th Century naval and sailing parlance).

I'm not entirely convinced that just because there are recordings of 20th/21st Century English available to Honorverse star nations, that the English language wouldn't drift over the centuries from now until the future then.

Go back and listen to some old radio broadcasts, or watch some old movies from the 1930's/40's. The English language those recordings preserve is subtly different than today's American English in a lot of different ways--cadence, vocabulary, pronunciation, etc. People today don't really care very much how people talked in the 1930's and 1940's.

On the other hand, I've read in an number of different places that American English is actually closer to 18th Century British English than 21st Century British English is to its 18th Century ancestor. So a factor that might tend to preserve a language is the very Diaspora away from Earth that mankind undertook in the Honorverse. (The hibernation ships originally used would of course pretty much perfectly preserve whatever language the travelers spoke when they departed, thank you very much.)

Regardless, this is a point that I'm more than willing to suspend any disbelief, so I'll buy the no-language-drift Honorverse handwavium with equal ease that I accept the Honorverse FTL drive physics handwavium.

JohnRoth wrote:
The important thing here is that both MSM and Spanish are regional languages, English is a global language. You don't learn MSM to talk to anyone outside of China, you don't learn Spanish to talk to anyone outside of Spain and the Americas. You learn English if you want a good chance of talking to important people anywhere in the world. The relative number of speakers, whether native or second language, is irrelevant.

That is incorrect. There are quite a lot of places where English is definitely not the preferred language to know if you want to have a chance to talk to the "natives".

Large portions of Africa, you want French or sometimes even German, though the latter seems to be mostly disappearing. And both of those languages are also very valid in some scattered other places, mostly the result of previous colonisation or trade.

Spanish goes both in America and some places in Asia/Pacific, Portugese likewise.

Russian has been given a fair spread(and not very regionally so) due to USSR sending people to various places for both good or bad reasons.

Mandarin is starting to become a big thing in various places in Africa and already has plenty of regional following around China, while also increasing in popularity in Europe(where it is quite common to learn a third or even fourth language beyond their own and English).

Japanese is more likely to work on the Philippines and a few other places than English is, along with some occasional places in South America and Asia/Pacific, but is also slowly gaining in some other areas, far from being a 2nd language NOW, but might become it in another 50 years or so.

Arabic is being pushed as the "must know" language for anyone islamic(the koran must be read in original language), this has pushed it up to much wider spread than it otherwise would have had.


Most important of all, the current trend is that while more countries are adding English as a 2nd language, the idea of English as THE international language is actually in decline.
Even more than adding English as 2nd language, people are adding a 3rd or even a 4th language, not seldomly to better skill than English, with those 3rd and 4th languages being the "important" ones while English is used less often.


Longterm, this points towards more languages becoming normality to the point where English will probably eventually become demoted to one among several major trade and business languages roughly based on origin region or type of business or culture but also some degree of random.

Exactly. I suspect it has roughly the same status as Latin had in Late Medieval Europe and later - the common languages had diverged by that time, so Latin became a lingua franca that was pretty much frozen - it didn't change much because it didn't have to change. Right up to the 20th century the standard Latin Bible was the Vulgate, which was created in the late 4th century.

It didn´t change because it was a dead language, kept alive artificially and in a rather bad form which those who spoke "real latin" probably wouldn´t even understand sometimes.

In fact, by the time of the Honorverse, it would be possible to have accurate, real-time mechanical translation. The basis has already been laid down; unfortunately it's currently stuck in academia somewhere in Australia - they don't seem interested in publicizing it. Or at least, the don't seem to be very effective in publicizing it outside of professional linguists who are interested in semantics.

There´s already some extremely advanced translation devices available. There are some limits to any translation device, but up to that point, already today there are such that reaches up to that limit.

filbert wrote:I'm not entirely convinced that just because there are recordings of 20th/21st Century English available to Honorverse star nations, that the English language wouldn't drift over the centuries from now until the future then.

Go back and listen to some old radio broadcasts, or watch some old movies from the 1930's/40's. The English language those recordings preserve is subtly different than today's American English in a lot of different ways--cadence, vocabulary, pronunciation, etc. People today don't really care very much how people talked in the 1930's and 1940's.

Indeed. I´ll even say that there´s nothing subtle about it if you compare Swedish of today with that of the 1930s, there are blatant and obvious differences.

filbert wrote:Regardless, this is a point that I'm more than willing to suspend any disbelief, so I'll buy the no-language-drift Honorverse handwavium with equal ease that I accept the Honorverse FTL drive physics handwavium.

Doesn´t really matter, because trying to make up language drift and write according to it is just a very bad idea for any writing.

You´re not writing for a future audience, you´re writing for the current audience.

At All Costs, Chapter One wrote:
"Lawrence, Arabella," she said to the youngest Mayhews, "you haven't heard this book before, but I think you're old enough to enjoy it. It's a very special book. It was written long, long ago, before anyone had ever left Old Earth itself."
Lawrence's eyes widened just a bit. He was a precocious child, and he loved tales about the history of humankind's ancient homeworld.
"It's called David and the Phoenix," she went on, "and it's always been one of my very favorite stories. And my mother loved it when she was a little girl, too. You'll have to listen carefully. It's in Standard English, but some of the words have changed since it was written. If you hear one you don't understand, stop and ask me what it means. All right?"

In RL, David and the Phoenix was written in 1957. Since Honor says that there has been some words that changed since then, there has been at least some language drift for Honorverse Standard English.