Spoken Languages In The Honorverse ...

Tenshinai wrote:Japanese is more likely to work on the Philippines and a few other places than English is,

No one knows Japanese in the Philippines. No one knows Japanese outside of Japan by and large. More know Chinese in the Philippines than Japanese.

English in the Philippines is actually a creol language. IT IS one of two language franca's of the Philippines. Most phone call centers are being based in the Philippines because of their EXCELLENT ENGLISH language pronunciation. You can go anywhere and speak English in the Philippines and almost everyone knows it unless in the deep countryside. When I was there near 30 years ago this was true. I am sure this has changed since then to some degree. Their literature is in English quite often. When I was there, their text books in many schools were in English. This has changed since then as many texts have been introduced in Tagalog(filipino to everyone else in the world). It is the base language of commerce and government in the Philippines. This is slowly changing to Tagalog which incorporates large portions of English part native, part Spanish, part Chinese. Tagalog is essentially becoming a bastard language like English already is.

This is true for many countries where a written language is a very recent addition. Many countries in Africa, English is what they write in. Take Nigeria for instance. 200Million people and their government literature is in English! Pretty much any place the British Empire existed for over a hundred years in Africa, all of the official language of government is in English. The population may not know how to speak it fluently but many can read it. This influence is obviously waning with the break-up of the British empire in the 60's.

Will Mandarin make inroads into Language Franca? Not until China starts letting its massive population move of its own accord it will not. For over 200 years the worlds language franca has been English because of the British Empire built in the 1700's. Will English die out as language Franca? All depends on economics.

Another driving factor is computers allowing quick transcript of the written language into your own. I would predict all of those countries that built by the British Empire to completely eliminate the English language as their governance language. Now this will also percolate into business and engineering where nearly every publication in the world in business and engineering is published in English. Engineering standards. Business practice standards etc.

Spanish overall probably would be a better language franca than anything else. At least one can read/write it easily unlike ENGLISH!

Tenshinai wrote:

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".

Since Relax has dealt with most of this, I'm only going to emphasize a few points. First, I wasn't talking about "the natives." I was talking about people a business person, scientist or politician, etc, would be interested in talking to. It's much less likely that the average person in the street knows English well enough to communicate.

Tenshinai wrote: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.

This is one of the myths of Arabic. People in the Islamic countries do not speak Q'ranic Arabic, they speak a local dialect that isn't the same as the one in the neighboring country, and is usually mutually incomprehensible. Tower of Babel all over again.

As far as learning classic Arabic, children are taught to sight read and pronounce it to the extent needed for the mandatory prayers and other passages they need to memorize and regurgitate. Know what it means? Heaven forfend! Their local religious authorities will tell them what it means.

Now, obviously there are scholars, educated people, and a great many etceteras who can actually read Classic Arabic and understand it, but that isn't typical for the average citizen.

Tenshinai wrote: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.

Anyone who's dealt with Google Translate will laugh at that. If we had really accurate mechanical translation already, there wouldn't be as many versions of the Bible in English as there are.

While RFC has pinned his hopes on the stasis that digital archiving will supposedly bring I work in the archives/library profession and we are already very very worried about the loss of readability of documents from a mere 20 years ago in digital form. My research project from a mere 15 years ago would be unreadable to most in digital form for most as it is not in a standard format (PDF, DOC, RTF) but a proprietry format.

Also language changes regardless of the printed status. Just read Shakespear or even Jane Austen to get a feel for how much the language has changed. More importantly there is the change in knowledge context becasue of technological advance.

One interesting mental challange is to take a modern pop song lyric and put yourself in the shoes of someone from Austen's time and realise how many phrases need translation for meaning. You may guess them but the true nuance is lost. Also while modern language may seem static just use the google ngram viewer to see how much the corpus of the language has actually changed in the last 100 years. https://books.google.com/ngrams

I can buy that the obviously strong commercial connections between the league and manticore could keep the language more or less unified (more so than the latinate languages of today). However there is no realistic chance that Honor should be able to understand a Grason speaker any more than a portugese speaker could understand say italian. There is an acknowledged 500 year or so period of isolation. During this time there would be word evolution, vowel drift and definitional mutation to meet the day to day needs of people trying to survive in a dangerous world.

Grason language would still be recognisably part of the germanic language family but then so is dutch but that doesn't mean that if you speak English you understand a dutchwoman.

Personally I am always happy with running a translation convention in this kind of story because we want the action and political intrigue, and lets be honenst, several pages of mutually unintelligable cross talk would be dull as ditchwater.

What about constructed languages?

Given what we have been told about colonization, it wouldn't surprise me in the least that there are a few planets out there that speak anything from Klingon to Elvish. Heck, they may even be populated by people with head bumps and pointed ears, thanks to genetic engineering. We won't really see them, but given the mentality of some fans, those colonies might just exist.

Given the way American English steals words from other languages in response to current events that then drop (more or less) back out of use, I am not sure that the I still speak the same English of my youth. Military personal are constantly bringing back terms and phrases from other countries where they are stationed. Some catch on and hang around, some die out in months.

Then there are the generational changes. Just one word that I have run across recently is the word "hack". It originally meant chop with an axe. Then it meant break into a computer system. Now it has something to do with shopping (I still haven't figured that one out).

With the speed English is changing today with the need to express new ideas and concepts and the increase in the speed of the generation of new ideas, in the future I just can't see English staying that stable.

Relax wrote:No one knows Japanese in the Philippines.

I may have accidentally overstated what i said (really should remember to post more carefully when i´m sleepy), but your statement above is outright a big "huh?".

Japan has been one of the more popular places to go find work in since the 60s, and has left Philippines with a noticeable minority speaking Japanese as an additional language, however among these it is common to speak it better than English, which was really the original point i aimed for(and it was this that i accidentally wrote in such an poorly exaggerated way, causing my original statement to be effectively and obviously wrong).

Relax wrote:More know Chinese in the Philippines than Japanese.

Really? You realise that the rise of Chinese there comes from the exact same source as Japanese did, except that working in China didn´t become really interesting until the 90s.

Relax wrote:No one knows Japanese outside of Japan by and large

Correction, noone knows Japanese as an official or 2nd language outside Japan. And that wont change anytime soon i expect.

However, the number of people who CAN use it outside of Japan, are definitely increasing, quite fast. Internet allowed Japanese culture to start becoming international rather than a fringe thing, and while you may not see this "boom", it´s definitely there.

While it´s still rather unusual as regular school courses, it´s one of the top 10 most studied languages in Europe.

Relax wrote:Will Mandarin make inroads into Language Franca? Not until China starts letting its massive population move of its own accord it will not.

China is starting to do big business in especially Africa but also elsewhere, this has led to a massive rise in people learning Chinese around the places where they´re active, it´s not truly visible YET, but that rise is only just starting.

Relax wrote:For over 200 years the worlds language franca has been English because of the British Empire built in the 1700's.

Last 2 centuries? Riiight...

Perhaps you should go check what language "lingua franca" says it is? ~Language of the Franks, or modernly, the French.

Guess why the olympics committee or FIFA uses French? Because they were created in late 19th and early 20th century, before French became replaced by English as the "lingua franca", which it had then been from the 17th century.

Only if you count it as English having been the most common lingua franca in the 21st and 20th centuries can we achieve "2 centuries" in any way. Claiming 200 years is just rubbish.

Especially since English didn´t truly replace French until AFTER WWII!

And before that, the big thing was Spanish. And Spanish remains the second most common language in international business, and third most common in international politics, diplomacy and other non-business affairs. After English and French.

Relax wrote:Will English die out as language Franca?

I never said it would die out. I said that most likely it would become one of a group of "lingua franca" languages rather than the primary one.

Relax wrote:Another driving factor is computers allowing quick transcript of the written language into your own.

Beware of relying on that. Seriously. Swedish uses the same alphabet(with the fairly simple addition of Å, Ä and Ö), but still, computer translation to or from English is still a potentially very risky (or humorous) matter. And that despite Swedish being not too horribly distantly related to English.

Switch over to trying to have computer translation between some languages that are worse and the results you get will wary from "just fine" to "WTF???".

Relax wrote:Now this will also percolate into business and engineering where nearly every publication in the world in business and engineering is published in English. Engineering standards. Business practice standards etc.

And it´s only half a century since THE science language was German for about a century.

JohnRoth wrote:This is one of the myths of Arabic. People in the Islamic countries do not speak Q'ranic Arabic, they speak a local dialect that isn't the same as the one in the neighboring country, and is usually mutually incomprehensible. Tower of Babel all over again.

You´re talking about where Arabic is already the primary language, i wasn´t.

Moslems outside of the arabic speaking area are often pushed to learn arabic for reason of religion.

JohnRoth wrote:As far as learning classic Arabic, children are taught to sight read and pronounce it to the extent needed for the mandatory prayers and other passages they need to memorize and regurgitate. Know what it means? Heaven forfend! Their local religious authorities will tell them what it means.

That varies greatly from place to place. Here i would say at least 50% of moslems know Arabic roughly as well as English.

JohnRoth wrote:Anyone who's dealt with Google Translate will laugh at that. If we had really accurate mechanical translation already, there wouldn't be as many versions of the Bible in English as there are.

Like i said, there are limits of what computer translation can achieve. However, up to that point, today there are pretty decent programs, as long as you don´t rely on it too slavishly.

jchilds wrote:What about constructed languages?

Given what we have been told about colonization, it wouldn't surprise me in the least that there are a few planets out there that speak anything from Klingon to Elvish. Heck, they may even be populated by people with head bumps and pointed ears, thanks to genetic engineering. We won't really see them, but given the mentality of some fans, those colonies might just exist.

Probably yes(i read a fanfic exploiting this just a few months ago, hehe).

Still, constructed languages historically have a very poor record of survival, they simply tend to not be used.

So they wont be normal or common, but like you say above, there´s probably at least some place where some nutjobs MADE it the standard.

I'd think it fairly obvious that the Honorverse uses English as a common language because RFC is writing in English. If he was French, German, Japanese or what-have-you then he'd be writing in that language - unless he chose to write in English for the simple reason that more people who are likely to read books for pleasure have English as a first or second language than any other language. Leave aside as irrelevant the question of how many speakers there are in any language, what counts are the numbers of potential readers for the story.

But it's equally certain that drift has occurred, and that other languages are in use. I await the passage when RFC has one of his characters experiencing what happened to me in an African country with probably dozens of closely-related tribal dialects plus English and Swahili as the official languages used in schools, commerce and government. The great joke enjoyed by the locals is to chatter at foreigners in Swahili (but they all love it when anyone tries to learn that language). So my wife and I were on safari and went back to the hotel after a morning's drive in the game park. We sat down in the bar for drinks, and a waiter came to us and asked in Swahili what we'd like, and had we had a good morning in the park. Without thinking abut it I answered in Swahili (yes, I knew a fair bit of the language in those days). He started to go off to get our drinks - and then came back looking stunned to check that I'd actually done that, he hadn't imagined it. His jaw actually dropped in astonishment, the first time I'd ever know that to really happen. (Oh, and we got marvellous service for the rest of the time we stayed there because all the waiters wanted to talk to me.) Contrast that with an American sitting in a different hotel bar where my wife was waiting for me to get back from a meeting. Yes, all the staff spoke good English. But he behaved as he would have at home in whichever part of the US was home, snapping his fingers and calling 'Boy' for service. Not a good idea, it was seen as insulting and he never got served at all. So it's not just a matter of having a common language, one also needs to be seen as polite according to local ideas; I think that might be a bigger stumbling block for mutual understanding.
Cheers
John

John Prigent wrote:I'd think it fairly obvious that the Honorverse uses English as a common language because RFC is writing in English. If he was French, German, Japanese or what-have-you then he'd be writing in that language - unless he chose to write in English for the simple reason that more people who are likely to read books for pleasure have English as a first or second language than any other language. .

One of these days, I'm going to laugh my parts off when some science fiction writer blithely asserts that, in the future, everyone speaks, reads, and writes standard Basque or Welsh....