Language on Safehold

hanuman wrote:The language situation on Safehold has intrigued me since the first book. All of the colonists spoke Standard English, the Writ and Testimonies were written in the same language and every single colonist was literate, as were their descendants for several generations.

However, the colonial enclaves were widely dispersed across the planet, and at least for the first century or two there would have been little if any direct contact between enclaves that were located far apart. The simple truth is that 8 million really is a very low number for a planetary population, and until the population saw a drastic increase there would have been little motivation for the citizens of, say, the Lake Pei area to seek direct contact with those of, let's say, the region that would eventually become the Duchy of Malikai in Dohlar. Distance, cost and effort of travel, and limited market sizes would have precluded long distance trade.

Remember that I'm not considering the Church at this point. I'll get to that.

The point here is that the driving force behind language development would have been the relative local isolation of the enclaves during the first few centuries. That would have been plenty time for significant language divergence to take place, as happened after the fall of the (Western) Roman
Empire when within a handful of decades Vulgar Latin showed the beginnings of divergence into the various proto-Romance languages.

But then there was the Writ, the Testimonies and the Church, which did maintain regular contact between Zion and the outlying enclaves. Clearly the language of the Church would have been the language of the Writ, as would the language used for any and all official correspondence and records.

As such, Standard English would have remained virtually unchanged throughout the eight or so centuries since the 'Day of Creation', at least in written form and only slightly less so in spoken form. It would function as a global lingua franca.

Although most educated Safeholdians would be able to speak the language, and most of the rest would at least be able to understand it to some degree, it would very much function in the same way Ecclesiastic Latin or Old Slavonic did until relatively recently, or as Quranic Arabic still does to this day. Safeholdian Standard English would be restricted as a language of daily use to the Church, for diplomacy and for international trade, whilst the regional 'dialects' would be the languages of everyday life. Charisian might very well not even be the same language anymore as Dohlaran, or Harchongese.

SWM wrote:Everyone on Safehold is given some basic education. All of the teachers were either trained at the Temple, or trained by someone who trained at the Temple. And unlike medieval Europe, everyone is taught to read the holy text, and the holy text is written in the vernacular. That goes a long way toward maintaining a consistent language. But the text does note that accents do vary considerably across the planet.

The other factor enforcing a single language, of course, is the exigencies of a fictional story.

SWM wrote:Everyone on Safehold is given some basic education. All of the teachers were either trained at the Temple, or trained by someone who trained at the Temple. And unlike medieval Europe, everyone is taught to read the holy text, and the holy text is written in the vernacular. That goes a long way toward maintaining a consistent language. But the text does note that accents do vary considerably across the planet.

The other factor enforcing a single language, of course, is the exigencies of a fictional story.

JeffEngel wrote:

hanuman wrote:The language situation on Safehold has intrigued me since the first book. All of the colonists spoke Standard English, the Writ and Testimonies were written in the same language and every single colonist was literate, as were their descendants for several generations.

However, the colonial enclaves were widely dispersed across the planet, and at least for the first century or two there would have been little if any direct contact between enclaves that were located far apart. The simple truth is that 8 million really is a very low number for a planetary population, and until the population saw a drastic increase there would have been little motivation for the citizens of, say, the Lake Pei area to seek direct contact with those of, let's say, the region that would eventually become the Duchy of Malikai in Dohlar. Distance, cost and effort of travel, and limited market sizes would have precluded long distance trade.

Remember that I'm not considering the Church at this point. I'll get to that.

The point here is that the driving force behind language development would have been the relative local isolation of the enclaves during the first few centuries. That would have been plenty time for significant language divergence to take place, as happened after the fall of the (Western) Roman
Empire when within a handful of decades Vulgar Latin showed the beginnings of divergence into the various proto-Romance languages.

But then there was the Writ, the Testimonies and the Church, which did maintain regular contact between Zion and the outlying enclaves. Clearly the language of the Church would have been the language of the Writ, as would the language used for any and all official correspondence and records.

As such, Standard English would have remained virtually unchanged throughout the eight or so centuries since the 'Day of Creation', at least in written form and only slightly less so in spoken form. It would function as a global lingua franca.

Although most educated Safeholdians would be able to speak the language, and most of the rest would at least be able to understand it to some degree, it would very much function in the same way Ecclesiastic Latin or Old Slavonic did until relatively recently, or as Quranic Arabic still does to this day. Safeholdian Standard English would be restricted as a language of daily use to the Church, for diplomacy and for international trade, whilst the regional 'dialects' would be the languages of everyday life. Charisian might very well not even be the same language anymore as Dohlaran, or Harchongese.

I think there are another three things that will make the Safehold case differ from the post-Roman European one in favor of keeping Standard English more constant.

First, those 8 million people there to start would be living for a couple centuries. So those Standard English speakers from decades, even centuries before would still be right there til a bit past 200 years after creation as a living talking yardstick of "proper" English. Serious language drift would almost have to wait til after they were dead, or at least hugely swamped by their descendants.

Second, Europe after Roman communications fell apart had foreign linguistic influences all about it. There were other vocabularies and grammar to pull the language apart, in addition to mere drift. Someone else would surely know more, but I'd be very surprised if medieval French didn't get plenty influence from Gauls and other north-of-Rome sorts, and eastern languages plenty from Greek - among others. On Safehold, there wasn't another language to borrow from, no native men or women to woo, no other source for just the right word.

Third, literacy in the early days was much, much better than in post-Roman Europe, so the Writ and other documents could do much more work on many more speakers keeping the language around that standard.

Less important but still worth a mention:
The Church did have a role in shuffling speakers about on Safehold. Priests were deliberately moved around to shake up regional/national loyalties, and everyone getting their basic schooling was getting it in the Church. That priesthood represented much more of Safehold's population than ever in Europe, too - all the lawyers, doctors, farming and ranching instructors, terraforming experts, surveyors, and so on. If the Church policy had all of them shuffled about to, there was more mixing going on than you may be counting on from that historical precedent.

Last - I think - distant trade had significant advantages on Safehold relative to Earth. The archangels built all those canals and high roads, provided instructions for building and keeping up more of them, and made that upkeep a holy duty. The maps in the Book of Hastings were, for the time, perfect, so you knew exactly where you were going and how on land or in sight of it, so distant voyages could be a whole lot more secure than in Europe prior to the 1700's or so. People still wouldn't be making too many of them, but they'd be making them far more often and far more safely than the low early population densities and current transportation technology would suggest.

I do think there's reason to suppose that vernacular Safehold English, between the death of the Adams and Eves and recovering a fair population density, ought to have become a group of dialects that verged on mutually incomprehensible, but that Langhorne's English was and is something mastered by anyone with a grade-school education and it's no trouble for anyone with that background to shift from that dialect to Langhorne's English as needed. Once the population density did get up there and communication between enclaves became frequent, you'd have dialects drifting back toward some new center defined by two poles: Langhorne's English and whatever won the lottery of words the developed in regional dialects but got widely borrowed once the dialects got into more contact with one another.

hanuman wrote:I'll reply point-by-point.

First. Language is a constantly evolving phenomenon. Even within just a single decade, it is possible for significant and noticeable shifts in language usage to take place. I returned to my hometown a few years ago, after a decade-and-half away, and was astounded at the changes in pronunciation, word choices and even sentence construction. Granted, South Africa is a multilingual nation and also has a reasonably decent telecoms industry, which means we're fully exposed to international media. On Safehold such shifts in language use would have been somewhat slower, but you're talking about two centuries, not just a couple of decades. Believe me, if one took a voice recording of the same person in year one and another in year two hundred, one would notice a definite change.

Second. You're quite right, French evolved from Vulgar Latin, under the influence of both the local Celtic languages and the Germanic languages of the invaders who ended Roman rule in Gaul - especially the Salian and Ripurian Franks. That wouldn't happen on Safehold, of course, until such time that the population had grown to such a level that territorial expansion became necessary or long-distance trade became both viable and profitable.

Third. Writing and speech just aren't the same thing. Just because we spell things the same, does not equate to pronouncing them the same way.

Your fourth point is fair, although I'd still think that the priesthood would not constitute enough of a deterrent to language drift.

Fifth. I never claimed that long-distance trade wasn't possible or didn't happen, only that the low population numbers coupled with the isolation of many enclaves precluded the motivation for the intense levels of trade that would develop later on.

And by that time, language drift would have created enough dialectal differences that significant interregional contact would only contribute to further divergence.

Off Armageddon Reef, May Year of God 890, Chapter III wrote:For the moment, they were concentrating on recording the local languages and dialects. Without the PICA data interface, Nimue was going to have to learn the hard way to speak the considerably altered version of Standard English spoken by present-day Safeholdians. It looked as if the written language and grammar had stayed effectively frozen, but without any form of audio recording capability, the spoken form's pronunciation had shifted considerably . . . and not always in the same directions in all locations. Some of the dialects were so different now as to be almost separate tongues, despite the fact that virtually every word in them was spelled the same way.

jchilds wrote:

Off Armageddon Reef, May Year of God 890, Chapter III wrote:For the moment, they were concentrating on recording the local languages and dialects. Without the PICA data interface, Nimue was going to have to learn the hard way to speak the considerably altered version of Standard English spoken by present-day Safeholdians. It looked as if the written language and grammar had stayed effectively frozen, but without any form of audio recording capability, the spoken form's pronunciation had shifted considerably . . . and not always in the same directions in all locations. Some of the dialects were so different now as to be almost separate tongues, despite the fact that virtually every word in them was spelled the same way.

SWM wrote:Everyone on Safehold is given some basic education. All of the teachers were either trained at the Temple, or trained by someone who trained at the Temple. And unlike medieval Europe, everyone is taught to read the holy text, and the holy text is written in the vernacular. That goes a long way toward maintaining a consistent language. But the text does note that accents do vary considerably across the planet.

The other factor enforcing a single language, of course, is the exigencies of a fictional story.