Persistence of Language?

evilauthor wrote:

Silverwall wrote:The real miracle is that after 1000 years that the languages are still mutually intelligable and not different languages with a common scrip where it is agreed that a particular glyph means cat despite being said quite differently a-la mandarin/cantonese.

I think the mutual intelligibility can be pinned on two factors:

1) The CoGA's long standing policy of crossposting priests to nations they weren't born in. This more or less lets everyone on Safehold hear what the language is SUPPOSED to sound like.

2) The Writ's emphasis on making sure every Child of God is properly educated. Those same priests from other lands are also responsible for teaching their congregations "proper" speech.

Taken together, these two factors slow the evolution of accents into separate languages. Even then, there's been mention of regional accents - typically from people with poor, back-end-of-nowhere backgrounds, ie, the people least likely to see crossposted priests or get formal educations - are nearly unintelligible to more mainstream speakers.

Chances are that's partly accents and partly dialect - you've got Writ English and you've got all the new words, shifted meanings, and alternate diction peculiar to an area. Doing your best, you may be able to play down the accent and avoid local dialect and be intelligible enough. If you're not trying to adhere to Writ English - or if you're sticking to dialect to twit an aristocrat or to avoid being intelligible to the foreigner - you're not going to be easily understood if at all.

The more education you have, or the more contact with people from distant places, the less command of local dialect you're likely to pick up in the ordinary course of things and the better your Writ English will be. Cayleb Ahrmahk may well have an easier time talking with Paityr Wylsynn, from the far side of the world, than with Tellesberg wagon drivers born five miles from where he was. (He'd be an even better example, alas, if he'd spent more time with his tutors!)

noblehunter wrote:

saber964 wrote:Well considering how many words creep into english, I am not surprised. In every day conversations, I use words that are German French Italian Spanish and Russian in origin.

Russian? Which words did we steal from Russian?

In addition to 'Knout' which someone mentioned earlier here are a few more from wikipedia and elsewhere:

Balalaika, Balaclava, Bolshevik, Cosmonaut, Glasnost, Gulag, Luna, Maskirovka (military deception), Pogrom, Sable, Samovar, Shaman, Sputnik, Tokamak (fusion reactor design), Troika, Tsar/Czar, Vigorish (Vig; from betting), Vodka.

Some of those are more rare/specialized than others

Jonathan_S wrote:

noblehunter wrote:Russian? Which words did we steal from Russian?

In addition to 'Knout' which someone mentioned earlier here are a few more from wikipedia and elsewhere:

Balalaika, Balaclava, Bolshevik, Cosmonaut, Glasnost, Gulag, Luna, Maskirovka (military deception), Pogrom, Sable, Samovar, Shaman, Sputnik, Tokamak (fusion reactor design), Troika, Tsar/Czar, Vigorish (Vig; from betting), Vodka.

Some of those are more rare/specialized than others

Here is the list from wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_E ... ian_origin

obviously some of these may not meet your personal definition but its still one hell of a list.

JeffEngel wrote:partly accents and partly dialect - you've got Writ English and you've got all the new words, shifted meanings, and alternate diction peculiar to an area. Doing your best, you may be able to play down the accent and avoid local dialect and be intelligible enough. If you're not trying to adhere to Writ English - or if you're sticking to dialect to twit an aristocrat or to avoid being intelligible to the foreigner - you're not going to be easily understood if at all.

The more education you have, or the more contact with people from distant places, the less command of local dialect you're likely to pick up in the ordinary course of things and the better your Writ English will be. Cayleb Ahrmahk may well have an easier time talking with Paityr Wylsynn, from the far side of the world, than with Tellesberg wagon drivers born five miles from where he was. (He'd be an even better example, alas, if he'd spent more time with his tutors!)

Good point about the aristocrats but even then it is amazing how fast the language or even the elites changes when the base language changes. It took about 250 years for norman french to be displaced in English courts and the language of chaucer (early modern english) is basically unintelligable because of linguistic drift. The number of words of foreign origin that changed are far less important than the fact that the grammar and syntactic elements evolved radically.

Silverwall is also missing, or misreading, a lot of detail. It's actually as valid to ask "why should Safehold languages be any more different than English and Scots?" And yes, as any Scot can tell you, they don't speak English north of Tweed and south of Forth, and haven't since before English was English. Or, perhaps, you can say that they're the ones who _do_ speak English, since the language of England has been so heavily polluted with Norse and French.

The 3 Romance languages have completely distinct histories and influences: Italian derives from Latin overlaid, of course, on Italian [and some Etruscan, for the dialect that became modern Italian], with a rather weak Germanic influence - IIRC, the Ostrogoths had been speaking Latin for a while when they invaded Italy. Romanian is Latin overlaid on Dacian and Moesian - which were only distantly related to either Italic or Germanic - with, if anything, a light dusting of Magyar and Bulgarian [or Old Slavonic, at any rate] on top. Spanish is Latin on top of Celto-Iberian [closest relatives Irish/Scots Gaelic?], with a layer of Visigothic and a very, very strong influence from Arabic - probably as strong as the effect of Norman French was on English.

The best Indo-European parallel [I won't say the best parallel, but my knowledge of non-Indo-European languages, other that a bit on the Semitics, is disgustingly bad] to Safehold is the Norse languages - 3 languages divided by political, and to a small degree cultural, barriers, and 2 way out in left field, geographically and linguistically. While Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are clearly now separate languages, they are still pretty close. Speakers of each have interesting things to say about how the others talk, but no major problems understanding them. All of them regard the Icelanders as rubes stuck in the Viking Age. Which, for the language, is true enough - 5 centuries of substantial isolation followed by 5 of utter neglect can have that effect. AFAIK there's no society on Safehold in a similar position. The remaining Norse language, Manx, is not only geographically separated but also heavily influenced by Gaelic.

The point of all this is that the diversity seen in, for example, the Romance languages is a result not just of their evolution, but evolution under the influence of a range of other, distinct, independent languages, often from completely separate linguistic families. Something that simply doesn't happen on Safehold.

Silverwall wrote:The real miracle is that after 1000 years that the languages are still mutually intelligable and not different languages with a common scrip where it is agreed that a particular glyph means cat despite being said quite differently a-la mandarin/cantonese.

JeffEngel wrote:

evilauthor wrote:I think the mutual intelligibility can be pinned on two factors:

1) The CoGA's long standing policy of crossposting priests to nations they weren't born in. This more or less lets everyone on Safehold hear what the language is SUPPOSED to sound like.

2) The Writ's emphasis on making sure every Child of God is properly educated. Those same priests from other lands are also responsible for teaching their congregations "proper" speech.

Taken together, these two factors slow the evolution of accents into separate languages. Even then, there's been mention of regional accents - typically from people with poor, back-end-of-nowhere backgrounds, ie, the people least likely to see crossposted priests or get formal educations - are nearly unintelligible to more mainstream speakers.

Chances are that's partly accents and partly dialect - you've got Writ English and you've got all the new words, shifted meanings, and alternate diction peculiar to an area. Doing your best, you may be able to play down the accent and avoid local dialect and be intelligible enough. If you're not trying to adhere to Writ English - or if you're sticking to dialect to twit an aristocrat or to avoid being intelligible to the foreigner - you're not going to be easily understood if at all.

The more education you have, or the more contact with people from distant places, the less command of local dialect you're likely to pick up in the ordinary course of things and the better your Writ English will be. Cayleb Ahrmahk may well have an easier time talking with Paityr Wylsynn, from the far side of the world, than with Tellesberg wagon drivers born five miles from where he was. (He'd be an even better example, alas, if he'd spent more time with his tutors!)

Those are good points Louis R.

I guess my attitude is based on your Iceland example but with double the timeframe. This is why I chose the romance examples.

Basically history says that isolated linguistic groups do evolve differently from each other, this is why despite being colonised only a handful of times we have somthing like 1/6th of all the worlds languages in New Guinei and most of them are of only limited inter-intelligability.

I also discount the ability of a handful of educated elites such as priests or very senior nobles to keep a language pure. History shows that latin died out everywhere even when it was the language of the Mass in the real world so I would expect the same thing to happen to angelic (modern english) in a safehold setting.

I also say this becasue while RFC has made the travel for our heroes/villians relatively quick and easy for story reasons this is not mirrored in any real world historical travel. The Stories 2 months from zion to Charis is laughably fast as even in the 20th centuary this length of trip (NZ to England) took my parents 6-7 weeks on a 1960s Liner using the suez canal. This means that general contact between native speakers will in reality be very reduced. Couple that with massivly reduced literacy amongst the base population and each language will evolve differently as per your scandanavian example but without the physical closeness that keeps the languages evolving in parallel.

Basically what it boils down to is that I feel that RFC has made a good call linguistically based on the needs of the story. However if safehold really existed/happened I would expect the languages to have speciated significantly over that time period and for the amount of cross block contact to be very limited compared to what is suggested in the books. This is especially true as RFC himself has acknowledged that Merlin had to spend considerable time learning Safeholdian give the way the language had evolved since her time.

Silverwall wrote:Those are good points Louis R.

I guess my attitude is based on your Iceland example but with double the timeframe. This is why I chose the romance examples.

Basically history says that isolated linguistic groups do evolve differently from each other, this is why despite being colonised only a handful of times we have somthing like 1/6th of all the worlds languages in New Guinei and most of them are of only limited inter-intelligability.

I also discount the ability of a handful of educated elites such as priests or very senior nobles to keep a language pure. History shows that latin died out everywhere even when it was the language of the Mass in the real world so I would expect the same thing to happen to angelic (modern english) in a safehold setting.

I also say this becasue while RFC has made the travel for our heroes/villians relatively quick and easy for story reasons this is not mirrored in any real world historical travel. The Stories 2 months from zion to Charis is laughably fast as even in the 20th centuary this length of trip (NZ to England) took my parents 6-7 weeks on a 1960s Liner using the suez canal. This means that general contact between native speakers will in reality be very reduced. Couple that with massivly reduced literacy amongst the base population and each language will evolve differently as per your scandanavian example but without the physical closeness that keeps the languages evolving in parallel.

Basically what it boils down to is that I feel that RFC has made a good call linguistically based on the needs of the story. However if safehold really existed/happened I would expect the languages to have speciated significantly over that time period and for the amount of cross block contact to be very limited compared to what is suggested in the books. This is especially true as RFC himself has acknowledged that Merlin had to spend considerable time learning Safeholdian give the way the language had evolved since her time.

A couple of points:

• Safehold doesn't have any real isolated "linguistics groups" although we know that there where some initial settlements of specific ethnicity which most likely introduced pronunciations of english which was based on their native language, and Harchong is one of them.
• Safehold have the semaphore system.
• Safehold have priests going to and from Zion from all over Safehold.
• Safehold have pilgrims going to and from Zion from all over.
• Safehold have priests (and they are not a handful) being placed far from their birthplace.
• Latin is a very poor example in this discussion since it was never universally spoken.
• Using the time it takes a cruise ship to travel from NZ to England is another poor example, cruise ships "cruise" at a leisurely speed most of the time. A container ship traveling from Hong Kong to Britain will take less than 30 days (using the Suez), how fast do you think it would take if the ship was build for a bit more speed instead of freight???
• Language isn't just about understanding words, you need to understand the cultural context too, hence why it took Merlin some time to learn "Safeholdian" without tipping everyone off that he was an outsider.
• It's much easier for languages on Earth to change since they are influenced daily by all the other languages. Safehold doesn't have any outside influences at all except Merlin as of his awakening.
• Everyone on Safehold are using the same written language which makes the rate of change low.

Personally I don't see any problems with how RFC has portrayed the language and travel times in general. You feel the changes to the language should be greater but so far I can't see your reasoning holding together.

Joat42 wrote:[*]It's much easier for languages on Earth to change since they are influenced daily by all the other languages. Safehold doesn't have any outside influences at all except Merlin as of his awakening.

I can think of one instance on Earth where we had speakers of (about?) one language spread out and spend time apart from one another without (for some time) having other languages to knock them in different directions (in every case, anyway): Polynesians spreading all over the Pacific islands. Whether they did start with just one language is for me an assumption - someone else may know better, or more confidently, or even both - and certainly they've been exposed to other languages a lot in the last 2-300 years. It was still an instance a bit like a Safehold case in which there's a question of language drift without other languages to influence things. It doesn't feature so much continued mixing among themselves, and it doesn't feature an authoritative written language to act as an anchor.

JeffEngel wrote:

Joat42 wrote:[*]It's much easier for languages on Earth to change since they are influenced daily by all the other languages. Safehold doesn't have any outside influences at all except Merlin as of his awakening.

I can think of one instance on Earth where we had speakers of (about?) one language spread out and spend time apart from one another without (for some time) having other languages to knock them in different directions (in every case, anyway): Polynesians spreading all over the Pacific islands. Whether they did start with just one language is for me an assumption - someone else may know better, or more confidently, or even both - and certainly they've been exposed to other languages a lot in the last 2-300 years. It was still an instance a bit like a Safehold case in which there's a question of language drift without other languages to influence things. It doesn't feature so much continued mixing among themselves, and it doesn't feature an authoritative written language to act as an anchor.

The polynesian languages are good examples of language change and evolution over a ~1000 year period, Maori and hawaian are now quite different.

The reason I brought up the distance between NZ and UK by steamship is that the average speed of advance of a sailing ship is about 6 knots and even a slow steamer does 12 and a liner will usually sustain 16+

historical evidence is that the travel times on safehold are completely unrealistic, it was a 9-12 month voyage to do that distance by sail, even crossing the atlantic by sailing ship was a 1-2 month journey historically and the ships of the time were probably better than the pre merlin galeons. Thus the idea of most out islanders doing the pilgramage strikes me is rediculous, similar to how pre technolgy most muslims would not do the Hajj from indonesia.

This is going to be a bit off the top of my head sinse I'm a bit too lazy to look it up right now.

But, IIRC,...

Unlike Terra, Safehold started out with a common cultural matrix that began to drift apart sinse the various enclaves were too scattered and distant from another to share a common communal experience.

This would have an inevitable impact on language sinse language evolves to suit the needs of the community sharing it. (I always chuckle when someone tries to talk about a "correct" version of English, for example. There is no such thing, not even in England.) There are flowers in Tellesburg gardens that remain unnamed in Glacierheart simply because they are outside a Glacierheart coal miner's experience and thus unnamed.

When Nimue woke up, she found that language on Safehold had drifted from the TF norm to an extent that she had to work on mastering what was normal on Safehold --presumably in Charis-- in order to fit in. It is true that the COGA was a common thread as it schuffled clergy and attracted pilgrims, preventing the language from drifting so far apart as to make people of differing communities from being mutually unintelligible, it would also be true that the details of life and culture in each community would differ to an extent that someone visiting that community would require a certain amount of updating to be fully conversant about what was going on around him. That would include vocabulary, syntax, cliches, slang and so on. The cross fertilization that we have noted wouldn't overcome that.

Don

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