Persistence of Language?

n7axw wrote: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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Right. The argument's just between people who take the common start, movement of people (Church teachers, traders, pilgrims), common written sources, and absence of competing linguistic influences as sufficient to keep drift from getting beyond differing dialects, versus those who think that that's implausible and drift would have made for mutually unintelligible languages. (I suppose a third position is that you'd have "ring species" languages: everyone's mutually intelligible to their near neighbors but by the time you cross Haven, the Harchongese/Trellheimers and Siddarmark/Tarot/Fallosians are not mutually intelligible. I don't think anyone has staked out that position yet though.)

Anyone - I don't think anyone is supposing that not even differing dialects and accents would emerge, and you seem only to be denying that claim.

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

Did the polynesians have a universally used WRITTEN language based on phonetic spellings? Aka, how a word is spelled tells you how it's pronounced unlike object based languages that use ideographs that use single symbols to represent actual concepts and don't tell the reader the pronunciation.

Because I read somewhere that if Confucius showed up in China today, he wouldn't be able to understand the language as it's spoken now. But he'd be able to write notes that can be read by everyone and be able to read all the signs being used in China now (outside certain concepts that didn't exist in his time).

In contrast, Safehold uses written English for its writing and written English is phonetic. English spelling tells the reader how the word is pronounced. And the Writ specifies teaching that Church should teach its followers to read and write.

A phonetic writing system alone is going to slow language drift, and the biggest cause of language drift is region A is going to have a different concept of how a certain letter combination should be pronounced from region B. But that's where the crossposting priests come in and show the "official" way that words should be pronounced.

JeffEngel wrote:

n7axw wrote: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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Right. The argument's just between people who take the common start, movement of people (Church teachers, traders, pilgrims), common written sources, and absence of competing linguistic influences as sufficient to keep drift from getting beyond differing dialects, versus those who think that that's implausible and drift would have made for mutually unintelligible languages. (I suppose a third position is that you'd have "ring species" languages: everyone's mutually intelligible to their near neighbors but by the time you cross Haven, the Harchongese/Trellheimers and Siddarmark/Tarot/Fallosians are not mutually intelligible. I don't think anyone has staked out that position yet though.)

Anyone - I don't think anyone is supposing that not even differing dialects and accents would emerge, and you seem only to be denying that claim.

Actually, were this real life and not a literary work, I would find the little bit of drift we see in the textev to be very improbable indeed. Hoe intelligible would we find the speech of Alfred the Great? Not very... But, well, it's just a story and language drift is not the point...

Don

Silverwall wrote:
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.

Looking up some figures for the Great Tea Race of 1866, the winning Clippers, serious but light cargo ships highly optimised for speed and involved in a highly publicised, high prestige, high value race, did the distance from Fuzhou in China to London in 99 days. According to a modern nautical calculation website the distance is about 13393 nautical miles. So they averaged something around 5.6 knots. The same calculator says London to Wellington, NZ, is 13570 nautical miles. (Both distances round the bottom of Africa) I don't have any figures for sailing ships doing the UK to NZ run, but if it took them 9-12 months they were averaging under 2 knots, so either they really weren't trying or the journey time is wrong.

RFC once posted a handy table of sailing distances from places in Charis to places in the mainland, which I can't find just now. Could someone point to it for us? Looks to me like any sailing journeys at more than 5.5 knots require explanation and a more normal speed would be something a bit lower than that.

I don't think Don ever said that 'most' out-islanders made the Temple pilgrimage, but between the Clergy, Nobles and the very pious a fair number would have done, and they would all be people who were disproportionately influential on all kinds of social norms, including speech patterns.

The problem I have with the theory that shifting clergy around and having nobles travel overseas is that that is not a factor in historical liguistic change. These elites almost certainly speak a different dialect as those elites did historically. However the fact is that linguistic change is a bottom up process far more than a top down one. We don't all speak french but a germanic language with french influences despite 250 years of french being the court language and latin the language of law and liturgy becasue when it comes to linguistic change the mass of the people are more important than the elites floating at the top of the population pool. The language of the elites tends to be conservative and high status and evolves following the trends of the common people. When it doesn't you end up with Emperor Hirohito needing a translator when he tells his people to surrender because palace Japanese is so different to regular Japanese.

I will also point out having a common spelling doesn't mean that the language will stay static, just look at how spelling has ossofied in english no-one says Kanighet but we still spell the word knight. Spelling does NOT fix pronunciation, especailly when spelling is limited to the aforementioned elites. Other examples of spelling not matching pronuciation are the lurk/lark set of words with the poster chiald being clerk. In the states it is sounded lurk and for me and the brits it generally rhymes with lark but we both spell the word the same.

Continue these differencess for 1000 years on safehold and you and up with a single writen language but multiple spoken ones (Chinese, cantonese et al)

evilauthor wrote:

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

Did the polynesians have a universally used WRITTEN language based on phonetic spellings? Aka, how a word is spelled tells you how it's pronounced unlike object based languages that use ideographs that use single symbols to represent actual concepts and don't tell the reader the pronunciation.

Because I read somewhere that if Confucius showed up in China today, he wouldn't be able to understand the language as it's spoken now. But he'd be able to write notes that can be read by everyone and be able to read all the signs being used in China now (outside certain concepts that didn't exist in his time).

In contrast, Safehold uses written English for its writing and written English is phonetic. English spelling tells the reader how the word is pronounced. And the Writ specifies teaching that Church should teach its followers to read and write.

A phonetic writing system alone is going to slow language drift, and the biggest cause of language drift is region A is going to have a different concept of how a certain letter combination should be pronounced from region B. But that's where the crossposting priests come in and show the "official" way that words should be pronounced.

Personally I would describe english as being semi phonetic, because of it's mongrel nature there are a lot of words that are basically ideographs. E.g Islay? if you don't know your going to get it wrong. Giraffe? again you need to know. There is a reason people have been trying to reform english spelling for hundreds of years. Also most of the french derived words are a mess phonetically. ratatouille anyone? Remember the old joke about Ghoti being pronounced fish? while this is not actually correct (Gh can only sound as F at the end of a word) the sentiment it represents is very much true.

In the safehold setting it would become more and more ideographic to most people.

Silverwall wrote:The problem I have with the theory that shifting clergy around and having nobles travel overseas is that that is not a factor in historical liguistic change. These elites almost certainly speak a different dialect as those elites did historically.

That's going off the rails of that argument early on. Safehold's priests on the mainland seem to get shuffled around from pretty low ranks. A upper-priest isn't really an "elite", certainly not in the sense a landed noble is. And Safehold's priesthood represents most of the teachers (including all the elementary ones), the doctors, the lawyers, at least the experts with regard to extending cultivated land, geographers, at least the experts in farming and ranching, the historians.... So the shifting clergy represents much more of the population than you seem to be factoring in, and it includes the people doing the primary school teaching available to every kid on Safehold - which teaching is far more common and lengthy than you'd have in a medieval setting. (Not nearly universal, alas, but outside Harchong, it's on the upswing and the Church has always offered it.)

JeffEngel wrote:

Silverwall wrote:The problem I have with the theory that shifting clergy around and having nobles travel overseas is that that is not a factor in historical liguistic change. These elites almost certainly speak a different dialect as those elites did historically.

That's going off the rails of that argument early on. Safehold's priests on the mainland seem to get shuffled around from pretty low ranks. A upper-priest isn't really an "elite", certainly not in the sense a landed noble is. And Safehold's priesthood represents most of the teachers (including all the elementary ones), the doctors, the lawyers, at least the experts with regard to extending cultivated land, geographers, at least the experts in farming and ranching, the historians.... So the shifting clergy represents much more of the population than you seem to be factoring in, and it includes the people doing the primary school teaching available to every kid on Safehold - which teaching is far more common and lengthy than you'd have in a medieval setting. (Not nearly universal, alas, but outside Harchong, it's on the upswing and the Church has always offered it.)

Elite as in "Not a peasant". The 1-5% of the population that runs stuff rather than makes stuff and farms stuff. These groups have never in history been able to prevent linguistic drift and nothing I see in the safehold text gives any reason to think things are different there.

JeffEngel wrote:

Silverwall wrote:The problem I have with the theory that shifting clergy around and having nobles travel overseas is that that is not a factor in historical liguistic change. These elites almost certainly speak a different dialect as those elites did historically.

That's going off the rails of that argument early on. Safehold's priests on the mainland seem to get shuffled around from pretty low ranks. A upper-priest isn't really an "elite", certainly not in the sense a landed noble is. And Safehold's priesthood represents most of the teachers (including all the elementary ones), the doctors, the lawyers, at least the experts with regard to extending cultivated land, geographers, at least the experts in farming and ranching, the historians.... So the shifting clergy represents much more of the population than you seem to be factoring in, and it includes the people doing the primary school teaching available to every kid on Safehold - which teaching is far more common and lengthy than you'd have in a medieval setting. (Not nearly universal, alas, but outside Harchong, it's on the upswing and the Church has always offered it.)

The priest is far more likely to speak the language of the people he serves than any high falootin' language he absorbed at the sem. In fact the problem any freshly graduated seminarian experiences is getting the ivory tower out of his head to the point where he can truly communicate and identify with his parishoners. Any pastor who can't do that is pretty useless as a pastor. That especially applies to the use of language.

Don

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n7axw wrote:The priest is far more likely to speak the language of the people he serves than any high falootin' language he absorbed at the sem. In fact the problem any freshly graduated seminarian experiences is getting the ivory tower out of his head to the point where he can truly communicate and identify with his parishoners. Any pastor who can't do that is pretty useless as a pastor. That especially applies to the use of language.

Don

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Yeah, but the standard is that the people the priest serves are NOT the people he grew up around. Which means he's going to have a different accent than his flock, and he's going to be teaching the children of his flock how he learned to speak. And perhaps how his seminary speaks.

Charis and the other out islands are anomalies in that the majority of their priests are natives.