At which point, he will often be sent off to impact a completely different set of parishoners
There seems to be some confusion here over the definition of "language" - and much of this discussion appears to be overlooking the fact that a language is not just defined by how people say words. Far more important is what words they use and how they use them: grammar, syntax and vocabulary. That's why rednecks, 'strines and Geordies can all legitimately claim to be speaking English. Despite the fact that I can have trouble understanding any of them!
While the course of linguistic evolution has been moderately well documented - for a few places, and for perhaps the last thousand years, at best - the dynamics still aren't always at all clear. In fact, they seem at times downright odd. For one thing, what the peasants are speaking doesn't necessarily determine what's going to be spoken 5 or 10 generations later. Two examples, both of which came as something of a surprise to me, since they don't adhere to the conventional wisdom [and they're neighbouring and related populations]:
Recent genetic scans have shown that the speakers of English found south of the Danelaw are by and large the same population as the Welsh to their west. Celts, IOW. It now appears that the Anglo-Saxon population that carried the language into Britain was relatively small, and from the evidence had a fairly distinct settlement pattern. They didn't push the British out, they assimilated them. So successfully, in fact, that the next lot of invaders eventually gave up and started calling themselves Anglo-Saxon, too. [AAMOF, they invented the term - the old English never used it]
Meanwhile, across the Channel... We all know that the French speak French because the Franks conquered a Latin-speaking Roman province and absorbed the language of their new subjects, don't we? Well, it seems that Romanisation was actually extremely variable across the provinces of Gaul. Gallia Narbonnensis was indeed very heavily Romanised, and the rural population by and large did speak Latin. Further north, however, Latin was a mother tongue only in the towns, and the Coloniae where discharged soldiers were settled [although, given who most of said soldiers married, 'mother' isn't the correct word], and people's familiarity with the language was otherwise inversely proportional to their proximity to a market town. For the most of them, the daily language was still... proto-Welsh. Just like their cousins to the north, as it happens, for whom Romanisation ran just about as deep. And the degree of penetration declined through the 4th century, as the Roman towns were gradually abandoned as insecure. So in come the Franks, speaking a language recognisably related to Anglian and Saxon, and what happens? When the dust settles, everyone is speaking, not the language of the conquerors, not the language of the conquered, but Old French. AFAIK, it has yet to be figured out just why, but I will note that by the end of the 5th century, possibly the only group in what became northern France using Latin routinely would have been - the clergy. There is, BTW, a linguistic marker of this that persists to this day - the more or less fully Romanised Gallia Narbonnensis was pretty much coincident with le pays du Langue d'Oc.
Claims that such and so ought to have happened on Safehold should be advanced with extreme caution. The historical evidence is not generally as clear-cut as people imagine - and the odds are that Himself knows it better than any of us do.
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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n7axw wrote:evilauthor wrote: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.
At first. But gradually he will blend in. I went to went to sem in St Louis and picked up a Missouri accent. I went to Montana afterwards. It took a couple of years to shed that accent, but I did. The point is that his parishoners will impact him more than he impacts them.
Don
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