Wednesday 9 August 2017

Speaking Other Languages

Apparently:

"'Iston peded i phith i aniron, a nin u-cheniathog'" -

- is Sindarin for:

"I can say what I want and you can't understand me..."
-SM Stirling, Lord Of Mountains (New York, 2013), Chapter Six, p. 125.

I have some very limited experience of conversing in an artificial language. Noticing that a guy was wearing the green star (la stelo verda) of Esperanto, I managed -

Me: Cu vi parolas Esperanton? (Do you speak Esperanto?)
Him: Jes, jes, flue. Kaj vi? (Yes, yes, fluently. And you?)
Me: Ne! Ne flue! (No! Not fluently.)

On another occasion, someone said:

"Ci tio estas mea amikino. Si ne comprenas Esperanton do mi povas diri kion mi volas!"

"This is my girl friend. She doesn't understand Esperanto so I can say what I want!"

And that's it for my knowledge of Esperanto.

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And of course we see LATIN being used by the Polesotechnic League as a common language used by its many multispecies members and employees in Anderson's Technic History.

And I have sometimes wondered what a text written in the Anglic of the Terran Empire would be like. How would it differ from the text I am writing? It would probably be, in some ways, a simplified form of our English, in other ways it would be more complex. And it would include loan words from the languages of non human intelligent races.

Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,
Human Avalonians, instead of translating Ythrian concepts like "deathpride" into Anglic, would probably incorporate the Planha terms directly into their own speech. We see the words, "choth," "Wyvan" and "Oherran," being used in Anderson's English language texts.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Yes, those would be examples of loan words from a non human language becoming part of the Anglic used on Avalon. And it makes me wonder which human concepts and Anglic words were taken into the Planha used on that planet. One other point, this means Avalonian Anglic would be becoming a dialect distinct from the Anglic of the Empire.

Sean