"'Ya-lawa!' he commanded his steed: in Haisun, 'Freeze!'" (8, p. 132)
"'Il-krozny ya?'" (10, p. 156)
"'Vakhabo!'" (ibid.)
"'Eyan haa wharr, Hlirr talya -'" (20, p. 231)
"'Dwynafor, dwynafor, odhal tiv...'"
-Poul Anderson, A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows IN Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (Riverdale, NY, March 2012), pp. 339-606 AT IV, p. 401.
The first three phrases are Haisun. The fourth is Planha. The fifth is Eriau. Apart from the first, the meanings are not stated.
We need to hear these languages spoken with subtitles in films. In a Time Patrol film, we should hear Temporal, for example, when Everard speaks into a communicator:
"'Unattached Everard. Come immediately. Combat.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Shield of Time (New York, July 1991), p. 113.
I imagine that that is just three short words: "Everard" inflected; "come" inflected; "combat."
20 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Your comments about Temporal makes it seem a bit like Latin. There are Latin words and terms that needs a whole sentence to be translated into English.
Ad astra! Sean
"Arma virumque cano."
"I sing of arms and a man."
But Latin is complex. Temporal would be simple.
Latin uses inflection/declension to convey meanings that English gets across with word order, modifier words, or just leaves to context.
Eg., "cano" is not just "sing", but specifically "I sing". The suffix -que just means "and"; hence SPQR, "Senatus Populusque Romam", the Senate and People of Rome.
Latin is a fairly typical early Indo-European language that way; the original language was -highly- inflected, and full of irregularities and special classes of words and whatnot.
(It also sounded like someone with a bad head cold clearing his throat a lot, btw.)
And oddly, 'you' was 'tu' -- exactly what it is in French now.
Contact languages -- languages where people who learn it as a second language are common -- tend to have simplified, positional grammars.
English isn't quite a contact Creole but it has strong tendencies that way, starting about a thousand years ago or a bit more, which is why it has a stripped-down positional/analytical grammar.
Senatus Populusque Romanus: the three noun endings in agreement.
Also no "a" or "the." "Vir" means "a man" or "the man," depending on context.
Sorry. Two nouns and one adjective.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
And all these interesting comments makes it easy to think Temporal had a lot in common wit Latin.
And Stirling's comments about English helps to explain why, from a technical POV, it's so widely used. That stripped down positional analytical/grammar.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I think that Romance languages also have positional grammar? English is spoken widely because it has been spread widely.
Paul.
Senatus Populusque Romanus
and a certain deliberate echo
"The Assembly and the People of Nantucket"
;
"Romanus" is an adjective, not a genitive noun, so it's "The Roman Senate and People," which means the same thing anyway.
I was working from memory and got it wrong -- sorry. It's "Senatus PopulusQue Romanus"
Paul: the Romance languages have -more- positional grammar than Latin did, but not to the same extent as English.
And English is -relatively- easy to learn, particularly for anyone who speaks a Romance language, or a Germanic one.
(Because it's fundamentally Germanic with a massive, massive freight of Romance/Latin derived loanwords.)
The main handicap English has is its orthography. Unfortunately we standardized our spelling right at the beginning of a profound and rapid period of changes in the sound-system, the Great Vowel Shift.
Originally words like night and bright and so forth were prounced the way they're spelled -- roughly n-i-ggghht. Now we pronounce it as if it were spelled nite.
This makes English hard to learn to -write-.
Kaor, Paul, Mr. Stirling, and Jim!
Paul: It's because English has spread so widely and became the most prevalent Western which is helping to drive it to becoming a truly universal language.
Mr. Stirling: If English becomes so widely used it becomes "Anglic," I can see its orthography also becoming stripped down and simplified. E.g., we currently use "qu" for the "kw" sound. I can see words like "quack," "queen," "quick" changing to "kwack," "kween," or "kwick," etc
Jim: An even more exact analogy for SPQR in Stirling's Nantucket books would be the "Council and People of Nantucket."
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Yes. English is widely used because it has been spread by imperialists, not because of its positional grammar. See earlier comments above.
I was unsure of the status of English so I checked. It is indeed not a Romance language but a Germanic language with a lot of Latin input. In that way, maybe, a sort of synthesis. Its spelling is unfortunate with sometimes even educated English people having to check dictionaries to get it right. Sometimes I prefer American English to British English spelling.
Paul.
Paul: both the grammar and the history are important.
English developed its contact-Creole features in two episodes; the prolonged contact with Old Norse in the Danelaw areas (which dialects are the source of modern Standard English) and then in contact with French after the Norman conquest.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I thought English, in its more Germanic origins, descended from the Old and Middle English used in south eastern England? With input from the Danelaw.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: all the dialects affected each other. The western dialects were profoundly conservative and showed less influence from Old Norse. Eg., in the Severn Valley people were still saying "geboren" for "born" in the 17th century.
The dialect directly ancestral to modern Standard English is an East Midland one. It became predominant in London and area due to an influx after the Black Death, which hit London and environs particularly hard.
There are a number of ways to tell this -- the high percentage of Old Norse loanwords, for example; there are over 800.
Then the London dialect (with the exception of ancestral Cockney, which is more southeastern) became the template for "court English", which in turn became the foundation for the standardized form of the language.
Some northern dialects have even more Norse influence. Scottish English ("Lallans") does, for example -- hence the use of "kirk" instead of "church", for example.
Note that a lot of the Old Norse loans in English are 'core vocabulary' -- things like 'egg' and 'beat' and 'bag' and 'dirt' and 'get'.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I should have kept in mind how the devastation of the Black Death caused a nearly total turnover of the population of London/south eastern England. Hence that influx from the old Danelaw.
I think Tolkien translated SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT from one of those conservative dialects little affected by that of the east Midlands/Danelaw.
Ad astra! Sean
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