Sunday, 7 October 2018

On The Moon

Poul Anderson, The Stars Are Also Fire, 12.

In Lunar gravity, it can be comfortable to remain standing even while eating.

Two young Lunarians wrote "...the program that constructed the basic Lunarian language..." (p. 161) Now I understand how a language developed so quickly. Dagny's daughter, Verdea, adds to its vocabulary.

In SM Stirling's Emberverse, speakers of Tolkien's Elvish have to expand its vocabulary. Also, the Sword gives its wielder extended but consistent knowledge of the language. How does that work? The Emberverse series is fantasy. Gods are involved.

Fiction and fictional languages fit well together, e.g., subtitles for Klingon and Vulcan in Star Trek films. Let's see Anderson films with Eriau, Planha, Temporal, Exaltationist, Lunarian etc.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And how might our English change to become the Anglic of Nicholas van Rijn and Dominic Flandry? A simplified spelling of many words, for instance? I can see words like "though" losing the "ugh," for example. And something might be done about the problem caused by words with the same spelling and/or sounds but different meanings: such as "bear" for the animal, "bear" for carrying something, or "bare" for persons or objects which are uncovered. And our "to," "too," and "two" is another difficulty!

And the Anglic of Dominic Flandry and the Terran Empire had changed enough that works written in our "modern" English had to be translated into the later Anglic. We know this because Flandry mentioned to Aycharaych in A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS having read, in translation, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem "A Musical Instrument." And Flandry was startled when Aycharaych quoted from that poem!

Sean