The Nikean "fish" tells Tom that he will see a "cave" about a hundred "kilos" upriver. Although he explains that a "kilo" is a thousand meters, Tom does not understand how he is expected to "spot" a cave from the air. Initially puzzled, the Nikean deduces that "spot" means "espy" and then explains that a "cave" is a "stronghouse," recognizable as such by its "'...turrets, projectors and set down fields.'" (p. 476) Tom realizes that he means a castle - but it is not the Engineer's castle because the Nikeans would not be so "whetless" as to let Tom near the Great Cave when he might have a tommic boom.
What we see here is one language, Anglic (descended from English), in the process of becoming two or more, as Latin became Italian and the other Romance languages - unless, of course, Tom is about to forge such a strong alliance between Kraken and Nike that regular contact and communication are resumed.
11 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Altho "whetless" means "witless," in this story, I don't think the former descended from the latter." WE usually use words like "whetting" to mean things like sharpening blades. So, someone on Nike who was not very "sharp" might be called "whetless."
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
And Elanor values her "...real steel knife." (p. 500)
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And one Nikean farmer was willing to sell almost anything to Tom's wife because a 50 grams gold coin had a very high demand and value there!
Ad astra! Sean
We tend to have a distorted view of the linguistic history of Latin because the written language survived a very long time -- but it was never very close to the actual spoken tongue, which always had internal dialect differences.
The sounds and grammatical system expressed in the formal written 'high' tongue were already archaic in Caesar's time; for example, the final -m in nominative case had probably already been dropped.
Roman London was spelled Londinium, but probably pronounced (by native speakers of Latin) more like "Londini'" or "Londino" in the 1st century CE.
The Romance languages aren't descended from literary Latin; more from legionary dog-Latin, the "sermo vulgaris".
Mehercule!
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And I remember how Poul Anderson touched on some of these points in a story where time travelers from roughly our era more or less Shanghaied some Romans from the reign of Augustus, only to have these "primitive" Romans outwitting them and escaping to do very well in our world. But, offhand, I don't recall the story's title.
Ad astra! Sean
An example: the written Latin word for "horse" is "equus", from PIE *ekwo (root for Old English "eoh", too, btw.)
But -none- of the Romance languages have a derivative of 'equus' as their word for 'horse'.
They all use words descended from "caballus", which meant "hack, nag".
Languages like Irish and Welsh which use Latin loans for "horse" also use descendants of caballus.
So that was apparently what virtually everyone who -spoke- Latin in Roman times -said- when they were talking about a horse.
They only used "equus" in formal, literary situations. Everywhere else it was "your nag" not "your horse".
Have I said this before? A guy I worked with referred to "the old man" but he did not say, "the old man." He said, "t'aul' lad."
"the" was abbreviated to "t'";
"ol-" was mispronounced "aul-";
"d" was dropped from the end of old/auld;
"man" was colloquially transformed into its opposite, "lad."
A different language.
My maternal grandmother was from Lancashire, and did a dialect joke whose punchline was: “Ah nivver jest on brass” — I never joke about money.
A standard language is just a dialect that’s acquired some authority. Standard English is what it is because of migration patterns in late-medieval England: it’s an eastern Midland dialect that became predominant in London because a lot of the migrants to London after the Black Death period came from that part of the country. England was a tightly centralized country, so the London dialect became that of the Court, Parliament, the judicial system, etc.
It’s a rather peculiar form of the language; rhotic, heavily influenced by Old Norse (about 800 words, many very basic ones) because the East Midlands were the heart of the old Danelaw, and radically de-inflected and positional/analytical even by English standards.
The court/chancery language of the pre-1066 English kingdom was based on Wessex dialects ancestral to what English people think of as West Country — “Ay, ay be a Devon man, Ay beee”. If that had been the basis of the standard language, it would sound very different.
Kaor, Sean!
I don’t recall reading this tale of the shanghaied Romans. Are you sure that it’s by Poul Anderson?
Best Regards,
Nicholas
Kaor, Nicholas and Mr. Stirling!
Nicholas: I'm at least 90 percent sure the story I mentioned was by Poul Anderson. I simply have to FIND it somewhere! (Smiles)
Mr. Stirling: thanks for your interesting explanation of how our standard English descended from a Dano/Norse influenced east Midland dialect BECAUSE of the Black Death. Yes, before 1346 the "English" spoken in London and the territory around was probably still recognizably a Wessex based variant of Old English.
Ad astra! Sean
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