"...you could teach two or three interested shipmates something you were knowledgeable about, such as a skill or a language..." (pp. 84-85)
In In The Envoy II, I suggested short talks on interesting topics. Such talks might include an introduction to the structure of a language but could not possibly extend as far as linguistic training to the level of conversational ability. However, the Envoy crew should be able to aim for such ability in each other's national languages, especially with the help of "...an interactive virtual reality program." (p. 85) Being able to speak each other's languages would surely help to break down some of the evident barriers to mutual understanding.
When I was at school in the Irish Republic in the 1960s, we were taught languages, including the national language, incredibly badly so that we emerged unable to converse in Irish, French or Latin despite having "learned" these languages as school "subjects" for six years. Hopefully, school education has improved since then.
41 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Your comments about how dreadfully languages were or are taught in Eire strengthens my dislike of public schools (in the US sense). It's my belief they should be either abolished or no longer made mandatory in the states.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
The school in which I was mis-taught languages was a fee-paying boarding school run by Jesuits and registered as a charity. I understand that the teaching and pastoral staff (except for one chaplain, of course) are now all laypersons because vocations to religious orders have plummeted.
Paul.
Generally speaking, people don’t learn languages unless they’re useful to them. Israelis revived spoken Hebrew successfully because they needed a lingua Franca and most Jews in all the source countries had at least some acquaintance with it, not just for nationalistic reasons. But what does knowing Erse get you in everyday terms, except the ability to talk with people who all speak English too anyway?
When most people were peasants and lived local, peasant lives, local tongues were the most useful, but that’s no longer the case. Half the languages on earth are dying or moribund. The largest ‘native’ home language in Singapore isn’t Chinese, it’s English, and the number of people in India who can speak English is over 100 times what it was in 1948. In fact, something like a quarter or more of all adult human beings speak English as a first or second language, and there’s hardly a city on earth where you can’t order dinner or ask directions in it.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: And the decadent secularism of our times is a catastrophe!
Mr. Stirling: I agree, you need a STRONG reason for learning a language besides the one you speak or write in for every day use.
It does make me wonder, will English become the dominant language on Earth, as we see happening with it in Anderson's Technic stories (after morphing into Anglic)?
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: English or one of a half-dozen others, depending on unforseeable circumstances. All languages are of roughly equal semantic efficiency, so in the abstract it doesn’t”t really matter.
All languages aren’t equally easy for an adult who grew up speaking something else to learn, though. English is about the easiest of the major ones because it’s partially a ‘contact creole’ already, with most of the grammatical complexity, irregularity and inflections stripped out, because it’s been bumping up against other languages through most of its existence.
The sound system still does have some idiosyncratic elements, like ‘th’, which outsiders find hard. Hell, a lot of English dialects drop that one; ‘fink’ and ‘fing’ for think and thong, for instance.
Chinese might be nearly as easy if it weren’t for the tone system and the absurd Bronze Age writing system; it’s said we were still writing on hieroglyphs or Linear B.
James Blish's Chronology of Cities in Flight includes the Fall of the West and Russian becomes the universal language of space, then a dead language. Interlingua is also mentioned.
Russian could only become widespread through political pressure; it’s very old-fashioned, in that it retains most of the hideously complicated Indo-European inflectional system. For the same reason as Lithuanian if not to quite the same degree. It spent a long time off by itself, alone in the woods. That made it a lot harder to learn as a second language. It’s more archaic than Classical Latin that way. Note that Latin’s descendants, like Spanish, have shed much of the inflections.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I can think of at least a other languages which might, for one reason or another, become dominant on Earth, besides English: Spanish, Chinese, Arabic.
Yes, I know the tone system and the hideously complex writing system makes it unlikely Chinese would become a world language, absent political and military causes. English only needs 26 characters while I read that you have to master TEN THOUSAND characters for a basic knowledge of written Chinese. And similar reasons seems to apply to Arabic.
So, ever since Chaucer's time English has been gradually simplifying itself? I think that is good and I hope it continues, such as by dropping the "ugh" in "though" and "although."
And I have "thot" that "thought" should be "thot."
And something should be done about the confusion caused by words like "bear" having different meanings or sounding like still others, such as "bare."
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: the same sound changes that altered words like ‘ought’ also helped produce the large number of English words with identical sounds and different meanings. Bear and bare originally sounded like ‘bee-arrr’ and ‘b-a-re’, with a stress on the final ‘e’, roughly, IIRC. Knight and night were quite different too, and so on.
The main change in English has been loss of inflection — showing meaning and word-relationships by changing endings. English tends to use word-order instead. Eg, in English ‘house dog’ and ‘dog house’ mean very different things; in Latin or Russian you do that with inflection and the order of the words is irrelevant..
This simplification started long before Chaucer - it was already far advanced by Middle English times. The main reason Chaucerian English would be hard to understand is that the sound system has changed quite drastically, via the Great Vowel Shift. His English sounded more like Dutch or Low German, though the grammar was already around 2/3 of the way to the modern form.
To shoot a bear dead or to shoot a dead bear.
How is it known how English used to be pronounced?
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Many thanks for these fascinating comments, which I think a philologist like JRR Tolkien would also have enjoyed reading and commenting on! "Bear" and "bare" used to SOUND different, etc.
And, given both continued simplification and the influx of loan words from non human languages, it's no surprised English had become Anglic by Nicholas van Rijn's time in Anderson's Technic stories. Or that Flandry mentioned, much later, that poems like "A Musical Instrument" (by Elizabeth Barrett Browning were read by him in translation.
Ad astra! Sean
Paul: there’s a set of techniques known as reconstructive philology. Just to name one of them, you can use poetic meter and rhyme; for example, in Chaucer, a green shoot is spelled ‘shoote’ and the scansion and the words it rhymes with show that it had three syllables, began with a rolled ‘r’, and ended with a voiced ‘e’.
Oops, meant ‘root’, not ‘shoot’.
Mr Stirling,
Thanks. I have probably asked this before!
Paul.
Thought there was something funny there...
Compared to Middle English, the modern for is quicker, more clipped, and pronounced much further forward in the mouth.
For example, we pronounce ‘beat’ and ‘beet’ the same.
In 1400, the first syllable In ‘beat’ was the same as the first part of ‘bed’, only longer, and the second was like the word ‘at’. Beeh-at, roughly.
The change started around London and spread unevenly from there between about 1400 and the early 1700’s. English spelling is so odd pretty much because it was regularized right in the middle of this upheaval. You can see the changes happening in the different way Elizabeth I and Henry VIII wrote, by the way.
Irish and Scottish dialects of English didn’t undergo the changes as early or as thoroughly; they’re ‘old-fashioned’.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And I recall how, in his comments prefacing his translation of SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT, Tolkien remarked on now the Midlands dialect that poem was written in differed from the London variant.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: one result of the Norman conquest was that for centuries there was no “official” form of English,since the Wessex-based Chancery dialect was swept aside. When a new standard emerged, it was the East Midland based dialect that emerged in London (because of migration from that area to the capital after the Black Death).
The old standard had been southwestern and very conservative. The new one was from the Danelaw, more Scandinavian (and French) influenced and much more innovative grammatically.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I am intrigued by that, the idea that a pre-Conquest form of English based on the Wessex dialect used by the King's Chancery was starting to spread.
Now that was interesting, how the havoc wreaked by the Great Plague so devastated London that the entire population essentially needed replacing. And these new Londoners were from the east Midlands, speaking a dialect influenced by Dano/Norse and French.
I did know that for centuries after the Conquest the official languages used for legal and governmental matters were Norman French and Latin. And French was the language spoken at court. I THINK King John was the first post-Conquest king to know any dialect of English.
Ad astra! Sean
England was an occupied country.
Kaor, Paul!
Yes, but my view is that by the 13th century that was no longer the case. The Norman rulers and all the changes they had brought in were transforming England, had become too deeply rooted to any longer be thought alien.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
We are our history.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Of course! In both good and bad ways.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
One British black celebrity cook found that his ancestors included not only slaves (expected) but also a slave-owner (unexpected).
Irish people surnamed Fitzgerald have to accept that their ancestors were English Norman invaders of Ireland.
Paul.
It took about 3 generations for most of the Normans who settled in England to become native English-speaking; longer for the upper aristocracy, who had estates in France too and spent time there, and longest for the royal court. A lot of ordinary Normans married English women (often widows with claims to land) right after 1066, and the assimilation process was steady from then on.
It was about complete by Chaucer's time, when even the royal family and the Court spoke French only as a second language -- there are a number of jokes about that in the CANTERBURY TALES, where the excruciatingly refined Prioress speaks French, but not after the fashion of Paris, but that of the school in Stratford-atte-Bowe.
Arthur Conan Doyle, in his SIR NIGEL, has a scene where young Nigel Loring and Samkin Aylward are riding to Dover in 1350 to take ship for the war in France, and stop to look at the battlefield of Hastings:
"Here, up and down the low hill, hour by hour the grim struggle had waxed and waned, until the Saxon army had died where it stood, King, court, house-carl and fyrdsman, each in their ranks even as they had fought. And now, after all the stress and toil, the tyranny, the savage revolt and fierce suppression, God had made His purpose complete, for here were Nigel the Norman and Aylward the Saxon with good-fellowship in their hearts and a common respect in their minds, with the same banner and the same cause, riding forth together to do battle for their common mother, England."
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: I am not in the least surprised that celebrity cook had both slaves and slave owners in his ancestry. Lots of blacks were trafficking in slaves, after all, on the west coast of Africa. I have even heard of slaves who owned slaves!
And the process described by Stirling of how the Norman French conquerors of England were eventually assimilated into England is what happened to them in Ireland as well.
Mr. Stirling: so the Norman French were assimilated into England somewhat more quickly than I had thought. Somewhat longer for the upper aristocracy and the court.
If Henry V had managed to complete and consolidate his nearly successful conquest of France, all this would have been reversed! France was so much larger, wealthier, and more populous than England that the court and gov't would soon have relocated entirely to France. And England would have both undergone another wave of influence from France and relegated to being the junior partner in the United Kingdom of FRANCE and England.
What strange contortions and distortions of history might have resulted if St. Joan of Arc had not been raised up?
And I did read with interest A. Conan Doyle's SIR NIGEL last year. I appreciated the RESONANCES with your own Emberverse books! (Smiles)
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: it was a long-term stroke of luck for England that Henry V died when he did. Poul points out in one of his Time Patrol stories how France would probably have absorbed an English conquest.
To genuinely change the language of a country needs mass migration of ordinary people, usually. As late as 1840, half the population of Ireland spoke Erse. It wasn’t until the generation after the Famine that English was securely established as the predominant language of the country.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
You mean THE SHIELD OF TIME, showing us an alternative timeline where the Church came to dominate the State. And "Amazement of the World" shows us some speculations about what might have happened if the State had come to dominate the Church. Both of them bad time lines.
But Daniel-Rops, the French historian of the Church suggested a different possibility. God raised up St.Joan because He was not going to allow a king like Henry VIII to rule BOTH England and France. A man like Henry VIII as king of both countries could have dragged them both into schism and heresy, inflicting enormous harm on the Church.
So St. Joan was raised up to rally France in her hour of despair, in the catastrophic years after Agincourt. I have read of how the legitimate King, Charles VII, was seriously contemplating fleeing to Italy if Orleans had fallen to the English.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Ainslie Harriott's ancestors included a white slave owner.
I remember as a child being astonished at Shakespeare's representation of Joan.
The Time Patrol must be busy in medieval France as elsewhen.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Again, that is not in the least surprising. Some blacks, like Herriott, would have mixed ancestry, such as white as well as black slave owners.
Well, I would not expect Shakespeare to transcend the anti-Joan prejudices of his times among the English! There would still be some lingering bitterness over how a victory in France which had seemed so close was snatched from their hands.
I can see the Time Patrol being busy in France in St, Joan's time! Manse Everard might have needed to take steps against time criminals trying to stop her from defeating the English.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Not unexpected but something that he had to come to terms with.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Since Herriott was not responsible for any villainy perpetrated by any of his ancestors generations or centuries ago, he had no need to "come to terms" with that.
I would not want to be descended from Henry VIII or Oliver Cromwell, but I am not responsible for their crimes.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
You are not taking into account people's feelings. If we found that a close relative (at least) was guilty of war crimes, then we would know that we did not share the guilt but we would still have some problems in dealing with it. Someone I knew in Northern Ireland had a cousin in Long Kesh for murder.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
A fair point. If we had a reasonably close relative who was a murderer, that would hit CLOSER to home. Affect us more PERSONALLY. And be a matter for grief and sadness.
Ad astra! Sean
Everyone on Earth, without exception, is descended from slaves and slave-holders, because slavery was a ubiquitous institution until so recently. Half the population of what’s now Nigeria were slaves until the 1890’s; a third of the population of Thailand (then Siam) were slaves in the 1860’s; sale of children into servitude didn’t become illegal in China until the 1920’s. 15% of the population of England were slaves at the time of Domesday Book in the 1080’s, which was a steep drop from before 1066.
President Obama was descended from black American slaves… but on his (white) mother’s side, not his Kenyan father’s.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree with you. What you said is simply a historical fact. And I have read that Obama descended, on his faher's side, from black African slave traffickers.
A bit surprised about English slavery, tho. I thought it had evolved into serfdom by the time of the Domesday Book survey.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: no, serfdom in the classic sense was more of a post-1066 thing. There were analogous social groups, but it wasn’t as systematized or rigorous.
But while the Normans had no real principled objection to chattel slavery, they tended not to use it. They preferred systems of estate management that mostly ran by themselves, and slavery as an agricultural labor system is management-intensive. Western Europe during the ‘High Middle Ages ‘ was one of the few areas on earth where slavery wasn’t just rare, but completely absent.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Understood, that was what the post-Conquest Normans were implementing in the two decades before the Domesday Book and afterwards.
And would I be right thinking one reason these Normans preferred "...systems of estate management that mostly ran by themselves" because the "tenants" holding these lands, knights, barons, earls, were often away from home on the king's business, fighting in wars, or visiting estates held elsewhere?
I think the Norman conquerors of southern Italy and Sicily did use chattel slavery fairly widely, for certain management-intensive purposes or as eunuchs for their harems.
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment