Flandry to Ydwyr:
"'You, uh, you are most kind, sir,' he said. The honorific appeared implicitly in the pronoun." (p. 283)
That linguistic detail is interesting. So it is something like "You-sir..." in a single inflected word, which might be a single syllable. Poul Anderson's Technic History refers to the dominant Merseian language, Eriau, and to the Ythrian language, Planha. The same author's Time Patrol series refers to the time travellers' language, Temporal. CS Lewis' Ransom Trilogy mentions a Solar language spoken on Malancandra/Mars, on Perelandra/Venus and in Deep Heaven/space. But we want to know more about all these languages and to hear them spoken in films. Only Tolkien got fictional languages right.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Even if he was not a linguist Anderson gave some thought to how non-human languages might differ from ours. Tolkien, of course, was a professional linguist or philologist, specializing in ancient/modern Germanic languages, with an interest in other tongues like Finnish.
By the time Nicholas van Rijn was born, in about AD 2421, our "modern" English had changed so much that it became a different language called Anglic. At least as different as Chaucer's Middle English is from ours.
I have wondered what a page of Anglic might look like--some teasingly familiar bits along with a great deal of strangeness?
Ad astra! Sean
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