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Anglic (scroll down)
Fictional Lewis does not just quote fictitious Natvilcius. He first quotes the latter's Latin, then translates it for us. Later, another of Lewis' characters, Wither, addresses the man whom he thinks is the revived Merlin in Latin:
"'Magister Merline,...Sapientissime Britonum, secreti secretorum possessor...'"
-CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength IN Lewis, The Cosmic Trilogy (London, 1990), pp. 349-753 AT CHAPTER 12, 6, p. 626.
My Point? I wish that:
I had been taught French, Latin and (in our case, in the Republic of Ireland) Irish properly, to read and to speak them;
I had been helped to understand that this was worth doing.
Instead, we were force fed something that we neither understood nor wanted at the time. But our expected social role did not require us to speak or read anything other than English.
25 comments:
Latin and French, yeah. Irish Gaelic? Spoken by no more than 40K people? What's the point? Apart from bilingual signs nobody reads.
But I was in contact with fluent speakers, including language enthusiasts. It would have been good to converse with them in their language, not just in English - especially since I was, notionally, being given the opportunity to do that. Two Irish speakers could switch to their language if they didn't want me to understand what they were saying.
Kaor, Paul!
I did a quick google on the actual use of Gaelic, and the conclusion I reached made me agree with Stirling. The actual everyday use of Gaelic is steadily declining. Gaelic is simply not satisfactory or practical for daily use.
Ad astra! Sean
All languages are of roughly equal semantic efficiency. Therefore it really doesn't matter what language you speak, except for its usefulness -- which is a function of how many people speak it. Except for studying literatures, of course.
But I would like to have learned to speak Irish for the reasons I said.
Note: For a while the "Newer Post" link has been just going back to the post it is in.
The earliest post with this error is:
https://poulandersonappreciation.blogspot.com/2026/05/more-mixed-mythologies-in-works-by.html
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stirling: I might quibble a bit because the written forms of some languages, like Chinese, make them difficult to learn. I read that basic literacy in Chinese requires learning 10,000 ideographic characters. Our Roman alphabet only has 26!
In your THE WINDS OF FATE the leader of the Chinese time travelers modernizing the Han Empire talked about introducing an alphabetic writing system, to replace those awkward ideographs.
That could be 25 if the sound represented by "qu" was replaced by "kw," meaning words like "quack" or "queen" were spelt "kwack" and "kween." Then we could jettison the letter "Q."
Yes, the usefulness of any language depends on how many use and speak it.
Paul: I strongly suspect there are more passionate fans of Tolkien's works taking an intense interest in Elvish Sindarin than those who really care about Gaelic.
Ad astra! Sean
I don't want lots of people to care about Irish!
Jim,
Thank you. I don't know what to do about that - or how serious it is?
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Good, there's no point keeping alive dying languages. I would leave them to the philologists and other scholars.
Ad astra! Sean
Paul: "I don't know what to do about that - or how serious it is?"
If this month ends up with more than 100 posts, it will make it harder to reach some posts. The "Older Post" link still works, but if that fails too, then some posts would be unreachable.
Jim,
Have you any idea what to do about it?
Maybe I should just put less than 100 posts on each month? (I am already posting a lot less nowadays.)
Paul.
Sean: yes, the Chinese have kept their Bronze Age script. Serious impediment to literacy.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Exactly, it takes so much time/effort gaining basic literacy in Chinese using those ideographs. But their use seems to be so deeply entrenched that it might need a ruthless tyrant, another Chin Shihhuang-ti, to break it.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Liu has the advantage that literacy is rare in Han times -- only a small minority had it, a much smaller percentage than in the Roman empire. He can substitute a modified Pinyin set of letters, and the "classically educated" will ignore it until too late.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
The simplicity of the Roman alphabet was a huge reason why literacy was so much more common in the Roman Empire than it was in Han China.
I had not known there are apparently serious suggestions for replacing Chinese ideographs with a kind of Pinyin alphabet. Something that would be much quicker/easier to learn.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: there aren't serious suggestions to replace the ideographic alphabet -- they've put too much effort into making literacy common. Liu does that on his own.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Got it, I misunderstood you. I can see, after thousands of years, plus the effort made making literacy common using those awkward ideographs, it's just too hard to switch to using an alphabetic script.
Ad astra! Sean
Note that the 2nd century was the end-phase of Old Chinese... which did not have tones. They had consonant-clusters at the end of words, which developed into tones. Old Chinese was a really weird language -- it sounded abrupt and harsh.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I remember the Chinese time travelers in your Antonine books talking or thinking about that linguistic history.
I've seen mention of modern Chinese sounding "sing-songy" to Western ears.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Yes, it's changed much more than the Romance languages have from Latin, although the sound changes between Latin and Romance are fairly extreme. Latin was also a 'harsh' language, nothing like as mellifluous as Italian. "C" was pronounced as a hard "K", for example. The Germans borrowed "Kaiser" from "Caesar", but their pronunciation of it is much closer to Latin.
That often happens with loan-words -- for example, Finnish borrowed their word for "king/chief" from Proto-Germanic, but they still pronounce it as "kuningas", which is very close to Proto-Germanic "kuningaz".
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Ha! So, I would have been mistaken enunciating "Caesar" in the Rome of Marcus Aurelius as "Ceesar," the correct form being more like "Keesar."
Tolkien would have read your philological comments with keen interest!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: I find linguistic evolution fascinating. Though it's probably slowed down rather considerably after recorded sound became common. Slang still develops and passes quickly, but the basic pronunciation has been more stable for the last century. Increasingly so.
If you listen to -early- recorded voices, there are more regional accents (in the US, at least) and some very strange social-class ones. Theodore Roosevelt sounded -strange-.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I can see how technology can lead to a standardizing of languages.
Regional accents still exist in the US, including me! Some 30 years ago a shopkeeper in London could not only tell I am American, but also that I'm from Massachusetts.
I've been amused by your descriptions of how TR naturally spoke, like a well-educated man of the upper-class northeastern US.
Ad astra! Sean
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