Would Saunders and Belgotai be mutually comprehensible with a gap of a thousand years between them?
We are told how English has changed:
Belgotai has a slurring accent although it becomes easier to follow with practice;
vowels sound different;
consonants have been modified;
"r" is more like twentieth century French or Danish;
foreign words, especially Spanish, have been incorporated.
"Chronning," chronology, has also changed. Belgotai does not recognize "nineteen seventy-three."
"...modern chronology dated from the ascension of John Mteza I." (p. 180)
- because the late twenty-seventh century Planetary League and African Dissenters had ended the earlier Armageddonist/Fanatic rule.
Some of this sounds like (a different version of) Poul Anderson's first future history series, the Psychotechnic History.
Onward.
7 comments:
Languages change at different rates.
English underwent massive changes between 1000 and 1500 AD -- that was the period when it changed from an inflected language to an analytical one. Basically, it dropped most inflections and relied on word order instead. Which is why "horseman" means something quite different from "man's horse".
The influence of Norse and French was important; equally so was the lack of an "official" English language. The written version of Old English before 1066 was essentially a Wessex dialect -- which was -very- old-fashioned and not subject to Norse influence.
The dialect which became standard in the 16th century was an East Midland dialect, heavily influenced by Norse (around 900 words, and grammatical influence as well) and French.
OTOH, Lithuanian is the closest modern IE language to Proto-Indo-European. It's very easy for a Lithuanian-speaker to learn Proto-Indo-European because the grammatical structure is still strongly reminiscent of PIE.
I used to puzzle about whether The Greek Orthodox Church read the New Testament untranslated! - but apparently not. It is too different.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I always find these mini or mini-mini essays of yours very interesting.
You reminded me of "The Man Who Came Early." Did the Norse Icelandic of AD 1000 change so little in nearly a millennium that it was plausible that the American speaking modern Icelandic was easily comprehensible to people of that time?
I think a major reason for that massive change in English was the Black Death which ravaged England after 1348. The Great Plague virtually exterminated the population of London, who apparently then spoke a more Wessex like dialect of English (with Norman French and Latin accretions?). The city was repopulated by immigrants from the old Danelaw (the east Midlands), speaking a heavily Norse influenced English. And French and Latin.
I also thought of how no English speaking gov't bothered to set up anything like an "English Academy" to police the language, decreeing which words were acceptable and how the language was to be spoken /written. For one thing, for centuries, the educated/upper classes spoke French or Latin, which were the prestigious/high status languages. As late as George I's time, who notoriously did not speak English, he got along fine conversing with his ministers in French.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Yeah, modern Icelandic is mutually comprehensible with the Icelandic of 1000 AD -- sparse population dealing mainly with neighbors speaking the same language is a recipe for slow change.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
That makes sense to me. Plus, long isolation on the outskirts of Europe would also slow down linguistic changes In Icelandic Norse.
Ad adtra! Sean
Languages in contact with other languages change more rapidly.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, what we call "English" being a classic example of that.
Ad astra! Sean
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