McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

A writer's question about lingual shift

(1/10) > >>

Kali:
Sounds dirty, but isn't.

So, like most of you I always have story ideas bouncing around my head.  I usually daydream over them, see if there's really anything there that catches my interest.  The latest one is a fantasy novel with a Rip Van Winkle sort of character who wakes up after being asleep (for lack of a better word) for 200 years or so.  He's on the run and ends up at the home of a widowed farmer woman.

In 200 years, there probably hasn't been enough of a shift that they speak different languages.  But it's comparable, more or less, to someone from the early 1800s, late 1700s showing up in our time.  They speak the same language, roughly, but use it differently. 

The problem?  Neither of them speak English, so it wouldn't be appropriate for me to use "thee" and "thou" and all that sort of thing to indicate he's speaking an older form of her language.  So how do I do it?  I don't want to just use descriptive phrases like:

"I don't understand what you're saying but my, this soup is delicious," he said in his old-fashioney words.

Any thoughts?

Sebastian:
If you're writing the story in non-English, look up how people spoke ~200 years ago and use that.
If you're writing the story in English, you're practically translating their fantasy gibberish anyways and may as well use ~200 years old English. That would be approximately Byron, no?

Beware, though: :)
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YeOldeButcheredeEnglishe

Shecky:
Read The Forever War by Jack Haldeman for an example of temporal shifts in an otherwise unchanging language. Personally, I think they're done reasonably well, all things considered; the job is HUGE. If I were you, I'd pick some other plot point. :D

Blaze:
Languages are plastic, they constantly change as long as they are being spoken, and the meaning of words change constantly.  I think if you seriously research the language in use by Rip Van Winkle as opposed to any current dialect of modern American English there would be grounds for a lot of humor.

Language, slang, accents and especially speed at which we speak. 

To do it well, that would be the trick.  Good luck and keep us posted!

svb1972:
And also take into account cultural idioms.
If someone, say fell asleep in 1809, and woke up today. 

Would they have any idea what "OMG, I like, totally googlestalked him."  would mean?

Also.  What is the rate of technical/magical advancement in your world.
Has the lives of the average person changed, and how drastically in the last 200 years.
Do they still use horse drawn plows? Or Do they have little magical sprites that prepare the fields.
Were there any big battles, any big wars?  Cultural events.

For example.
If you went to sleep in 1350 and work up in 1550. 
The english spoken would likely not have changed too much, although you might be weirded out by the level of french/english merging.  But an amusing thing.  A now common physical expression (giving someone the middle finger) would be completely incomprehensible to you.  That's because you've never heard of the Battle of Agincourt.  From which that particular expression came from.  There's just alot of things to consider, and that's during a relatively slow period like the dark ages. 


Temporal shift stories are hard to pull off well.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page