The Dresden Files > DF Spoilers
Who is the guy with an English accent in the cell at Demonreach?
Kindler:
--- Quote from: Arjan on August 30, 2018, 07:44:09 PM ---
--- End quote ---
K, but in fairness, that was Max Weinreich talking about Yiddish, which actually has multiple accepted forms (like Eastern Yiddish). Old English, for example, doesn't even use Roman letters for a while, and was heavily influenced by Old Norse (hence the Runic alphabet). Dialect vs. Language is an age old debate, but we're not talking about Creole vs. French or Roman Latin vs. Church Latin; there is an enormous rift between even Tudor/Elizabethan English and Middle English, which is only separated by a century or two (I forget when he wrote the Canterbury Tales; Chaucer lived from 134(3? 1345?) to 1400, and the Tudor period starts in 1485ish, at the end of the Wars of the Roses). The difference from Chaucer to Shakespeare (1564-1616) is night and day (mostly because Chaucer is one of the first people who bothered to write fiction in English (yes, there are other examples, but few had the staying power of the Canterbury Tales, save for Beowulf, which isn't even pure Old English, as it's heavily influenced by West Saxon dialect).
I had a similar conversation with some of my old students who were working on time travel stories. One of them was really hung up on the minute details (he wanted to be a typical hard Sci-Fi writer) surrounding how far back the characters could go while still being understood (and understanding in return). We came up with a functional limit of about five hundred years without making serious effort (or a handwave-y gadget or other such nonsense; but again, he wanted to be a hard Sci-Fi writer, so the whatsit couldn't just work, he had to be able to explain how, but he also didn't want to include any nonsense materials or energy that could do it. Needless to say, he was never quite able to get out of his own way and just write the damn story).
Anywho, this was a long tangent that could've just been summarized by me simply stating my disagreement with the spirit of Weinreich's reductionist remark.
Arjan:
Actually some dialects are as understandable for me as Chaucer, they just do't have an army. :)
Our time traveler just has to learn the language and that is easier for some people than for others but it is possible even if the languages differ considerably. Human explorers in the past have proved that several times.
How difficult is that? Easier than speaking to a polynesian if you are the first european arriving there. If you go back to Shakespeare's time it is probably already easier just to write on the sand than speak to each other because the spoken language changes faster than the written one as showed by how badly the english spelling actually fits the spoken words. That might have been better in the past.
From what I have heard of middle english it should not be that difficult for a gifted human who already speaks several germanic languages to pick it up after a little immersion. Nobody says our time traveler should be the average man on the street. I have been told that the more languages you learn the easier it is to learn another one.
And people study those languages, they read the texts. The languages are related. Those europeans who went to polynesia had no textbooks and those languages were totally unrelated.
Kindler:
--- Quote from: Arjan on August 31, 2018, 05:24:16 PM ---Actually some dialects are as understandable for me as Chaucer, they just do't have an army. :)
Our time traveler just has to learn the language and that is easier for some people than for others but it is possible even if the languages differ considerably. Human explorers in the past have proved that several times.
How difficult is that? Easier than speaking to a polynesian if you are the first european arriving there. If you go back to Shakespeare's time it is probably already easier just to write on the sand than speak to each other because the spoken language changes faster than the written one as showed by how badly the english spelling actually fits the spoken words. That might have been better in the past.
From what I have heard of middle english it should not be that difficult for a gifted human who already speaks several germanic languages to pick it up after a little immersion. Nobody says our time traveler should be the average man on the street. I have been told that the more languages you learn the easier it is to learn another one.
And people study those languages, they read the texts. The languages are related. Those europeans who went to polynesia had no textbooks and those languages were totally unrelated.
--- End quote ---
The issue wasn't just the traveler understanding, it was being understood, and quickly. The exercise was based on a Man-Out-of-His-Own-Time archetypal short story; someone wakes up at some point in the past, with no preparation, and deals with the unexpected problem. They were to use characters they had already used for other stories. The idea was to get them to figure out how characters they knew would react to out-of-context problems. The focus was on characterization, which is why I was a tad frustrated with this particular student's tunnel vision in regard to (what I considered to be) minute details for the story. Attention to detail is important, and I get his attitude—in some ways, I agree, because details like this one are a big reason I love the Dresden Files so dearly—but he was missing the point. Thus, we agreed that, barring any sudden lingual proficiency or science-y gadgets or other such handwaves, most people could travel back to Elizabethan England and talk with regular people without undue problems, but going back too much further than that will pose significant difficulty without previous effort (because, come on, who spends their time learning Middle English except for English Lit/History majors like I was?)
One cool thing that came out of the exercise was one of my student's hard-boiled Noir-style detective trying to survive the Alamo. She knew my weakness for over-the-top narration, so it was exactly what I was hoping for.
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