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Author Craft / A writer's question about lingual shift
« on: December 16, 2009, 10:07:36 AM »
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?
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?