Impressing Forms about Tongues on my Number-Counter

[athelind]

In a locked post in his journal, a friend of mine observed that science fiction writers often make aliens sound "aboriginal":

People with warp travel and a high tech, computerized society say things like "The day of lightning", "the trial of strength", or "the forbidden land". In short they typically end up sounding like Native Americans, or more accurately, what white people think Native Americans sound like and wrote dialog for in spaghetti westerns.

Speaking a polyglot language like English tends to distort one's perspective. We simply don't notice when we use words and phrases that are pretty much exactly like that.

I mean, on the Day of the Thunder God, I got a call on my hears-far in the middle of watching my sees-far, and had to get in my moves-by-itself to head to The Place Below The City. I traveled on the Road Between Estates to the almost-island, and spoke to One Who Knows The Word Of Water at the All-Together in the High Woods about the Balance of Eating-Away.

Which is exactly the same thing as saying "On Thursday, I got a call on my telephone in the middle of watching television, and had to get in my automobile to head to the suburbs. I traveled on the interstate to the peninsula, and spoke to a hydrological scientist at the University in Palo Alto about the equilibrium of erosion."

And if I spoke Spanish, Greek, or Latin, that sentence would sound as much like the first version as the second.

So, basically, English sounds more "sophisticated" to an Anglophone because it's chock full of foreign words whos meanings we either don't know or don't really hear.

Incidentally, I've never understood the assumption that people in Sci Fi shows were actually supposed to be speaking English. Nobody ever makes that assumption when they're watching something set in, say, 17th Century France or Pharaonic Egypt. On Star Trek, they might be speaking Esperanto, or some kind of interlac of Terran, Vulcan, and other languages. We're just watching a translation into our Primitive 20th-Century Dialect.

Comments

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Now, that last point surprises me greatly. My assumption (and the prediction of a few SF authors who actually bothered to give it thought) was that the proliferation of recorded media would provide the same kind of anchor to spoken language that widespread literacy had for written language.

Honestly, it's kind of cool that it doesn't. I wonder if languages controlled by central Acadamies, like French, show less linguistic drift?

I HAVE heard that, in the Untidy States, at least, regional accents have started to become less distinct than they used to be because of broadcast media. I've heard a bit of that -- few US-ians of my generation or younger have incomprehensible accents anymore, and people tend to lose their accents (or slip more easily into new ones) when they move to different regions of the country than they once did.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

There are fewer regional accents now than there were fifty years ago, because of broadcast media; that's true. But try the experiment of listening to a thirties radio show, and see if you can hear the linguistic differences. They are there. I think the changes in accent would have been much more pronounced without broadcast media than they were with it, but that doesn't mean there was no change.

I think that broadcast media has slowed the rate of linguistic change in terms of accents. It has also, as you mention, leveled the playing field so that there are fewer accents to deal with. But, and this almost negates the other two, it has sped up the introduction of new, specialized, loan or slang words into the language. Twenty years ago, "access" was a noun. "Yada yada" was something you heard in certain neighbourhoods of NYC. "I ain't got no more" was bad grammar on at least two levels. You get my drift.

Ten years ago, there was a clear dividing line between print and broadcast media. Then the internet became a force, and all of a sudden, we're seeing linguistic change in the written language at a rate that hasn't happened in centuries. At the moment, it's confined to the young or undereducated users, but it's there and it will become a force for change over the next two decades. I predict that written English as we know it will have changed considerably in a hundred years, much the way it did between Chaucer and Shakespeare, because of the influence of the Internet and the linguistic shift that it is creating.