![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Impressing Forms about Tongues on my Number-Counter
In a locked post in his journal, a friend of mine observed that science fiction writers often make aliens sound "aboriginal":
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.
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.
no subject
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.