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

[araquan.livejournal.com]

I actually recall a scene in Babylon 5 when Delenn and co. are meeting the Drakh for the first time and communication comes in- not in Interlac, but in Minbari- with the whole scene presented in English just as if it had been dubbed for us. Of course, the fact that the Drakh- in a supposed first-contact situation- already speak Minbari is cause for some concern...

There's also the Doctor Who approach- the TARDIS adjusts your neural centers so you speak and hear all local languages as if they were your own, transparently. This came up in the Tom Baker era. Sarah Jane Smith was the companion if I recall correctly, so we're talking mid-'70s. Kind of like a Babelfish without the fish.

As for languages spoken by others... If it's made obvious that translation is being done on the part of the speaker and the result is stilted and awkward English, I always presume that they're circumlocuting in a language not their own- Deus knows I've done that enough times in Spanish. But indeed, Earth languages are riddled with words that are constructed from words that describe what things do- "windshield" in Spanish is "parabrisas", or literally "thing that stops breezes". Constructing new words that way makes more sense in some languages than others...