A historical Valentine

My friend Sheila Finch pointed this wonderful link out to me yesterday. It's about the earliest known use of the world "Valentine" to describe one's love - occurring in a love letter from Margery Brews and her betrothed John Paston in 1477. They married and their descendants still live in England today, and if you scroll down, you'll find on the right-hand side a place where you can listen to the letter read aloud in the original dialect.

It's just wonderful, so enjoy - and happy Valentine's day!

TTYU Retro: Do you want to consider language change?

Have you ever tried to hear the difference between a Cockney British accent and an Australian accent?

Once I set myself the challenge - I was on a train platform in Tokyo, and I heard some people talking near me, and I started listening just trying to place my best guess as to where they were from. It was pretty hard. Eventually I fastened onto one single language feature: these people were using glottal stop "t" (a "t" pronounced way back in the throat) in the middle of words instead of flap "t" (like in American "batter"). That one difference told me I was listening to British English instead of Australian English. The rest of it - vowels, intonation, everything else - was at the time too subtle for me to distinguish.

Why in the world are these accents so similar? It turns out that when Australia was first settled, starting in 1788, most of the people who moved there came from the same area of England where Cockney speakers live today. A lot of them were convicts. My Aussie husband will tell you that these folk were subjected to a trip to Australia for petty crimes, like stealing or poaching, rather than anything more serious. Who'd want to be stuck on a ship full of murderers for six months? But as a result, both Cockney and Australian English are actually "daughter languages" of the same parent, an English dialect spoken in a particular region (and by a particular social group) in London at the end of the 18th century.

It's been more than two hundred years since then, and at the sound level, the two dialects are remarkably similar. There are more noticeable divergences of vocabulary, of course (for example, Australians say "truck" instead of "lorry") but a lot still remains common (such as saying "lift" rather than "elevator").

I remarked in my earlier post on dialects that the longer a language exists in a particular area, and the more isolated regions are, the more dialects will diverge. In the United States, there are isolated regions in the East (such as Appalachia) which preserve language features that haven't been present in a standard American dialect for hundreds of years. These are in fact useful for scholars who study language change.

You probably already know how I'm going to be connecting this to speculative fiction. It becomes relevant in all kinds of contexts. One possible science fiction context is that of extrapolating the language used by future societies (I think immediately of Mike Flynn's The January Dancer and Up Jim River). One possible fantasy context is that of quoting ancient texts (I think of Tolkien). Either science fiction or fantasy can easily support the idea of two societies that have been isolated for a long period of time suddenly finding one another again and having to resume communication (I think of Stargate, and one of my own planned stories).

If you're writing a story that involves language change, it's useful to consider the following factors:

1. amount of time elapsed

2. presence or absence of written language (this can slow change)

3. amount of intercommunication between isolated groups (more communication can mean slower change)

4. amount of intermixing with other language groups (this can accelerate change)

It's also useful to consider that change can occur in any of the following features:

1. phonology (consonant, vowel systems, etc.)

2. morphology (verb conjugations, noun pluralization, negation, etc.)

3. vocabulary (some words lost, some words new)

4. syntax (probably not the main word order, like subject-verb-object for English, but phrasings can vary a lot)

5. discourse (the order in which thoughts are presented, for example)

6. politeness (all kinds of manners may change along with social activities)

When you think about the degree of change that you want in your language, here are some English-language landmarks that you may find useful.

Old English: Beowulf, dated variously from the 8th or 11th centuries, so between the years 700 and 1000

hwaet we garde na, in gerdagum, theod cyninge, thrym gefrunon, hu the athelingas ellen fremedon.

(I have at least one friend who is better conversant with the proper format of this line. This is my rough transcription of a portion I memorized solely by sound - somewhat improved by reference to internet sources.)

The words I know have remained most similar to modern English here are "in" and "hu" (who) and "the." I think "gerdagum" means "those days" which sounds a lot like German to me. Needless to say, not a lot is comprehensible after more than a thousand years.

Middle English: Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, written between 1387 and 1400

Whan that Aprille, with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote

And bathed every veyne in swich licour,

Of which vertu engendred is the flour...

Okay, this is much, much more comprehensible, but still pretty tough. Consider also that its pronunciation is quite well reflected in the spelling of the words, so that gh is actually pronounced like "ch" in the German "ich". In addition, "flour" is actually "flower." So here we've got a pretty serious degree of difficulty. Amount of time elapsed: 600+ years

Shakespeare's English: excerpt from "The Tempest," written 1610 or 1611

I have done nothing but in care of thee,

Of thee, my dear one, thee, my daughter, who

Art ignorant of what thou art, nought knowing

Of whence I am, nor that I am more better

Than Prospero, master of a full poor cell,

And thy no greater father.

This should be much more familiar to a general audience. And while it is written in verse, it does give us an indication of the kinds of phrasings and vocabulary used in this time period, because Shakespeare's plays were intended to be performed for the general public (I would argue that they still come across better read aloud than read silently). Time elapsed: 400 years.

A last couple of notes: slang is always present, and changes pretty rapidly, but may not always be incorporated into the main thrust of change in a language. Also, language does not always simplify, nor does it always complicate - it will generally simplify in some areas of the language and complicate in others.

Layers of Language

The other day I found myself talking to a friend of mine about computer languages. One of the interesting things about computer languages is how they have increased in complexity and layered over one another. The interfaces that we see on our computer screens look simple and easy because there are lots of intervening layers of meaning between what is simple and easy for us, and what is understandable by a computer chip. In the conversation with my friend, I ended up describing binary machine code - how zeroes and ones correspond to the presence or absence of an electrical signal. To get from that to a pretty window with icons to click on requires an elaborate process of translation which progresses through multiple layers of linguistic re-interpretation.

Zeros and ones are obviously not the only option as a fundamental basis for language - they are just associated with the structure of computer chips. I recently read an interesting article about something called "memristors," which don't have the same either-or structure and have the potential to change this fundamental basis. Here's a description of them at Wired magazine.

This layering reminds me in some sense of human language, except that the layering of human language occurs over time (here's a post I wrote on language change, for the curious). Language speakers will take ideas and put them together, combining words to express that complexity. Then, when such a combination gets used a lot of times, the sounds will simplify and the word will become unique and singular. For a while the underlying meanings will outlive the alteration of their sounds, but eventually the word will become opaque, and those who learn to utter it will have to be taught, explicitly, what the word's origins once were. Here are two examples:

God's wounds => 'zwounds =>zounds
All Hallows Even => Hallow e'en => Halloween

I bet you can guess what put me on to this idea... Mike Flynn has a fascinating post on the history of Halloween as a holiday (and about saints), which everyone should read. It's here.


etymology and the history of language. words/expressions that start out meaningful and then become opaque, like Halloween.

Endangered Languages

UNESCO has an amazing site with a list of some 3000 endangered languages of the world, here:

link

Not only do I think this is a very interesting possible source for language design ideas, it's also inherently fascinating to me.

What are the cultural conditions under which people stop speaking the native language of their parents? Obviously there are lots of options. Here are two examples:
* There are tons of Japanese-Americans out there who were born during WWII or shortly thereafter, who were never taught Japanese by their parents because their parents didn't want those children to be associated with the enemy.
* There are also children whose parents have been told it would hurt them academically if the parents spoke to them in anything other than English (this is wrong). Consider what that does to a child - it doesn't help them to comprehend English, since usually the English of the parents is rudimentary anyway. In effect, it renders them unable to communicate effectively with their parents, and disrupts all the normal kinds of guidance communication that children need growing up.

Some kids who have a start in one language and then are forced to switch entirely to another never feel like they have "native" proficiency in any language - they're lost in between. The UNESCO database classifies languages based on the way that they are used, whether they're used in the home but not outside, whether they're not used in the home except between older individuals, or whether they're known by an individual but not really used at all.

It's sad for me to think of languages dying - of the richness of cultural heritage and the unique forms of meaning that are no longer expressed when a language disappears. Whether you look at the database out of curiosity, or while looking for language design ideas, it's interesting to contemplate not just how many languages of the Earth are endangered, but how awfully many there are to begin with.

Fascinating stuff.

A Crazy Pattern in English

Yes, I am a linguistics geek.

I was driving to pick up my daughter today and thinking about the old meaning of the word "stupid," which was "stunned by grief or other strong emotion." Then it struck me that this word was probably related to the word "stupor." So I tried to think of some other examples of words with this -id/-or pattern, and within a minute or so I'd come up with valid/valor - except I wasn't sure if my extrapolation was (pardon me for this one) valid.

So after dinner tonight I pulled out my etymological dictionary (everybody should have one! :-) ) and I checked it out.

This pattern is bigger than I suspected.

The -id suffix makes adjectives out of old Latin verbs, while the -or (-our, for Brits) suffix makes nouns. Not every -id word has a corresponding -or word, nor does every -or word have an -id word, but check this out:

stupid / stupor
vapid / vapor
valid / valor
candid / candor
fervid / fervor
rigid / rigor
splendid / splendor
rancid / rancor
torpid / torpor

Valid/valor, the one I'd been wondering about, comes from the Latin vale, "to be strong or well."

I thought of another one, too: languid / languor

For interest's sake, I'll give you the ones that don't have correspondents:

-id: torrid, acid, fluid, morbid, gravid
-or: ardor, clamor, color, dolor, favor, honor, labor, odor, savor

Interesting Links

This last week hit hard after our return from Chicago, and I'm having to rethink my blogging schedule temporarily. I've decided to start posting at the bottom of each entry the ideas I've had for upcoming posts, so that anyone who wants to share thoughts in advance, and potentially influence my post content, can feel free to do so. So look at the bottom of this entry for the first peek ahead.

Today I thought I'd put up a few interesting links, for anyone who's interested.

There's a discussion of body language on the Analog forum, and Tom Ligon mentioned a scientific approach to describing how the human body moves and gestures, called Laban Movement Analysis. You can read more on wikipedia or there's an official program site at http://www.labancan.org/index.htm

Also in that discussion Greg Ellis mentioned finding an online source about nonverbal gestures: http://members.aol.com/nonverbal2/diction1.htm
This one has some very interesting gesture-by-gesture descriptions, photos and examples from popular culture (such as quotes from Shakespeare and actors who favor a gesture).

I read an article recently about English spelling, but lost track of it and haven't quite been able to find it again, so anyone who's interested can check out this page, which contains some interesting information about historical elements preserved in spelling: http://www.nyu.edu/classes/copyXediting/Spelling.html

And of course if anyone knows of the article mentioned above, please remind me!

The last link is to a great resource about the nature of elements - a hard science topic, not a language/culture one, but still reflects on what the internet can do for making science accessible and enjoyable!

http://www.periodicvideos.com/#

Upcoming topics at TTYU: gender, swearing

Do you want to consider language change?

Have you ever tried to hear the difference between a Cockney British accent and an Australian accent?  

Once I set myself the challenge - I was on a train platform in Tokyo, and I heard some people talking near me, and I started listening just trying to place my best guess as to where they were from.  It was pretty hard.  Eventually I fastened onto one single language feature:  these people were using glottal stop "t" (a "t" pronounced way back in the throat) in the middle of words instead of flap "t" (like in American "batter").  That one difference told me I was listening to British English instead of Australian English.  The rest of it - vowels, intonation, everything else - was at the time too subtle for me to distinguish.

Why in the world are these accents so similar?  It turns out that when Australia was first settled, starting in 1788, most of the people who moved there came from the same area of England where Cockney speakers live today. A lot of them were convicts.  My Aussie husband will tell you that these folk were subjected to a trip to Australia for petty crimes, like stealing or poaching, rather than anything more serious.  Who'd want to be stuck on a ship full of murderers for six months?  But as a result, both Cockney and Australian English are actually  "daughter languages" of the same parent, an English dialect spoken in a particular region (and by a particular social group) in London at the end of the 18th century. 

It's been more than two hundred years since then, and at the sound level, the two dialects are remarkably similar.  There are more noticeable divergences of vocabulary, of course (for example, Australians say "truck" instead of "lorry") but a lot still remains common (such as saying "lift" rather than "elevator"). 

I remarked in my earlier post on dialects that the longer a language exists in a particular area, and the more isolated regions are, the more dialects will diverge.  In the United States, there are isolated regions in the East (I'm thinking it was the Appalachian mountains?) which preserve language features that haven't been present in a standard American dialect for hundreds of years.  These are in fact useful for scholars who study language change.

You probably already know how I'm going to be connecting this to speculative fiction.  It becomes relevant in all kinds of contexts.  One possible science fiction context is that of extrapolating the language used by future societies (I think immediately of Mike Flynn's The January Dancer).  One possible fantasy context is that of quoting ancient texts (I think of Tolkien).  Either science fiction or fantasy can easily support the idea of two societies that have been isolated for a long period of time suddenly finding one another again and having to resume communication (I think of Stargate, and one of my own planned stories).

If you're writing a story that involves language change, it's useful to consider the following factors:

1.  amount of time elapsed

2. presence or absence of written language (this can slow change)

3. amount of intercommunication between isolated groups (more communication can mean slower change)

4. amount of intermixing with other language groups (this can accelerate change)

It's also useful to consider that change can occur in any of the following features:

1.  phonology (consonant, vowel systems, etc.)

2. morphology (verb conjugations, noun pluralization, negation, etc.)

3. vocabulary (some words lost, some words new)

4. syntax (probably not the main word order, like subject-verb-object for English, but phrasings can vary a lot)

5. discourse (the order in which thoughts are presented, for example)

6. politeness (all kinds of manners may change along with social activities)

When you think about the degree of change that you want in your language, here are some English-language landmarks that you may find useful.

Old English:  Beowulf, dated variously from the 8th or 11th centuries, so between the years 700 and 1000

 hwaet we garde na, in gerdagum, theod cyninge, thrym gefrunon, hu the athelingas ellen fremedon.

(You'll have to forgive me, because this is actually an extremely rough transcription of the first line, which I memorized solely by sound - I've reconstructed some of it from internet sources, but help me anyone who has the actual text!!)

The words I know have remained most similar to modern English here are "we" and "hu" (who) and "the."  I think "gerdagum" means "those days" which sounds a lot like German to me.  Needless to say, not a lot is comprehensible after more than a thousand years.

Middle English:  Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, written between 1387 and 1400

  Whan that Aprille, with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote

And bathed every veyne in swich licour, 

Of which vertu engendred is the flour...

Okay, this is much, much more comprehensible, but still pretty tough.  Consider also that its pronunciation is quite well reflected in the spelling of the words, so that gh is actually pronounced like "ch" in the German "ich". In addition, "flour" is actually "flower."  So here we've got a pretty serious degree of difficulty.  Amount of time elapsed:  600+ years

Shakespeare's English:  excerpt from "The Tempest," written 1610 or 1611

I have done nothing but in care of thee,

Of thee, my dear one, thee, my daughter, who

Art ignorant of what thou art, nought knowing

Of whence I am, nor that I am more better 

Than Prospero, master of a full poor cell,

And thy no greater father.

This should be much more familiar to a general audience.  And while it is written in verse, it does give us an indication of the kinds of phrasings and vocabulary used in this time period, because Shakespeare's plays were intended to be performed for the general public (I would argue that they still come across better read aloud than read silently).  Time elapsed: 400 years.

It's late and I'd better wrap this up, but I hope it's been interesting.  A last couple of notes:  slang is always present, and changes pretty rapidly, but may not always be incorporated into the main thrust of change in a language.  Also, language does not always simplify, nor does it always complicate - it will generally simplify in some areas of the language and complicate in others.  

I welcome any questions or suggestions you may have on this topic.