------------------------------ Bundle: 566 Archive-Message-Number: 7106 Date: Thu, 31 Mar 94 02:44 BST-1 From: Mark Watson [-- REDACTED --] Subject: Re: TML nightly: Msgs 7091-7096 V71#1 Reply-To: [-- REDACTED --] In-Reply-To: [-- REDACTED --] Linguistics and the Collapse: James says: > I believe most US people would not deny that the British speak > "proper" English. Retentively prim & proper, to be precise. Unless > you're from Liverpool. (I assume by "retentively" you mean we retain the correct spellings) I think what we have to distinguish here are dialect, accent and idiom. Dialects are different versions of the same language, which are different enough to have, for example, variant grammatical rules and vocabularies. I read somewhere that England has over 50 mutually incomprehensible dialects, whereas the US has about 3 (can't remember the exact numbers, but it is of those proportions). Which shows that geographical spread is not so much a factor as history and technology. Accents are different ways of pronouncing the same words, and combinations of words. Liverpudlian is an accent, and in turn includes several sub-accents depending on where in Liverpool you may be (again, I suspect the degree of geographic variation is higher than in the US). The "prim & proper" way of speaking is referred to here as "received pronunciation", or maybe "BBC English". Note that the Royal Family don't use it; they seem to use a 1940s variant no-one else uses (Prince Philip is of course Greek, so I suppose he has an excuse). Received pronunciation is really South East England middle class English. The other classes in the South East use variants (for example, cockney, or the increasingly fashionable Thames Estuary variant). Other regions have their own variants, and the middle classes there speak versions of received pronunciation tinged with the local accent (in my case, North Yorkshire). By the way, my parents and grandparents can/could distinguish village origin on the basis of accent, that's 3 miles difference. Idioms, or slang, are variant ways of saying specific things. Realistically, you couldn't go through your whole life talking this way, and speakers could probably drop pretty easily back into the general swing of things without really trying very hard. Usually you would associate such talk with a specialist sub-group (programmers, teenagers, Grateful Dead fans, etc). OF course, regions associated with accents would probably have a tendency to use idiom, eg cockney rhyming slang, or Texas cowboy references. Now, applying this to Traveller: Firstly, the only thing to have developed during the collapse would be idiom, given the timescales involved. And that would be mostly morbid humour, given the circumstances (eg virus-head). Some is likely to be the result of generational cultural changes (ie teenage slang). I doubt though that most planets are sustaining the degree of variation we see today, mainly because our late 20th Century culture is more buoyant (by analogy, how strong is the Bosnian pop scene?). In the pre-collapse Imperium, I would guess that most planets have their own accent, and a strong degree of idiom based on planetary background (eg on a waterworld there would be a lot of water based references). In most cases, planet wide (even intra system) variation would tend to be low, but the nature of Traveller inter-system communications is such that the differences *between* planets should be fairly high. Dialectical differences are likely to be as a result of hybrid Solomani and minor human (or vocally compatible non-human) populations, and would be relatively few and far between (or at least mutually incomprehensible dialects). Most such differences would have been wiped out for practical purposes by trade and communications requirements. The Imperial culture is pretty invasive, probably to an even greater extent than Anglo-Saxon (mainly American) culture is beginning to invade other cultures. However, you might get some mileage out of having NPCs speak Yoda fashion and claiming that the NPC was speaking GalAnglic using Vilani sentence construction, in the same way that the Germans always put the verb at the end of the clause. Also remember that in Solomani space some populations are commited to derivations of languages other than English. Another trick to look at is to generate non-galanglic words, for example Vargr, and then try and figure out how they would look after 500 or so years of absorption into English. The longer words would shorten, and any even slightly difficult pronunciations would be smoothed. Then rewrite the word with a phonetic spelling. A useful model to look at would be Burgess' book "the Clockword Orange", where the teenage yobbo slang is derived from Russian. Alternatively, the upper classes might be tempted to using pretentious First Empire words and phrases based on Vilani (as we have in English phrases such as savoir-faire), so pick up a few Vilani phrases for the Imperial Court. Finally, remember that mobility is the great leveller: characters who have joined the Imperial services, both civil and military, or who have served in interstellar trade, are likely to speak the equivalent of received pronunciation, albeit with a tinge of their homeworld. Media personnel are likely to have the ability to speak clear received GalAnglic as a prerequisite for their job, and the starports are pretty likely to be fairly homogenous. Cheers Mark Watson ------------------------------