divergent languages

[sashamerideth]

In my story there is only one ancestral language but two divergent cultures, with no outside influences. I want minor language differences, a few new words for things that don't exist in one civilization, but not much.

Just how divergent can languages be when there is no other influence other than from within? I am talking about five hundred years of non interaction, just thinking about how much English has changed in that time.

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[Ravana]

There are people in London–that's 21st-century, compulsory education, mass-communication and mass-transit London, England, native-born speakers who've never lived anywhere else their entire lives–who speak dialects of English that are extremely difficult for people from another part of the same city to understand.

Five hundred years of no interaction? They wouldn't even recognize the others' language as having a common origin.

That's real-world, of course: you don't have to go with that. But I think it answers "how divergent" they can be.

 

[Graham Irwin]

Five hundred years of no interaction? They wouldn't even recognize the others' language as having a common origin.

AFter 500 years, the language would change drastically, indeed.

Most modern human languages all share a lost ancestor, the words for moon and mother and father and sun all being similar. But then, that's Earth!

Origin of language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is also a huge topic open for much debate. Language is thrilling, though. Definitely a reason Tolkien created his languages first. A language and a culture are tied together intimately.

 

[sashamerideth]

Looking like I need to address the problem of language barriers then. I don't want to make it a major problem. My mc can pick up skills just by being around the skilled person, I guess he will just have to pick up the language that way. Others in his group won't have it so easy.

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[Telcontar]

Yep, language and culture are intimately tied. In many ways a language is like a culture's DNA - you can use it to trace ancestry, and relations to other cultures.

 

[Ravana]

Most modern human languages all share a lost ancestor, the words for moon and mother and father and sun all being similar.

Well, that's largely a myth, actually. Most of the ones we're familiar with in the West share a common ancestor–but that's a far cry from all of them sharing one. Attempts to link all languages together have invariably failed.

Yep, language and culture are intimately tied. In many ways a language is like a culture's DNA - you can use it to trace ancestry, and relations to other cultures.

To a certain extent. I wouldn't want to overstate the relationship. (I know you probably already realize this: I'm stating it for others here. Especially since people who do overstate the relationship tend to go on to drawing unwarranted conclusions from it.) It can give you a starting point for tracing a culture's history; it can also be completely deceptive at times. For example: take a couple words that nearly every culture does have in common: coffee and tea. An uncautious scholar might conclude from these two words that all languages, and therefore all cultures, are ultimately derived from a combination of Arabic and Chinese. (This, by the way, is exactly the sort of evidence such claims are based on… similarities of just a couple words. Along with ignoring the overwhelming amount of other evidence that doesn't fit the claim.) A more thoroughgoing researcher will try to figure out if those products had a single source, at least until fairly recently in history, and whether it isn't more reasonable to consider that the name traveled with the product when it spread. Nor will he be fooled by the Japanese calling "baseball" besuboru–he'll at least check to see if the Japanese words for "base" and "ball" aren't totally different… which they are. (And as for words for "mother" and "father" being largely common to all languages: first, there are perfectly good non-historical reasons for this phenomenon–the sounds are the easiest ones for babies to produce; second, there are plenty of languages in which the sounds we think of are reversed with respect to gender–"mama" meaning "father," for instance.)

As for introducing the complications of language drift in your story, sashamerideth, I'd say don't worry about it any more than you want to. If you're trying to stick as much to the real world as possible (a practice I generally encourage, of course…), then, yes, you'd end up with two totally different languages. Even then, language barriers can be overcome with astonishing rapidity, at least at the level of basic conversation, when the need presents itself. Whenever anyone asks me the best way to learn a language, I tell them to parachute naked into the heart of a foreign nation. In two weeks, you'll be able to get along just fine. (You'll still be using baby talk–well, actually, most babies will still be ahead of you–but you'll be able to make yourself understood, and will understand ten times what you'll be able to produce.) So make it as much of a problem as you want it to be. You can always have your MC asking for explanations of less common words from time to time, if it seems appropriate.

 

[sashamerideth]

In a first draft of my story I had used the language barrier to introduce an ability of an antagonist, I may just have to use it again.

Thanks Ravana, it's good to have someone of your calibre active on the forum.

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[Ravana]

Thank you. And quite welcome. Any time.

 

[Anders Ämting]

There are people in London—that's 21st-century, compulsory education, mass-communication and mass-transit London, England, native-born speakers who've never lived anywhere else their entire lives—who speak dialects of English that are extremely difficult for people from another part of the same city to understand.

On the other hand, as a Swede, I could travel to Norway and have essentially no trouble understanding their language. But if I travel roughly the same distance to Skåne in southern Sweden, I'll be sure to run into people I cannot comprehend at all.

Language is funny that way.

 

[utiuts]

I hope this would help to make things the merrier.
Other than words, I always find that grammar and tenses between languages interesting, because it tells how a nation views time. My native tongue is Indonesian, and I've learned English, Chinese, and Korean. In Indonesia, we don't have tenses like English, such as past, present, and future tenses. When I look at my daily life, I find that Indonesians don't appreciate time the way most English-speaking people do. Maybe that's why Indonesians are late all the time. Lol
Then I learned Korean and found out that in a structure to a sentence, they put the past before the future. Like for example, when they're saying a future time, they use a word that has the literal meaning of 'behind', and vice versa. And when I look at Korean people, I do find them to be very proud of their past (mostly their history).
This is all not scientific of course, just a personal observation of mine. My point is, for me, figuring out the grammar and tenses is more interesting than to just trying to memorize different vocabularies. This is one of the reasons why I haven't learned any European languages until now, considering some of their languages have sexes for inanimate objects. I don't think my brain will be able to handle it at the moment. XD

 

[myrddin173]

@Utiuts - that's a really good observation. Language is an important tool when trying to understand a culture. In fact one of the four sub-fields of anthropology is linguistic anthropology. I also agree that giving words is confusing but you can't ignore them as in some cases a word has different meanings based on its gender. In French the words for lawyer and avocado are the same (avocat) but one is masculine the other feminine.

 

[Reaver]

I hope this would help to make things the merrier.
Other than words, I always find that grammar and tenses between languages interesting, because it tells how a nation views time. My native tongue is Indonesian, and I've learned English, Chinese, and Korean. In Indonesia, we don't have tenses like English, such as past, present, and future tenses. When I look at my daily life, I find that Indonesians don't appreciate time the way most English-speaking people do. Maybe that's why Indonesians are late all the time. Lol
Then I learned Korean and found out that in a structure to a sentence, they put the past before the future. Like for example, when they're saying a future time, they use a word that has the literal meaning of 'behind', and vice versa. And when I look at Korean people, I do find them to be very proud of their past (mostly their history).
This is all not scientific of course, just a personal observation of mine. My point is, for me, figuring out the grammar and tenses is more interesting than to just trying to memorize different vocabularies. This is one of the reasons why I haven't learned any European languages until now, considering some of their languages have sexes for inanimate objects. I don't think my brain will be able to handle it at the moment. XD

During my time in the US military (13 years total) I've travelled to 42 countries, many of which were in SE Asia, and I have to say that I found their cultures and languages both rich and beautiful. Having been fortunate enough to experience so many wonderful cultures, the one common thing I've discovered is that we all love a good laugh (sure there are a few party-poopers, but they're the exception to the rule). Every person I've met throughout my travels is someone I've tried to make laugh and I consider them friends. On a different note, I'm envious of anyone who is fluent in more than one language and it's still a personal goal of mine to learn at least three. At this point, the extent of my non-English vocabulary is mostly military terms, asking for directions, asking for identification, ordering a beer and of course, the most important phrases: please and thank you.

 

[Ravana]

In French the words for lawyer and avocado are the same (avocat) but one is masculine the other feminine.

Try learning a tonal language some time. (utiuts should know what I'm talking about.)

It is an accident of history that grammatical gender and physiological gender have gotten confused in the West. In fact, it is this confusion that led to the use of the word "gender" to refer to physiology in the first place: originally, it simply meant "type" or "origin" ("genus," the biological classification between "family" and "species," comes from the same word, as does Latin gens, "clan"). Grammatical gender refers to the class a word falls into in determining inflectional morphology–a system of marking every modifier of a word with the same (or a systematically related) extra bit. In English, this is pretty much limited to what we learned in school as "agreement"–subject and verb have to agree in person and number–and even there, most of the agreement markers have dropped off (for most verbs, only third person singular still gets marked: "the cat hides" but "I/you/we/the cats hide").

In languages with what we might in a non-technical way call "active" genders, other word classes and modifiers can get involved. So, for the French example, not only does "lawyer" get marked masculine, but every adjective and adverb that modifies it also gets marked. It's one way of encoding connections between words without imposing a strict word order… and while most languages will have normal, or even obligatory, word orders, this wasn't always the case: a speaker of Latin, for instance, would see little difference between someone saying the "large blonde lawyer," "blonde lawyer large," "lawyer large blonde," etc., because the words "large" and "blonde" would also get marked with morphemes that agreed in gender with the word "lawyer." (As well as number and case–something also almost vanished in English, to the point it rarely gets mentioned–and by declension, another grouping which overlaps but is not identical with the genders. There are, for anyone who's counting, three genders, six cases, and five declensions in Latin. And two numbers: some languages mark dual separately from singular and plural… Attic Greek did, I believe. Want to check me on that, Chilari?)

(Actually, the situation with Latin is far more complex than represented above: I chose the English words arbitrarily, so anyone who remembers more of their Latin than I do, don't get too worked up if I blew it and picked some that are gender-invariant. Though by all means feel free to correct me. )

By comparison, in a language such as Mandarin, which has no morphology at all, gender does not exist, its function being handled by word order–though Turkish, which has incredibly complicated morphology, also doesn't use gender.

Unfortunately, in the languages that came to dominate Europe, there were either two genders–which could conveniently be thought of as "masculine" and "feminine"–or at most three, to which "neuter" was, apparently, a fairly obvious addition. An examination of the words will show that there is no relation between most of them and anything that can even be imagined as having to do with physiology, however. This becomes even more evident when looking at languages that have more than three genders: many have four. Swahili has seven. Others have more. I'm not sure what the record-holder is. (It may be worthy of note that the term "noun class" is coming to replace "grammatical gender" in much linguistic literature… probably just as well.)

By the way, I wouldn't put too much emphasis on a connection between tense formation and the interpretation of time. That's one of the things I specifically had in mind earlier when I mentioned that it's possible to draw too strong a conclusion from such things. Indonesians, Koreans and Anglos all read clocks the same way… and so do Mexicans, who have a reputation (at least in the U.S.–my primary source on Hispanic culture is presently asleep, so I can't ask if the reputation holds inside Mexico or if it's just a stereotype ) for caring far less about time than U.S. folks do, in spite of the fact that their tense morphology is far more complex than English is. The difference, where and if there is one, has far more to do with culture than with language–I'm guessing speakers of Bahasa Malaya living in Singapore have a reputation for taking being on time fairly seriously, neh? The "linguist" [sic] who made the worst of these arguments claimed that Hopi had no words referring directly to time and that the Hopi people did not–could not–conceive of time in the same way Anglos did. He was incorrect–on all counts.

 

[utiuts]

Thank you, Ravana
my personal observation on tenses started when an Australian friend of mine whined about how hard it was to learn Indonesian, because the lack of tenses made it hard for him to determine if something happened in the past or in the present.
If I may add, it's also interesting about how Korean and Javanese have formal and informal grammar, depends on whom you're talking to, and in what kind of situation. Moreover, if you use the wrong one, the social chastise is quite severe too.