In-Reply-To: [email removed]
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