Re: Natlangs in Fantasy Worlds

In the last episode, (On Sunday 11 November 2007 19:27:21), ROGER MILLS wrote:
> Michael Poxon wrote:
> >In fact, this is what I have done in my tale "The Fletcher Wives" (book 1
> >was finished, then the CD onto which I had backed it up got lost after I
> >had to reformat the HDD after a serious virus 18 months ago, so I am
> > having to rewrite it!!).
>
> Interesting when that happens..........
>
> >All the Auleri speak (of course) their own language throughout the story,
> >sometimes in large chunks.
>
> When I was mentally creating Cindu/Kash etc. it was a First Contact story
> involving a young Terran who is sent down to Holunda city.  All the Kash
> would have spoken in that language, up to the point where John finally gets
> across the fact that his little shuttle ship has a device that enables him
> to learn a language in like half and hour :-)) Oddly, apparently I
> overlooked the fact that both he and all the Kash are telepaths, which
> would certainly solve the language problem....
> But once he learned Kash, the story would have continued in English. One
Not necessarily. Certainly in "Star Trek" and sci-fi of that ilk (think
Stargate) telepaths seem to be able to communicate across languages and
species, but then after a few episodes the Stargate aliens all seem to have
developed an oddly rapid and intimate knowledge of English (whilst cunningly
avoiding all terms which are not specific to their culture) anyway. However,
I wouldn't expect this to be the case in "hard SF" (of which, admittedly, I
have read very little.) After all, if we think back to the days when there
were lots of different makes of computer, all incompatible, they all "spoke
different languages" even though they all ran on electricity... and although
we may all be the same species, I'm sure we can all think of instances when,
communicating with someone who speak a/the same language as we do, we found
that hard to believe!

Jeff
--
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