#common language

[grrl-beetle]

Natacha Voranger

[yourmothershouldknow]

Common Language FW22

Photo by Janneke Van Der Hagen

[scintillulae]

[fieriframes]

[Americans and Irish. Separated by a common language.]

[postorbital]

They'd never managed to form a common language with the aliens, so the chief diplomat relied heavily on puppeteers and musicians.

[forensicated]

Smithy summing up how most of us felt about Tom Chandler!

[pitch-and-moan]

Tower of BAIbel

A horror movie written by artificial intelligence about an AI generating a globally understood language. The AI has to construct a world in which no one needs to speak in order for the language to work though.

[kaelmcdonald]

I love all of this, although for my own part I don't mind the notion of Common as it's simply functional for storytelling. To me, it feels more like imagining Esperanto actually catching on in our world - it ultimately will sound somewhat disjointed compared to one's native language but the utility more than makes up for it. It would be fun and perhaps more interesting to me if Common was the language of Trade and Parley, something stilted for casual conversation but well-built to settle deals and disputes.

Genuinely kind of bothers me how like all fantasy media always has a 'common language' and the only unique languages are just like. Languages unique to one species that All members of that species speak like all dwarves speak 'dwarvish'. No, let them all have a ridiculous amount of languages. And it doesn't make sense to base speech entirely off of heritage or species. The way it sounds might be different due to the difference in vocal chords but most languages would be specific to geographic areas, not entire species. Yes there are obviously going to be cases where only one species lives in an area and so that language is only spoken by that species but most of the time I'd expect that there's going to be multiple groups of people from multiple species living in the same place. And if there is a 'common language' then its likely to be one acting more like latin in medieval europe than a universal language. It's a language spoken by scholars mostly and if you try talking to a random Village farmer then they're not going to get a thing out of it.

[oobbbear]

I want to post this here too because I’ve seen it happen a few times

Please understand that there are cultural differences and language differences, if you see this happening let the person clarify what they meant, that person might just not be familiar with words the western side of the internet use

[vimbry]

(*1995 and largely icon, personally.

the choice is meant to be what you say now.

couldn't decide on where to comfortably separate the age demographics in the end, so made the focus more on the split of which generations were born into mainstream internet use.

no "other" option, because that would skew the poll out of people choosing terms in other languages/swapping between all of above/indecision

did originally have a wider variety of options such as badge, userpic, e.g. but simplified it down to terms used the most currently by users on this website).

[scintillulae]

[vollesroah]

The thing about scientists is that they don't just have specialized languages - jargons, they AGREE on the meaning of the words. The exception, like when a few professors fight it out over some (for everyone else) insignificant issue proves the point. So what do you get when people deliberately reject the language of others ? You get a never ending argument, because there is never a basis for any discussion to build upon.

"Everyone knows specific words have specific meanings, right? ☺️"

Not quite, the same words can exist in two languages and have different meanings.

The whole “scientists use big words on purpose to be exclusive” is such a bunch of anti-intellectual bullshit. Specific and concise language exists for a reason; you need the right words to convey the right meaning, and explaining stuff right is a hugely important part of science. Cultures that live around loads of snow have loads of words to describe different types of snow; cultures that live in deserts have loads of words to describe different types of sand. Complex language is needed for complex meaning.

[petermorwood]

A day or so ago, @dduane reblogged a long post - a Canadian magazine article from 1966 - about the Americanisation of Winnie the Pooh.

It's an Impressive Tirade in which the writer (Sheila H. Kieran) says what she thinks about letting Walt Disney have a free hand with a foreign Children's Classic.

There's mention of the previous Adaptation Endeavour, "Mary Poppins" (1964) but it's very brief, perhaps with an eye to limited column space - or maybe because All Was Said Already in a previous review.

There is, however, rather a lot about the English characters being given American accents, and about the inclusion of a new character, an American gopher (which, the article suggests, looked vague enough to the Kieran children - its target audience - that it might as well have been a mole or a beaver).

*****

And that reminded me of another bit of American Animalisation done by Disney, in the 1949 short "The Wind and the Willows" - though in this instance it's visual since the voices are, for the most part, suitably British.

They include Basil Rathbone as narrator, and a horse who sounds like George Formby. In some scenes the horse actually looks like Formby, so this voice may not be entirely accidental.

Badger, however, sounds like a Scotsman - the worst kind of stage Scotsman at that - rather than how I used to "hear" him as a C. Aubrey Smith-voiced crusty retired colonel.

That, however, is just personal preference.

However, Disney's Badger is not a proper British (more correctly, European) badger, Meles meles. Here's one, which though not the most amiable of beasts in reality, still manages to look fairly affable ("I say, old chap, whatever are you looking at?")

Instead he's a North American badger, Taxidea taxus, which not only has a less affable expression ("Hey, bud, you. Yeah, you. You lookin' at me? You lookin' at ME?") but, more important, different stripes.

Here's Disney's version alongside mine. The correction took about five minutes of pixel-tweaking.

Disney's animators could have got it right from the outset just as easily, because I'm pretty sure the reference library which provided costume info for Rat's tweed Norfolk jacket and britches included picture-books of natural history.

Come to that, any "The Wind in the Willows" after the unillustrated first edition would have been enough, and there must have been at least one copy lying around for story adaptation and scene-description purposes.

The first illustrated edition came out in the UK in 1931, and its artist was, at author Kenneth Graham's request, the very same E.H. Shepard who had illustrated the Pooh books just a few years previously...

...while this Arthur Rackham colour plate is from an edition published in 1940 in New York.

So those books wouldn't have been impossible for Disney to get.

The problem, however, is that if a word ("badger", for instance) is well known to mean one thing here, it may be Too Much Trouble to find out if the same word means something else there, with the result that finding out can sometimes come as rather a surprise.

Check the UK / US meaning of "suspenders" to see what I mean... ;->

[linkeduniverse]

Dawn pt. 4

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[ffcrazy15]

Someone needs to do an analysis on the way the Kung Fu Panda movies use old-fashioned vs. modern language ("Panda we meet at last"/"Hey how's it going") and old-fashioned vs. modern settings (forbidden-city-esque palaces/modern-ish Chinese restaurant) to indicate class differences in their characters, and how those class differences create underlying tensions and misunderstandings.

[goodgrammaritan]

Tamora Pierce straight up called the main language "Imperial" in her Circle of Magic universe

Sometimes i think about the idea of Common as a language in fantasy settings.

On the one hand, it’s a nice convenient narrative device that doesn’t necessarily need to be explored, but if you do take a moment to think about where it came from or what it might look like, you find that there’s really only 2 possible origins.

In settings where humans speak common and only Common, while every other race has its own language and also speaks Common, the implication is rather clear: at some point in the setting’s history, humans did the imperialism thing, and while their empire has crumbled, the only reason everyone speaks Human is that way back when, they had to, and since everyone speaks it, the humans rebranded their language as Common and painted themselves as the default race in a not-so-subtle parallel of real-world whiteness.

In settings where Human and Common are separate languages, though (and I haven’t seen nearly as many of these as I’d like), Common would have developed communally between at least three or four races who needed to communicate all together. With only two races trying to communicate, no one would need to learn more than one new language, but if, say, a marketplace became a trading hub for humans, dwarves, orcs, and elves, then either any given trader would need to learn three new languages to be sure that they could talk to every potential customer, OR a pidgin could spring up around that marketplace that eventually spreads as the traders travel the world.

Drop your concept of Common meaning “english, but in middle earth” for a moment and imagine a language where everyone uses human words for produce, farming, and carpentry; dwarven words for gemstones, masonry, and construction; elven words for textiles, magic, and music; and orcish words for smithing weaponry/armor, and livestock. Imagine that it’s all tied together with a mishmash of grammatical structures where some words conjugate and others don’t, some adjectives go before the noun and some go after, and plurals and tenses vary wildly based on what you’re talking about.

Now try to tell me that’s not infinitely more interesting.