On Sat, Nov 24, 2001 at 07:57:19PM +0200, Kai V Karmanheimo wrote:
Again we can say that what we are hearing is actually a translation in itself, and the language that the characters really speak is not English at all or is an eight hundred years older variant of English that bears as little resemblance to Modern English as Modern English does to the language of Beowulf. Yet you'd think that people who have grown up in completely different circumstances on planets with no mutual contact in centuries would not sound like they went to the same public school or referred to things that neither of their cultures probably has had in ages. Things can stay in the language long after the original concepts have disappeared or lost validity, but though lot of Western languages retain metaphors or expressions coined by nomadic tribes a couple of thousand years ago, it's a bit too conceited to expect all our petty little things that are currently in fashion to be around pestering the people after a couple of thousand more years (even if you are just using the future as an allegory for passions present or past).
But B7 isn't the worst at this, not by a long shot -- or maybe it's just that Australian culture is closer to British culture in many ways than to US culture... but the most glaringly disconcerting use of non-futuristic language in a far-future SF setting was something I came across in David Brin's "Glory Season". The problem was, the situation set up in that story was supposed to be thousands of years in the future; a human-descended civilization which had colonized that planet at least 3000 years ago. And there's a puzzle in the story (not a major plot point, really but...) where the key to an ancient mechanism (yeah, yeah, shades of Indiana Jones) was in a form of pictures, and you had to pick the correct ones. There were pictures of animals and ordinary household objects -- such as a jar of jam. The clue she had was a pun on the correct words... but it didn't use the word jam, it used the word "jelly". That really threw me out of the story because it was so US-centric that I became aware of the complete unlikelihood that even in the timescale of a thousand years (remember, it as an Ancient Mechanism) her own language wouldn't have changed such that the clue, based on a pun, would have been useless -- puns don't translate. As well as the unlikelihood that her language, thousands and thousands of years from today, would have retained a linguistic artefact which was exactly paralleled by the peculiarities of *one* dialect of English... well, as I said, it threw me out of the story.
The difficulty with this, and indeed with trying to create any futuristic language use (such as Kai was complaining of the lack of in B7) is that most native English-speakers are completely unaware of (a) the non-translatability of puns and (b) the high level of idioms we use in our everyday speech. Idioms don't translate either.
But I think expecting B7 to be linguistically aware is asking a bit much. If they can't get the science right, how on earth could one expect them to get the linguistics right? A lot more people in the SF world know science than know linguistics...
Probably the best person to get to write non-culture-imbedded language might be someone who spends a lot of time talking to new migrants or similar people who are non-native English speakers, and thus are more aware of what things are idioms and what things aren't.
Actually, in B7, the thing that bugged me about the language use was not the slang that the Space Rats used -- I thought that was rather good -- but the jokes that Vila told in "Ultraworld". Where to space-pilots park their ships? By parking meteors.
That jarred, because "parking meters" is such a late-20th-century concept that I find it hard to believe that a culture such as 28th-century Federated Earth is going to *have* such things as parking meters; we don't even know if private individuals are allowed to own their own vehicles, necessarily, and if they didn't then the concept of parking meters would be nonsensical. Of if everyone used air-cars, then maybe the concept of "parking" isn't the same. Do you see what I mean? That kind of thing bugged me much more than whether calling someone a "gook" sounds silly or not.
Of course, one thing that I don't think anyone writing SF is very likely to do is write a story in which the *meanings* of well-known words have changed (or at least, the most common, salient meaning has changed). Even though we've observed such a phenomenon in our own lifetimes with the word "gay". Their readers would be too confused if, say, calling someone "blue" was a deadly insult, or if "typewriter" meant "an obsolete holo-projector" etc. Easier on the brain to use new words.
Kathryn Andersen -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- "All irregularities will be handled by the forces controlling each dimension. Transuranic heavy elements may not be used where there is life. Medium atomic weights are available: Gold, Mercury, Copper, Jet, Diamond, Radium, Sapphire, Silver, and Steel. Sapphire and Steel have been assigned."