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Jul. 20th, 2002 06:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
strange_aeons817 words yesterday. Actually, I think it was 794 or something like that, but the count is 817 after the minor revisions I usually do on the previous day's work.
Originally this paragraph was extraordinarily whiny and self-absorbed, but in my unending magnanimity, I have chosen to tone it down a bit. The short version is, I've only written 418 words today, and it looks like I'm going to have to do some massive revision to the last 5600 or so; I've flubbed some of the linguistic stuff and I don't think I can continue before I fix it.
The situation is something like this:
It's a few centuries in the future. The English spoken in parts of North America is still mutually comprehensible with twentieth-century English (this here language I'm using now) — the accent and idioms have changed, it's been influenced by other languages, but allowing for some minor (organic) changes in orthography, a WIP-modern speaker could easily read things written in the twentieth century. I mean, so long as they were written in English. Obviously there's enough regional variation, creolization and so on that this isn't entirely true everywhere.
The English spoken in Underground is not at all mutually comprehensible with 20C English. The language underwent a lot of rapid change during the first few decades in Underground (when the population was very small and kind of startled), plus I think there have been weird little linguistic fads for making up new inflections, and then there's The Government, which has periodically felt compelled to go in and Standardize Things, resulting in a very regular formal register and a very irregular informal one (which is, ironically, much harder to speak), plus some ill will from the common man. Underground English has a much-changed syntax (except in the formal register) and scads of inflections 20C English doesn't.
Records of 20C English survive in Underground in the form of books, movies, news, and so on. By no means is it everything produced in every medium during the twentieth century (and, actually, the early twenty-first), but it's a large sample. Most of it is public domain, but the majority of the people who use it pay for access to it in translated form. So 20C English does survive, in much the same way that Latin survives in the modern US — it's spoken by hopeless geeks and no one else, really.
Rook, who is from Underground, is a hopeless geek.
The problem is with how long he takes to figure out that what Arunir and Sweeney are speaking is (to him) old English. He figures it out halfway or so into the second day, after listening to them talk intermittently for twenty-four hours, and that's just too long, given how much evidence he has. Yes, they both have Funny Accents, but not that Funny. This is woven pretty deeply into the last 5600 words, I'm looking at a Jesus-load of revision. Sigh.
I've discovered WinMX's bandwidth window. It's just a graph showing how much data I've transferred in the last, I don't know, ten minutes maybe. It's mesmerizing.
I suspect that I am, at the moment, barely within shouting distance of conventional sanity, and I'm not enjoying it, but I'm going to stop bitching about it because it's not making me feel any better. I'm going to find something else to bitch about. After I get some goddamn sleep.
Originally this paragraph was extraordinarily whiny and self-absorbed, but in my unending magnanimity, I have chosen to tone it down a bit. The short version is, I've only written 418 words today, and it looks like I'm going to have to do some massive revision to the last 5600 or so; I've flubbed some of the linguistic stuff and I don't think I can continue before I fix it.
The situation is something like this:
It's a few centuries in the future. The English spoken in parts of North America is still mutually comprehensible with twentieth-century English (this here language I'm using now) — the accent and idioms have changed, it's been influenced by other languages, but allowing for some minor (organic) changes in orthography, a WIP-modern speaker could easily read things written in the twentieth century. I mean, so long as they were written in English. Obviously there's enough regional variation, creolization and so on that this isn't entirely true everywhere.
The English spoken in Underground is not at all mutually comprehensible with 20C English. The language underwent a lot of rapid change during the first few decades in Underground (when the population was very small and kind of startled), plus I think there have been weird little linguistic fads for making up new inflections, and then there's The Government, which has periodically felt compelled to go in and Standardize Things, resulting in a very regular formal register and a very irregular informal one (which is, ironically, much harder to speak), plus some ill will from the common man. Underground English has a much-changed syntax (except in the formal register) and scads of inflections 20C English doesn't.
Records of 20C English survive in Underground in the form of books, movies, news, and so on. By no means is it everything produced in every medium during the twentieth century (and, actually, the early twenty-first), but it's a large sample. Most of it is public domain, but the majority of the people who use it pay for access to it in translated form. So 20C English does survive, in much the same way that Latin survives in the modern US — it's spoken by hopeless geeks and no one else, really.
Rook, who is from Underground, is a hopeless geek.
The problem is with how long he takes to figure out that what Arunir and Sweeney are speaking is (to him) old English. He figures it out halfway or so into the second day, after listening to them talk intermittently for twenty-four hours, and that's just too long, given how much evidence he has. Yes, they both have Funny Accents, but not that Funny. This is woven pretty deeply into the last 5600 words, I'm looking at a Jesus-load of revision. Sigh.
I've discovered WinMX's bandwidth window. It's just a graph showing how much data I've transferred in the last, I don't know, ten minutes maybe. It's mesmerizing.
I suspect that I am, at the moment, barely within shouting distance of conventional sanity, and I'm not enjoying it, but I'm going to stop bitching about it because it's not making me feel any better. I'm going to find something else to bitch about. After I get some goddamn sleep.
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no subject
Date: 2002-07-20 05:03 pm (UTC)Him being slowed down by accent and shock is how I have it now, and it's not ringing my bell, I suspect because Rook is the sort of person who, when thrust into a weird, frightening situation he can't do anything about, will occupy himself with the most intellectual aspect of the situation as a way of divorcing himself from the emotional aspects.
Plus he's noticed (a) Sweeney reading the old English side of the menu in the restaurant (which advertizes Authentic Aboveground Cuisine, and has old English on its menu [that came out wrong, but you know what I mean] for much the same reasons that modern Chinese restaurants have Cantonese on theirs), (b)
On the way up it said something under its breath that sounded more like English than like the language it had cursed at him in before, but if it was English, it was so heavily accented he couldn't decipher it; from the tone, Rook supposed it was more profanity.
and (c) that when Sweeney translates something Rook says from Underground English to WIP-modern English for Arunir, it sounds awfully familiar. Rook's a smart guy. He doesn't need to be beaten over the head too much.
I wouldn't be surprised if he was expecting elves to be speaking something with lispies and lots of E and I vowels and elegant polysyllables and Ds and Ls and Ns and the like, like Tolkien-elves, and so the idea that they'd be speaking something as prosaic as Old English just wouldn't occur to him while he's trying to assemble phonic sets like 'Hyarmentir' and 'Illuin'.
Hee hee. Actually, elvish does have a lot of Ns and Es and Is and Hs and considers at least half a dozen points on the L/R spectrum phonemic, but in my head it sounds more like Mondoshawan than Quenya.
I've found that it takes me about an hour of straight dialogue to parse English in an accent that isn't one of my default ones -- at some point I need to watch The Full Monty again when I can get my brain translating the accent before most of the way through the flick.
Hmm. This is useful information and I thank you for providing it.
And that's when I know that with all this stuff there's a pony in there somewhere.
... a literal or metaphorical pony?
no subject
Date: 2002-07-20 05:17 pm (UTC)The pony is because. . . okay. Kevin and Brooks and I went out to Fire and Ice, that spiffy restaurant I was telling you about. This involves parking at Kevin's office, walking about half a klick to the subway, going up two stops through horrible screeching wheels not that I'm sensitive to high frequencies or anything, and walking a couple of blocks to the restaurant.
Anyway. I digress.
We had to wait for a train to go by (the tracks run right next to the office), and when we came out from parking the car the entire area smelled of horseshit. We dithered about whether or not someone had mulched, or if the hopper cars had been full of manure. (It still stank when we came back, so we settled on the mulching.)
But anyway, as we were headed to the subway, I made the comment that I was looking for a pony-in-here-somewhere joke, and couldn't find one. ("With all this horseshit, there has to be a pony in here somewhere.")
So it was a fragment of my personal dialect that was at mind-forefront.