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Oct. 29th, 2008 05:21 pmI've been thinking about language as represented in media recently. Mostly in Torchwood and Merlin, as those two are more connected in their topic than Athenian drama and P.G. Woodehouse.
Merlin related thoughts have been more "Oooh, look at the ways I can play with Old/Middle English!"
In sociolingustics we talk excusively about language variation, and the most recent chapters have been change over time, though the chapters before that almost always show graphs of how sections of a population change over time.
The biggest thing that's stuck in my craw is the language they used in the flashbacks in "Adam." There is no fucking way that the language they speak in an colony 3,000 years from now is going to sound exactly like General American/Lower Midwest sounds today. While the words themselves may change little due to literacy, the way that those words are spoken will. A lot.
Think trying to get a person with a thick Glasgow accent trying to talk with a person with a thick Singapore accent. If they communicated with whiteboards, they'd be fine, but if they just tried talking it out it would be just as hard as that Glasgow speaker trying to communicate with a Dutch speaker.
I've come to this conculsion after two months of staring at studies done in the UK about language change in communities. For some reason, the author really, really likes to cite studies in Norwitch. And York, but mostly Norwitch.
Merlin related thoughts have been more "Oooh, look at the ways I can play with Old/Middle English!"
In sociolingustics we talk excusively about language variation, and the most recent chapters have been change over time, though the chapters before that almost always show graphs of how sections of a population change over time.
The biggest thing that's stuck in my craw is the language they used in the flashbacks in "Adam." There is no fucking way that the language they speak in an colony 3,000 years from now is going to sound exactly like General American/Lower Midwest sounds today. While the words themselves may change little due to literacy, the way that those words are spoken will. A lot.
Think trying to get a person with a thick Glasgow accent trying to talk with a person with a thick Singapore accent. If they communicated with whiteboards, they'd be fine, but if they just tried talking it out it would be just as hard as that Glasgow speaker trying to communicate with a Dutch speaker.
I've come to this conculsion after two months of staring at studies done in the UK about language change in communities. For some reason, the author really, really likes to cite studies in Norwitch. And York, but mostly Norwitch.
