"See Page X," Language, Lunar Organization

From: James Frusetta <gerakkag_at_wam.umd.edu>
Date: Tue, 4 Feb 1997 10:29:11 -0500 (EST)


On the common complaint (voiced here a couple times) of "when I ask a question, I wanna know an answer, not what book it's in."

Just my riff on it, but if this was commonly done, wouldn't Chaosium send over the Cave Troll Copyright Enforcers? I don't mind summarizing such things, but I dislike repeating this kind of stuff verbatim. As someone that had to struggle to get the old stuff, I sympathize, but...

On Languge & Dialect:
... wandering in foolishly, I go where only linguists should tread...

David Weihe sez:
>> The vocabulary and the grammar for the basic stuff seems quite
>> resistant to change, and should be common enough that you can
>> communicate in a regular fashion. It's when you get into the more
>The words are the same but the pronunciations will tend to drift
>badly. Thus you won't have just "throw" but "troe", "trow", "thruw" and
>"tassit" (toss it, just to be annoying). Its the big words that won't
>drift. Slang, of course, will vary from stead to stead, let alone tribe
>to tribe.

Yeah, but it's all pretty close to "throw." Big words tend to change more (or grammar that you don't use regularly) because it doesn't get "ingrained." So, for example, the Macos call the back "grb"; it was "grp" (pronounced "gorp." Hee hee hee!) a thousand years ago, or whatever. Little drift. This isn't counting synonyms, natch (so tassit wouldn't be part of throw, it'd be part of toss. And 'sides, I thought "tossing it" meant "to chunder?" -- which us Alaskans use, too, BTW, probably from Canada). I think it's the same for some of the really basic irregular verbs in languages like "to be," "sein," "cym," "see," "eat," etc. And for those core words which are similar in the Indo-European family like "mom."

However, I'm not really competant on this stuff, so hereby call for a linguist to explain it better than I can in my disjointed, wandering trollspeak.

Joerg Baumgartner
>The backvalley rural Sartarites will likely speak "Incomprehensible"
>rather than urban Sartarite, I agree, but with the introduction of cities
>Sartar has suffered a similar fate as other countries with the
>introduction of radio or TV.

Um, why? Urbanization -- which sure isn't going gangbusters in Sartar -- didn't do this in the real world. It was print standardization, general education and finally radio/tv which did it on the RW model. Granted, the most important thing for Sartar is going to be ease of travel, to allow language contact between areas, but I've never thought there was _that_ much travel. Not enough to create language standardization among non-educated non-elites, IMO.

Frex, the Lunar invasion will certainly shake things up, as urban speakers, rural speakers all hang out together in exile. "What? You rural bumpkin, you have to _decline_ 'murdering lunar bastard' when it's in the past accusative."

>>It's when you get into the more specialized stuff about
>>local crops, or geography, etc. that I think you need tradetalk.
>I very much doubt that. Unlike tourist/internet English, tradetalk has
>never been a complete language with specialized vocabulary outside of
>trade items (Since sale is done by appraising, I suggest that Tradetalk
>consists of more descriptive adjectives than any other word types summed
>up.)

When I'm from tribe X, I call the weird geological feature a "gooble frex". This is common. When the trader from tribe Y comes over, he doesn't know what gooble frex means. So I say, "waterfall" in Tradetalk (see below) and he might get a clue. I'm assuming tradetalk has standardized names and terms for things like geographic features, trade items, etc. Of note -- the Balkans people adopted a ton of German words (not english, for a change) for concepts they never had. (And didn't bother to chop off the German endings. Speaking on the telephone is "telefoniram/telefoniruvam," keeping in that German "ier" even though they don't conjutgate it.) I'm assuming that Tradetalk is the same mechanism for this -- what the hell's that? I don't understand you. Use the Tarshite word we both know in Tradetalk. Oh, yeah, _that_.
Since the basic words don't drift (as above), you're fine in those. It's the complicated stuff the villages will have problems with.

To be fair, I tend to flush out Tradetalk a little -- its more of a creole to me, in some ways -- merging in elements of other languages into the pigin. So it'd change quite a bit from place to place, with only the core "Issaries" cultspeak maintaining stasis from point to point (because the cult has good internal communication, and can dominate the core language). In Dragon Pass, I suppose you'd have a mixture of Sartar, Tarsh, Holy Country, Praxian, Troll and Lunar influence. Wheee! So there _would_ be a Tradetalk word for "Waterfall," (assuming the Sartarites don't have one), borrowed from another language, _if_ you need it.

This is probably All Wrong in lingusitic terms, so I invite a linguist in to correct me. (I slept through most of the relevant points on this in class.)

>>And note that the Sartarites may be borrowing words from the lunars --
>>IMO, if the Lunars "invented" using mass magicians on the battlefield,
>>the terminology Argrath uses when he does this is going to be Lunar.
>Sound argument in principle, but IMO not applicable to this example.
>IMNSHO Argrath used _native_ magics (and magic users) to form and train
>his magician units. If he had used Lunar Newspeak, half his magicians
>would have been illuminated anyway, and no longer any use against Bat or
>whatever bad.

No, not the magic, the _organization._ They never _had_ this, right? So when Argrath is saying, "Now you, you will be man-who-tells-other-shamans- when-to-cast-spell," IMO he's more likely to use the Lunar term. There's just nothing similar in Sartarite, because if they never organized in such a way, they never needed the term.

As I recall, English has a good RW example of this. When the Spanish started kicking butt left and right in the sixteenth century, the English adopted the _organizational terms_ of the Spanish army along with the organization they copied, and a few new tactical terms. So you have:

	Colonel from "cabo de colunela", "head of the column;"
	Sargeant Major "from sargento major",  and even
	Point Blank from "punto de blanco", "aimed at the target" [without
				elevation]

(This is according to John Guilmartin in _Feeding Mars_, so if the translation is off, blame him).*

Or the introduction of the term "lieutenant" stems from its origin in mercenary warfare (as I recall), which is why you see it repeated for each of the major early modern ranks: lt./captain, lt.col./colonel, lt.gen/general. It was the term for the guy who knew his stuff, who aided the cpt./col./gen. who had actually _raised_ the unit, or was a noble appointee. So English adopted the word from the French. (Don't know if it's the same in German, since the Germans developed the system -- do they repeat Oberleutenant at the different rankings, or are there different terms?)
(This is all different from, say, the use of French military loan-words in English, which happened because the Normads gave the Anglo-Saxons a good thrashing and took over the country. As a foreign occupying class, their words _replaced_ native words, not supplemented.)

In any of these cases the English _could_ have created new terms, but why bother? They used the Spanish terms for new concepts they hadn't had. They didn't change the names of their weapons, or the ways you used them, or whatever (the "native" bits), only adopted new words in for stuff they never had.

IMO, Argrath would do the same thing. You'd sartarize the words a bit, get rid of those stupid Lunar conjucations and what have you, but why not? There just aren't Sartarite terms for what you're trying to do, and (with all likelihood) most of your magic troopers have a little Lunar picked up during the occupation/exile, and are going to understand what you're on about. (This won't be all of them, no, but I'd think the younger, and more dynamic types, the ones who'll be backing you in any case, would have a little Lunar. Perhaps in the basement, where they torture him.)

Depends on how much language nationalism you see Dragon Pass as having. And how necessary the words are to such organization (I always figured it was pretty complicated, along the lines of a musket regiment -- screw one thing up, you fall out of place, you might snafu what the regiment's trying to do), but it doesn't have to be that way. Just my interpretation.

>>Perhaps you see good Orlanthi beating up those
>>traitors who adopt Lunarisms?
>You mean the Orlanthi are like the French (government, at least),
>banning the use of "that filthy language" from writing?
I was thinking more along the lines of "speaking like a lunar = lunar lover = immediate beating" rather than a uniform attempt by authority to give English the boot. ;) 'Sides, language nationalism may nor may not be present in Sartar (not, IMO): once the lunars are gone, you can use their words without a problem, because all the big angry guys who used to beat you up are off raiding the other clan again.

James Frusetta

End of Glorantha Digest V4 #162


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