Friends, acquaintances, associates
Hello!
A whole lot of Life happened this month, which means we’re here on the last day of the month once again.
Amazon is still reviewing my tax information, so when that’s sorted, I’ll be able to put Filling Your Worlds up for sale there. The ebook is going to go through Tolino Media (to all the platforms they have contact with), and I think that’s about ready to go, but I haven’t tested it on all platforms/apps/readers yet. (I could put the print book out through Tolino as well, but they won’t let me bring the print ISBN with me, and it’s already got two (paperback/hc), and I don’t want to make things more complicated than they already are.)
It’s one month until Amplitudes launches, so pre-order and tell all your friends 🙂
Speaking of friends…
CJ Cherryh’s Foreigner series is one of my favorites. I’ve written extensively about it both in my old column and in my book, because Cherryh’s linguistic worldbuilding is top notch and the main POV character of the series (for the first 6 or 7 books) is a linguist.
The quick version of the background is this: Phoenix, a starship, misses its target in jump-space and eventually finds its way into orbit around an Earth-like world inhabited by humanoid aliens with steam-era technology. Some people want to land on the surface; the crew of the Phoenix wants to go to another star to see if they can find Earth, or at least figure out where they are. Phoenix goes away, and people start parachuting down to the planet, aiming for what they think is an uninhabited island.
They encounter the native humanoids, the atevi, and start learning each other’s languages, and the humans, being basically future space US-Americans, start making friends with everyone and developing relationships with them. Everything is going well, so the humans think, until the atevi show up with bombs. What happened?
The atevi don’t have the same basic psychology as humans, and they have different emotional instincts and needs that are more like a herding instinct. They have man’chi to an ateva leader, and the atevi at the top feel no man’chi, rather a sense of duty to care for the people who feel man’chi to them. If two atevi have man’chi to the same leader, all is well, and they are associates. If they have conflicting man’chi, they should not be associated. At all. (This is a recurring point both in the books themselves and in the historical dramas that are often referenced.)
So the humans, not understanding that atevi psychology is different and that the word they casually translated as “friend” means something completely different, brought atevi into association who should never have been associated. Some of this was through social interactions; some of it was through the spread of technology that had unforeseen consequences when it reached atevi society.
The atevi, of course, also thought that the humans understood what “associates” meant and hoped that the humans would stop being so uncivilized as to not follow basic rules of politeness in atevi society. (This comes out in one of the very late books.)
One of the things Cherryh is good at (and one of the reasons she was awarded the Grand Master title) is making nonhuman species that aren’t just humans with slightly different physiology. They’ve got different psychology — and the humans often struggle with understanding them. Even the cloned human azi in the Alliance-Union universe have different psychology (because they’re programmed using subliminal training…it was the 80s.) It’s hard for me to suggest which book or series to start with, because she’s written SO MANY, so if you’re interested, read over her bibliography and see what sounds the most appealing to you (and is still in print…unfortunately, many books are hard to find now.)
Friendship in different human cultures
One of the biggest stereotypes of US-Americans is that we’re superficially friendly and generally fake, because we know someone for an hour, and they’re a friend now. This is, to an extent, true; I know I had work friends, friends from school, book club friends, etc., but they were mostly just people I knew from a situation. Acquaintances.
It feels like a cold word, doesn’t it? So distant; we’re just acquainted. I’d rather say “my buddy” or “this guy I know” than “acquaintance.”
One of the biggest stereotypes of Germans is that they’re cold, unfriendly, and aloof, because they don’t throw the word “friend” around like it’s candy, and they use “acquaintance” (Bekannte) regularly. There’s a joke that you can’t be friends with a German until you’ve known them three years, and in my experience that’s mostly true. It’s one of the biggest culture shocks US-Americans have when they come to Germany.
Then there’s love. Americans love everything: our partners, our friends, books, pizza, McDonald’s… And when you teach Americans German and get to the part of the book that talks about how people don’t say “I love you” to their parents but rather “ich hab dich lieb,” which is more like “I’m fond of you,” you sometimes get students who ask if that means Germans are incapable of feeling love.
To which the answer is, of course, no, just that they reserve the word for stronger, deeper, romantic relationships (and sometimes even then, Liebe is off the table, according to German friends of mine).
Side note: If someone is a cat-lover in English, they’re a Katzenliebhaber in German; someone who is fond of cats. For fans of uncommon or archaic words, lieb is cognate with lief.
What does this mean for writing purposes?
Well, if you want to invent different psychology that doesn’t have friendship (or some other basic human emotion), you can, and that can be the source of a lot of problems via communication error. If you’re talking about different human cultures, they’ll still have that baseline human emotion, but what the emotion signifies will be different from culture to culture, and you can portray that by, for example, one character being free with “love” or “friend” and another being less free with it and possibly offended by how casually the other person throws it around. (It doesn’t have to make it to the page, of course; it can be something you know about them.)
Fun linguistic factoids!
The words friend and fiend were both originally derived from verbs! Friend comes from Old English freond, which comes from Proto-Germanic frijond- ‘loving,’ and fiend comes, via Old English, from Proto-Germanic fijand- ‘hating.’ They are known as -nd stems, and they’re like a gerund (the -ing form of a verb, but as a noun).
I just think it’s neat. I also think it’s really neat that there is one class of nouns, the -r stems, that contains only five words having to do with the family (that all still end in /r/ today!), and another class of nouns, the -z stems, that contains four words for baby animals (where there are no /z/s today, sadly).
Until next time!
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