Hello!

This is the August newsletter, a day late because the thing I started writing needed more research than I had time for.

I will be at Flights of Foundry on September 20. Here’s my schedule:

• 6:00 UTC: Language, technology, and stories: Translation

• 7:00 UTC: Chill n chat (lotteried session)

• 11:00 UTC: AI could never: Idiom, word choice, and personality in translation

• 15:00-17:00 UTC: Building a linguistic toolbox for names in your fictional world (lotteried workshop)

I hope to see a lot of you there! Flights of Foundry is fully virtual and has programming around the clock, though because of demographics, a lot of cool programming happens during the Americas’ daytime.

Language contact

I possibly discussed this before, but it’s on my mind at the moment. Language contact is an interesting thing to talk about, because languages aren’t physical things that can touch each other. Rather, the speakers of languages come into contact with each other, and the contact between languages is occurring in the speakers’ brains. (NB: I’m using speaker as a shorthand for the more accurate term language user, which includes people who use sign languages or assistive devices/tools.)

You can have language contact between two (or more) monolingual speakers of different languages, which can lead to, depending on the situation, anything from the creation of a pidgin and then a creole to massive structural changes in one of the languages to simple borrowing of words. Either of the first two is a major field of study on its own, and the third is, while interesting, not what I’m interested in today.

You can also have language contact in a single multilingual speaker. The languages are making contact with each other in that person’s brain, and they can influence each other. If the languages are fairly similar, like English and German, you can still get unusual things to come out. For example, German strictly requires the main verb to be in the second position in an independent clause. English does not do this (it did a thousand years ago when it was the language currently known as Old English, though it was already in the process of changing, which can be seen in the texts over time). When an English speaker is learning German, they will often simply calque English into German, sentence structure and all. They’ll render “Tomorrow I’m going to the movies” as “Morgen ich gehe ins Kino” (or occasionally “Morgen ich bin gehen ins Kino.” Apologies to all the German speakers who just reflexively cringed.) In German it would be “Morgen gehe ich ins Kino.” German also doesn’t have multiple aspects of the present tense, just “ich gehe,” which could be any of the following in English: I go, I am going, I have been going.

You can get odd-sounding verb usage or placement in both directions, of course; Germans in my experience use the am going present aspect (progressive) much more often than the I go present, and sometimes when it’s not the appropriate choice. Like “I am living in Berlin since five years” or “I live in Berlin since 2021” is perfectly valid in German but definitely weird in English, because we need the present perfect or the imperfect (continuous) there (I do not know the actual English aspect terms; I never learned them in school and I focused on German in grad school.) More cromulent English would be “I have been living in Berlin for five years” or “I have lived in Berlin since 2021.” 

Where are you going with this?

Anglicisms are everywhere in non-Anglophone Europe. Partly because of the influence of the UK in EU politics (until Brexit anyway), partly because of the influence of Anglophone media (movies, TV, music) and the internet, partly because (thanks to the first item in this list) English became the lingua franca of the EU. Also there’s a bit of cool cachet from using English, though maybe less now than in the past.

Euro English has developed as its own dialect that has “common lexical and grammatical mistranslations influenced by the native languages of its non-native English-speaking population.” (There’s a short table with examples in the Wikipedia entry.) I asked my writer friends in group chat (because we have US and British English speakers as well as people for whom English is a second or third or moreth language) about a weird phrase that I kept encountering and made me wonder if I had forgotten how English works. I thought maybe it was a Briticism I’d never encountered and it had been adopted by Europeans because British English is the one mostly taught in schools. Nope. Turns out it was just Euro English. The phrase? We have to take a decision. My variety of English makes a decision, as did pretty much everyone else’s in the group chat.

Denglisch is something I encounter nearly every day. You get things like Handy meaning cell phone (according to DWDS, it comes from handheld two-way radio), Homeoffice for working from home (and not “the room in my home that’s my office” or the UK interior ministry), and Oldtimer for classic cars (as opposed to someone who’s been around for a long time). Oh, and Beamer for a video projector (it beams the image to your screen). At least the term Smartphone is becoming more commonly used, but Handy is still, at least among people at the ages I encounter them (maybe the yutes have different ideas), the more common term. So I will be like, “Oh, Entschuldigung? Ihr Handy!!” if someone leaves their phone on the seat, or talk about the Beamer I got from a friend who got herself a really nice one.

This is definitely something you can use in your writing

In Emily Tesh’s novel Some Desperate Glory, the language spoken on Gaea Station, where the protagonist grows up, is called T-standard (T for Terra). It’s revealed around two-thirds of the way through that T-standard is a simplified variation of English derived from American Business English to make automated machine translation between humans and the majoda (the aliens) easier: “a simplified ‘translatorbot-ese.’” And if humans go off-script and use their own language (presumably English) instead of the semi-invented language, the translator bots can’t handle it.

This does a LOT of lifting for the worldbuilding. The reader can infer that at the point when humans encountered the majoda, the Anglophones had enough prominence to dominate the language discussion, or that English was still the lingua franca. Then they had enough power to force people to learn T-standard (and call it the standard) to be able to interact with the majoda. But everywhere that wasn’t Gaea Station, people still spoke languages other than English or varieties of English other than T-standard often enough that the majodan guide for interacting with humans makes mention of it as a potential problem.

(People who backed my Kickstarter got an essay about SDG as a backer-exclusive reward, so this might be familiar to a lot of you.)

There are, of course, many other ways to make use of this principle of calquing words or idioms incorrectly or inventing pseudo-[language]-isms. It can be used for humor (even slightly embarrassing humor, like the old Spanish false friend embarazada, which doesn’t mean embarrassing (it means pregnant)) or tension (someone unintentionally says something insulting by miscalquing an idiom) and so on. 

Or maybe instead of English as the basis for translator bots, you used Esperanto. That would be a very different setting, right? A world where Esperanto actually got off the ground, rather than remain a niche interest: What would that world look like? What would have happened to make it that way?

Or maybe you have a generation ship with a handful of languages where the kids grow up speaking what their parents speak and whatever language school is taught in (or school is taught in all the languages or a selection of them), and what they speak amongst themselves is a delightful playful mixture of all of them (that their parents hate, of course, because that’s what adults always think about kids’ language).

You get the idea. I go into a lot more detail in my book (the river place Kobo itch Thalia), in case you missed the Kickstarter and want to know more. 

Until next time!