Language in the "Verse

Tuesday, July 12, 2011 5:05 PM

Bear with me while I indulge one of my favorite subjects, linguistics. I was just thinking about the languages spoken in our mythical ‘verse. For us, the audience, it’s presented as 21st century English spiced up with interesting regional slang, such as “blubberous,” and “What must you think of them that choose it?” etc., and some Chinese thrown in. But really, what would it have sounded like? Look at the differences between Elizabethan English, spoken about 500 years ago, and our modern English. If you send people, presumably from every country on Earth who are speaking many different languages, out into space, and then mix them up even more than we are these days with globalization, then let it all stew for 500 or so years, then you’ve got to have a pretty different sounding set of languages. The Chinese would be just as different. For dramatic purposes Joss had to give us only English and Chinese, but, as I mentioned, there would most likely be a fair assortment of tongues spoken in the new system, with a lot of them some pretty interesting new blended languages.

It just tickles me to ponder on it, so it does.

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