tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2233685335369677578.post6043084445915397679..comments2021-04-14T06:09:44.320-07:00Comments on The Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head: The Cross and the Sword, by Evangeline Walton: AnalysisLorinda J Taylorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16985567506994751475noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2233685335369677578.post-6042263583682031332014-03-25T07:13:06.041-07:002014-03-25T07:13:06.041-07:00Thanks for stopping by, Big Bad Bald - I'm alw...Thanks for stopping by, Big Bad Bald - I'm always happy to meet new people, and particularly Evangeline Walton fans. Check out some of my termite saga - I think you'd like it!Lorinda J Taylorhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16985567506994751475noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2233685335369677578.post-85382147180026187572014-03-24T18:52:25.751-07:002014-03-24T18:52:25.751-07:00It's always nice to find other Evangeline Walt...It's always nice to find other Evangeline Walton fans, her <i>Mabinogion</i> is gorgeous. Regarding the mutual intelligibility of the Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon languages, Chapter 98 of <a href="http://omacl.org/Heimskringla/hardrade1.html" rel="nofollow"><i>King Harald's Saga</i></a> details the escape of Harald's marshal after the failed Norse invasion of 1066 (which was a major factor in the defeat of Harold Godwinsson, who had to march the length of England from York to Hastings):<br /><br /><i>Styrkar, King Harald Sigurdson's marshal, a gallant man, escaped<br />upon a horse, on which he rode away in the evening. It was<br />blowing a cold wind, and Styrkar had not much other clothing upon<br />him but his shirt, and had a helmet on his head, and a drawn<br />sword in his hand. As soon as his weariness was over, he began<br />to feel cold. A waggoner met him in a lined skin-coat. Styrkar<br />asks him, "Wilt thou sell thy coat, friend?"<br /><br />"Not to thee," says the peasant: "thou art a Northman; that I<br />can hear by thy tongue."</i><br />Big Bad Bald Bastardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01983025559556548658noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2233685335369677578.post-33988572860265321052013-10-23T13:28:24.163-07:002013-10-23T13:28:24.163-07:00Fascinating! Thank you for taking the trouble to ...Fascinating! Thank you for taking the trouble to formulate this comment. I do something the same with the various branches of my alien termite languages (conlangs), although not in such detail. Here is a comment from the Appendix to the novel The Valley of Thorns, which I'm about to publish:<br /><br />Language had begun to evolve before the two ethnic groups (plains Shshi <br />and nasutoids) split. The three languages (Shum’za, Nasute, and Shei’kwai) are now comparable to widely diverse Indo-European tongues. Each has dialects, with some dialects being mutually comprehensible, as, e.g., Da’no’no and Shum’za (the native speech of Ki’shto’ba and Di’fa’kro’mi, respectively). Northern Nasute and Shkei'akh'zei are mutually comprehensible dialects of a Nasute sublanguage, while Southern Nasute (the Sta’ein’zei and the At’ein’zei) and Desert (Wei’gwai’mi) Shshi are mutually comprehensible dialects of a second Nasute sublanguage. The Shei’kwai (or Tramontane, or Yo’sho’zei/Gwai’sho’zei) language is distinct and is probably closest to the archetypal form. <br />Lorinda J Taylorhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16985567506994751475noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2233685335369677578.post-2934184663839088602013-10-23T10:23:34.768-07:002013-10-23T10:23:34.768-07:00Norse and English probably understood each other, ...Norse and English probably understood each other, more or less, most of the time, each speaking their own language (as Spanish- and Italian-speakers do today, as well as Scandinavians of all sorts). Here's Tom Shippey on the subject:<br /><br />Consider what happens when somebody who speaks, shall we say, good Old English from the south of the country runs into some body from the north-east who speaks good Old Norse. They can no doubt communicate with each other, but the complications in both languages are going to get lost.<br /><br />So if the Anglo-Saxon from the South wants to say (in good Old English) ”I’ll sell you the horse that pulls my cart,” he says: “Ic selle the that hors the draegeth minne waegn.” Now the old Norseman - if he had to say this - would say: “Ek mun selja ther hrossit er dergr vagn mine.” So, roughly speaking, they understand each other. One says “waegn” and the other says “vagn”. One says ”hors” and “draegeth”; the other says “hros” and “dregr”, but broadly they are communicating. They understand the main words.<br /><br />What they don’t understand are the grammatical parts of the sentence. For instance, the man speaking good Old English says for one horse “that hors” but for two horses he says “tha hors”. Now the Old Norse speaker understands the word horse all right, but he’s not sure if it means one or two because in Old English you say “one horse”, “two horse”. There is no difference between the two words for horse. The difference is conveyed in the word for “the” and the old Norseman might not understand this because his word for ”the” doesn’t behave like that. So: are you trying to sell me one horse or are you trying to sell me two horses? If you get enough situations like that there is a strong drive toward simplifying the language.<br /><br />(end of quotation)<br /><br />Indeed, in the primary sources there is never any mention of translators or interpreters when Norse and English talk together, and the Old English word <i>wealhstod</i> 'translator, interpreter' has the same root as 'Welsh', showing that the English primarily needed translators when talking to Welsh-speakers. In <i>Gunnlaugs saga Ormstunga</i>, the title character, a poet, says: "Ein var þá tunga á Englandi sem í Noregi ok í Danmörku. En þá skiptust tungur í Englandi, er Vilhjalmr bastarðr vann England", which is still fairly easily interpreted as "Once the tongue of English [was the] same [as] in Norway or in Denmark. But then shifted [the] tongues in England, when William Bastard [i.e. the Conqueror] won England".John Cowanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11452247999156925669noreply@blogger.com