As long as I'm writing about problems related to language that authors of fantastic fiction face when Earth people meet people from Somewhere Else, I might as well add another example. This one is from The Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Martian writing is rather difficult to explain to an Earth man— it is something of a cross between shorthand and picture-writing, and is an entirely different language from the spoken language of Mars.
Upon Barsoom there is but a single oral language.
It is spoken today by every race and nation, just as it was at the beginning of human life upon Barsoom. It has grown with the growth of the planet's learning and scientific achievements, but so ingenious a thing it is that new words to express new thoughts or describe new conditions or discoveries form themselves—no other word could explain the thing that a new word is required for other than the word that naturally falls to it, and so, no matter how far removed two nations or races, their spoken languages are identical.
Not so their written languages, however. No two nations have the same written language, and often cities of the same nation have a written language that differs greatly from that of the nation to which they belong. (Ch. 11, p. 115 in the Del Rey paperback)
Interestingly, in this description of the languages and writing systems of Mars, Burroughs has inverted the real-life relationship between spoken and written Chinese. In Chinese, several mutually unintelligible dialects (really separate languages) can all be written using a single writing system in a way that is more-or-less intelligble to speakers of other dialects. The Martian languages exist in the opposite relationship: there is a single spoken language with many writing systems.
Burroughs's account of why the spoken language hasn't diverged is nonsense, of course—no Barsoomian has apparently ever coined a new word out of a proper name (e.g. a danish)—but the idea of designing a language so that all future words were somehow already implied in the existing lexicon is an interesting one. Mostly, though, it served a dramatic purpose. John Carter is forever encountering new lost races on Barsoom, and it would be inconvenient for him to have to learn a new language from scratch in order to exchange witicisms during a sword-fight. I'm not sure why Burroughs had the writing systems diverge, though. Maybe he thought that a perpetual universal writing system was somehow less plausible than a perpetual universal language. As far as I can tell, it didn't seem to serve any dramatic purpose in the scene I've quoted above, in which Carter must read (by touch! in the dark!) a note in the writing of another city. I'm not sure when he's supposed to have picked up that city's writing system, but Burroughs was, shall we say, not overly concerned with continuity. In fact, the passage quoted above doesn't seem at all consistent with the explanation of Barsoomian communication in the first book of the series, A Princess of Mars.
...Like the animals upon which the warriors were mounted, the heavier draft animals wore neither bit nor bridle, but were guided entirely by telepathic means.
This power is wonderfully developed in all Martians, and accounts largely for the simplicity of their language and the relatively few spoken words exchanged even in long conversations. It is the universal language of Mars, through the medium of which the higher and lower animals of this world of paradoxes are able to communicate to a greater or less extent, depending upon the intellectual sphere of the species and the development of the individual. (Ch. 7, p. 38 in the Del Rey paperback)
This seems like a different and inconsitent attempt to explain why Carter isn't always having to learn new languages. Worldwide interspecies telepathy would explain how everybody communicates, but why would telepathic Barsoomians need spoken language at all, and why would that spoken language never diverge in isolated populations? Burroughs doesn't have a good answer for these questions, as far as I know, and I suppose linguistic plausibility wasn't one of his goals. Still, authors ought to make an effort not to contradict themselves too blatantly too often, don't you agree?
I expect the written-language thing was a momentary jape, thought up explicitly as a parody of the situation on Earth in places like China. And Burroughs is about the last author from whom one should expect a foolish, or even a sensible, consistency.
Posted by: language hat | June 23, 2004 at 06:11 PM