Thinking About Learning Languages
Originally published at ipse illum dicto. You can comment here or there.
One thing that comes up often in science fiction and fantasy stories is a situation where characters would, logically, probably speak different languages. The characters may come from different countries or planets, they may come from different times, or they may even come from different social strata. Since, as writers, we need to get our characters communicating, we often wave our hands around this fact, but sometimes it just doesn’t make sense that the character would already know the language and we therefore need our characters to actually learn a different language on the fly.
So how do we learn languages?
Now, obviously, I’m not a linguist. I know people who are linguists, and can probably talk about this process in excruciating detail. I’m interested in what I’ve observed and how we can make it work in fiction.
So, to start out with, we all learned our first language as children, through natural language acquisition. The studies I’ve been seeing on this imply to me that it’s actually largely a process of trial and error - the adolescent brain hears words and observes context and then tries to say them to see if they’re understood or not. I even read a piece once by a linguist who was speculating that the loss of language acquisition skills as we move into adulthood may be the result not of any inherent change in how the brain is wired, but rather results from an increasing dislike of making mistakes and an unwillingness to take time to do the listening and observing. But, while fascinating, that’s not something that’s a testable hypothesis yet.
Most of us who’ve learned a second language did it formally - meaning that we took several years of classes, being drilled on grammar and spelling, translating, and having inane conversations about how many cats there are in the trees. This method of learning seems to be effective, but, really, do we want to stop our stories for three years while the character enrolls in language classes?
What I’m noticing as an adult, however, is that immersion still works - within limits. And it’s in those limits that a character picking up a language this way will feel real or not real.
I should probably clarify that I know a few more languages than most people. I’m a native English speaker (a dialect that’s pretty close to Standard American). I took French in high school, and Latin and Greek in college. I’ve subsequently taught myself, through the “immersion plus grammar reference” method, Anglo-Saxon Old English and Chancery Middle English enough to be able to read them in my literature classes. And with the Latin and French training I can stumble through most of the Romance languages in written form (enough to pick out roots and get the gist of what it’s about). I’ve also had a little Russian and can still read the odd word or phrase, and as a singer I’ve encountered enough German to be able to pick out snippets in that language, too.
But how many of these languages can I converse in? One. Modern English.
There’s a huge gap between being able to read a language and being able to compose a coherent sentence in it. There’s also a not-insubstantial gap between being able to read a language and being able to understand it when spoken. So if you’ve got a character who can work out the written language enough to get by? I’m sorry, but that doesn’t automatically make them able to speak with the natives.
This is particularly true for time-travel stories. Latin, ancient Greek, Old English, Middle English - the grammar rules and pronunciations of all these languages were reconstructed by later scholars. (That’s why academic Latin, Church Latin, and musical Latin follow different pronunciation rules - the scholars didn’t agree.) Even the world’s leading authority on one of these languages if suddenly dropped back in a time where it was being spoken would be lost hearing it from the mouths of native speakers for the first time. And there are good odds that said scholar’s pronunciation would be so far off that the native speakers would have no idea the scholar was even speaking their language. And scholars of dead languages know that. Honestly, if you dropped me back in ancient Rome, I wouldn’t expect to be able to speak to the locals. But you can be damned sure that I’d be excitedly trying to get them to read various inscriptions (and graffiti) for me so I could hear how they pronounce them.
And as for having your characters grab a pen and paper as a way of getting around this, have you ever looked at an old manuscript? Handwriting changes very dramatically over relatively short periods of time. The Ellesmere manuscript is written using our modern alphabet. I challenge you to sit down with a page and try to type up a transcript. I know what it says and I struggle to read the letters laid down by the careful, professional scribe whose hand it’s in. Epigraphy is a field of study in its own right. Believability falters if there’s no learning curve when your character tries to do it.
And, of course, writing in a language you don’t use every day isn’t simple, either. For reasons I’m not going to go into write now, I was trying to compose in Old English the other day. It really underscored the vast gap between being able to understand and being able to formulate comprehensible expressions. I can recognize the declension of the nouns and the conjugations of the verbs when I read it, but suddenly having to work out how to decline the nouns and conjugate the verbs I want to use left me near babbling with frustration. I learned to read the language very quickly, but I am woefully unprepared to actually try to communicate in it. I’m sure what I wound up with would read to an authentic 9th-century Englishman as the linguistic equivalent of much of the typical spam e-mail. Those of you who want to mock me, I’ll share a bit of it next week.
Of course, sometimes you don’t need a character to read the language, but you want to dump them in a world where everyone is speaking it. Immersion does wonders for getting even people well past language-acquisition age to understand a spoken language. But it’s much the same deal as I experienced with the written language, in that it’s much easier to learn to understand than to learn to speak.
By virtue of living in a city with a large Mexican immigrant population, I can often understand what’s being said in Spanish. But I couldn’t ask a Spanish-speaking person to please take their seat in any comprehensible sort of way, though I know when that’s what’s being asked of me by a Spanish speaker. So to me it’s very credible when a character living somewhere that another language is spoken can understand common words and phrases, but I’m hard pressed to believe it when they can then respond and get it right the first time.
Now, it may be tempting to look at how complex this all is and say, “Well, it’ll be easier if I just give my characters a Universal Translator.”
Easier, perhaps. Better storytelling? I’m not so sure.
Remember all your writing instructors and the gurus who wrote those how-to books admonishing you not to let your characters off the hook? Remember the part where you were told to complicate their lives? Well, language barriers are a great way to do that. Harmless misunderstandings are great for comic relief (especially if you work out some funny false cognates and words with double meanings that do not coincide across languages). More serious trouble communicating can make a character’s life very, very difficult indeed, and can dramatically ramp up the tension in your story if you play it right. So don’t be afraid to try it.
If you’re specifically interested in linguistics and anthropology in science fiction, I’m going to point you to Juliette Wade’s TalkToYoUniverse blog. But hopefully I’ve given you some stuff to chew on for now.
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