I spent some time in college studying koine Greek, that is, the language that became the commercial and common language of the Roman empire (Latin may have been the official language, but far more people spoke Greek), in which the New Testament was written. Greek is praised for the accuracy and variety of its tenses. As someone has said, the English past tense is considerably less particular. She combed her hair is in the past tense; so is She slapped his face. Yet the former expresses a continuing action, and the latter an abrupt one. To make the action of combing hair momentary, we could say She ran a comb through her hair. We could achieve continuous action in the other case with She kept on slapping his face. But in Greek, the aorist and pluperfect tenses clearly distinguish an action which happened from one which was happening, in a single form of the verb.
English, meanwhile, is praised for its wealth of vocabulary. In contrast to French, which is overseen by a government-appointed committee which must approve new words and so limits the language to those words it recognizes, the borrowing and creating abilities of English have given it a vocabulary which has outstripped the abilities of unabridged dictionaries to contain. Germans have commented to me on the wonders of a language in which we can always find a way to say what we want.
German is praised as well. Frequently philosophers and theologians will fall back on German because it has the ability to create a word by complex combination of other words, and so express new ideas and new meanings in these constructs. When one of my players introduced a character named (I cannot swear to the spelling) Evegalia Stelenunderwebenonebenacthrichtungundmichtmacthausderverstand, I was not surprised to learn that this construction was a real German word under the rules of construction, although the player forgot what it meant before I got around to asking. Every language has its strengths. Eskimo has, if memory serves, eight distinct words for snow, each of which means something very different, such as snow of a sort used to build igloos. Skiers have a similarly rich vocabulary in this area.
Languages also have their weaknesses. Polynesian doesn’t have any word for snow, but must designate it something like cold white dry water that falls from the sky. I have often noted the difficulty English has with negating statements.
Do you want to go?I don’t want to go.
But does this mean that the second speaker has no desire to go, or that he specifically wants not to? Similarly:
Are you not going to the dance?No.
Is that No, I’m not or No, I am? The language is very difficult at this point.
It gets more difficult when we move away from the concrete to the abstract. C. S. Lewis has observed (in Mere Christianity, among other places) that we cannot say much about anything abstract without using metaphor. We might say that we see someone’s point, but this does not mean either that there is a pointed object or that our eyes perceive it. We might change it to say we grasp the concept, but our mind does not have hands closed around some idea, and the idea itself is not such that it could be grabbed. Yet metaphor like this tends to become idiomatic; and idiom rarely translates at all well to another language. An American would say Don’t let the fire go out; but if he translated that literally to French, it would be complete nonsense. How could a fire go anywhere, and where would it go? The Frenchman would say something much closer to Let not the fire be extinguished, and would not at all find that construction awkward. Decades ago Avis Rent-a-Car released stickers in several languages. The French one read Nous faisons plus pour vous satisfaire, which translates most closely to We make more for you to satisfy–which was as close as they could get to their simple slogan, We try harder.
Somewhere in all this linguistic trivia there is a point. That point is that some things are easier to say in some languages, more difficult to say in others. If we take Tolkienesque fantasy races as an example, we would expect to find that elves could quickly and easily speak of thousands of plants and animals, with words describing each color of autumn leaf or spring flower, and perhaps the taste of water as it changes through the year. But we would not expect them to be able to say much of anything about caves other than that they are dark and cold, and have been dug by dwarfs. But those dwarfs, for whom even tree might require a couple of words to describe (something on the order of tall thick hard plant, perhaps), would have a wealth of language for the variety of corridors, columns, chambers, carvings, and caverns, not to mention the vast array of tools and techniques used in creating them. A few terse words of dwarfish might be sufficient to convey when a cavern was made, with what tools and techniques, in what shape, for what purpose. In much the same way as baroque conveys a wealth of information to a musician and rococo to an architect, even so there would be words in each of these imaginary languages which conveyed far more to the native than you could ever find in a phrase book or Berlitz course.
In some games, player characters speak several languages. This ability is mostly used to speak to characters or creatures who don’t speak the common language of the game world. It is less often used for characters to convey information to each other without being understood by others present. But in both of these functions, it is sometimes useful to consider the limitations of each language. If I can speak dwarfish and elvish and I wish to know about the construction of a tunnel, I know which language will get me the answer faster and more accurately. If for some reason I choose the other, I’m going to spend a rather long time getting a very vague explanation.
It is useful in this regard to consider the character’s ordinary and intended use of the language. If you ask a scholar who is fluent in church Latin where you can buy beer, you may find that he doesn’t know half the words he needs to give you the answer, or even to understand the question. If the character learned to speak Wookie from a hermit in the trees of the home planet, he probably doesn’t know too many words related to the operation of a space ship.
If you’re playing a character who must normally converse with other game characters in a language which is not his native tongue, this can have its own nuances. Capable linguists can often identify the native tongue of a speaker based on the mistakes they make in speaking another language, as they will use sounds and constructions which make perfect sense to them but aren’t correct. If a dwarf doesn’t have a word for tree, why should he find it so easy to use the English word for it, instead of calling it a tall thick hard plant, as he would in dwarfish? Ancient Greek had scores of verbs for to come or go; in trying to switch to English, would they not at least sometimes make such mistakes as come there, then go here? Many Romance languages place the adjectives after the nouns they modify, and so would fall into the pattern of saying the sky vast blue and grass short green filled my view on the day warm summer, at least once in a while. Prepositions can be a nightmare, because every language uses many of them to describe multiple physical relationships which are not necessarily clearly related, and then compounds these with the metaphoric concepts. Is there a difference between speaking of something and speaking about it? Would it be completely incongruous for a language to speak to or around a subject, or for speakers of that language to use those prepositions when they try to express themselves in English? You can invent your own ordinary mistakes for fantasy languages; you can learn at least a few of the quirks of real speech by attending to people who grew up in other countries.
The inclusion of languages in the game can be interesting if used in interesting ways. To do so, you have to give thought to the differences between languages, and how that affects what is said and how it is phrased. Particularly when one of the speakers is not native to that language, it’s easy to misunderstand the meaning of a statement even when one has correctly understood each of the words. Even when we speak to those born in the same country, we have such misunderstandings often enough. The language barrier can be a real part of play, if it is used judiciously.
Next week, something different.
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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc. His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.
