A friend made a suggestion that I do a post related to language. Now, I've traveled a bit, attempted to learn a few languages, even taught English for four years outside the US; but I'd never dream of trying to invent a whole language. How I plan to use my knowledge of language learning is by having my non-native speakers make specific types of mistakes.
One of the classic ways Hollywood writes characters with Russian accents is by omitting articles (a, an, the). The reason some speakers have trouble with these is simply because they don't exist in some languages. Unfortunately, it is so commonly used that whatever characters you use this for will not only sound like non-native English speakers, but specifically Slavic/Russian type speakers (try saying, "Get into car," without using a Russian accent). Then again, maybe that's what you want.
Tense confusion is the second basic mistake for most people learning English. In English, we use different cases to give things a place in time relative to each other. Other languages, apparently not so much. Learning the Past Simple is usually fine for them (except for some irregulars), since they just add -ed (though some do pronounce it like "walk-ed"). Continuous tenses can also be tricky, with mistakes either from confusion or from forgetting to use "am" in the continuous form ("I going to school"). Most non-native speakers I've met just don't understand the perfect tenses (have done, had done) and simply avoid them, using other structures.
Phrasal verbs are a good way to really mess with non-natives. These are verb-preposition pairs that have a non-literal meaning (some can be separated by a noun). Tell a non-native speaker to "work it out" or "look it up" and you'll often get blank stares. Having your foreign characters not use them is a subtle tool, but having them not understand when a native uses them can help to remind the reader of cultural difference.
Use of idiomatic English and slang also causes confusion for non-natives. Hell, it can cause trouble for parents listening to children or visitors from a different state. One way for a non-native to make a mistake is with using a synonym for one of the words ("scarce as chicken's teeth," instead of "scarce as hen's teeth"). This is probably due to the speaker having learned the phrase in a literal translation. More often the mistake would be the substitution of a word that sounds similar ("scarce as men's teeth"), which can lead to misunderstanding and then misapplication of the phrase, since men's teeth are a bit more common than hen's teeth.
The trick with all of these things is in applying them without confusing your reader or distracting from the story. Used too subtly, some readers might not even notice you being clever. However, as I noted in my first posting, this is not a blog about how to best write your stories. This is my own personal info dump about how to flesh out your new world. I hope it helps.
It's also good to remember that when two cultures are in close contact they often appropriate words to use, especially for an activity or product that originates in the other culture. English is full of words that we have taken from other languages over the years (kowtow, souffle, etc). Other cultures have clearly done the same, with France most famously trying to avoid English language infiltration. One of the most loved recent examples is the short lived show "Firefly". Often Chinese phrases were used in conversation to remind the viewers of the universe the characters were living in (or maybe get around censors).
No comments:
Post a Comment