Way back in the early 2000s, I read the whole Ender's Game quartet.
And then, while comparing The Lost Steersman to the Enderverse, I discovered that the quartet is now a sextet! Apparently, there was a new sequel to Ender's Game published in 2008--and a follow-up to Children of the Mind published just last year!
So, I picked up Ender in Exile just for fun... and then found out it has linguistic content!
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Ender in Exile features several Italian characters (with just a smidge of Italian text as a secondary language), as well as peripheral references to other language communities. In chapter 8, we get a direct reference to language planning:
"I've been thinking of teaching English," said Valentine. "Offering a class."
"Not English," said Ender. "Common. It's spelled better--no ughs and ighs--there's no subjunctive, no 'whom', and the word 'of' is spelled as the single letter 'v'. To name just a few of the differences."
In the Enderverse, "Common" is established as a version of Controlled English, similar to Aviation English or Simplified Technical English, with the addition of a spelling reform.
Simplified Technical English, like International Fleet Common was intended for easier accessibility to second-language learners. And, as it happens, there was, historically, an attempt at English spelling reform for the same purpose: the Deseret Alphabet, a phonemic alphabet for (a particular range of dialects of) English that was supposed to simplify English language instruction, and thus cultural integration, of the large numbers of international converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints migrating to the Territory of Deseret (which later became parts of Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, and Oregon--basically, the US Mountain West) in the mid to late 1800s. Sadly, the Deseret Alphabet never really caught on, and is now effectively extinct, but the Enderverse's International Fleet has a great deal more political clout to enforce a spelling reform of English (historically a very difficult project to pull off), and, given Orson Scott Card's religious affiliation, I have to wonder if the Deseret Alphabet was any sort of inspiration for this feature of International Fleet Common.
A few pages later, we get an example of Diagetic Narrative Translation of Italian:
"It doesn't matter," said Alessandra. "Not enough women ruoli, parti--how do you say it?" She turned to Valentine hopelessly.
"'Role'," said Valentine. "Or 'part'."
which is followed up by a couple of examples of Making It Obvious with other Italian words that are very similar to their English translations (holografi - holographs, Il teatro - the theatre).
In chapter 14, we get a bit of Easter Egging:
Alessandra stood there, her hand to her mouth. Then tears came to her eyes. "Per tutte sante," she said. "I was... doing what she wanted. [...]"
No translation or explanation is given or necessary, as the context makes it obvious that this is some sort of emotional interjection. (Incidentally, it happens to mean "For all saints", a pretty standard entry in the category of religiously-based expletives, which also serves to reinforce the character's Catholic cultural background.)
A little earlier, in chapter 13, however, we get this intriguing exchange:
"[...]That way, no matter who wins this little power struggle, we'll be able to cash in. Am I correct?"
Alessandra had spoken the phrase "cash in" in English. Dorabella seized on that. "Shakespeare Colony has no cash yet, darling," said Dorabella. "It's all bartering and allotment so far. [...]"
which nicely serves to highlight a narrative translation convention. Of course, two native speakers of Italian having a private conversation with each other can reasonably be expected to actually be speaking Italian, even if the text on the page is English for the reader. But when they have each been portrayed in extensive conversation with English speakers, it might be easy to forget that! This callout of a character specifically using English is a sneaky way to remind us that we should actually be envisioning the remainder of the conversation in Italian, without ever having to explicitly say "they were speaking Italian."
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The DA was intended to be an orthographical reform only, and not a grammatical reform. Orthographical reform was in the air in the mid 19th century, and there were several sets of alternative spellings that were published. The DA follows the outlines of Pitman Phonotypy -- the two charts are practically identical in structure, if not in letterforms. The DA was also used to record bits of two indigenous languages, Hopi and Shoshone. (I'm gonna toot my own horn here: http://accidentalvariations.blogspot.com/2014/hopi-and-deseret-alphabet.html)
ReplyDeleteI doubt that the DA played a significant role in Card's imagining of "Common", since in the passage you quote the spellings are given in the Latin alphabet and don't use (or allude to) a novel system, and the reforms include grammatical distinctions as well (i.e., no 'whom', and no subjunctive). However, in The Worthing Saga Card hints at a very different kind of writing system. When Jason reappears to his decendants, he marvels at the complexity of the writing system used by his scribe (whose name escapes me now), who defends it with the reasoning that writing materials are expensive and so space on the written page is at a premium. The system is described as being full of ligatures created by compressing characters together. It's an obvious allusion to Mormon's defense of "Reformed Egyptian" in the Book of Mormon (Morm 9:32-33).
> The DA was intended to be an orthographical reform only, and not a grammatical reform.
DeleteAn important distinction which I see in retrospect I did not make clear enough! Thanks for the comment.
(By the way, I'm really enjoying this series of posts. Well done, and keep it up!)
ReplyDeleteSomething that makes the Deseret Alphabet difficult to use is that it has no schwa character; you have to decide how an unstressed vowel would be pronounced if it were stressed in order to spell it. I'm aware of at least one variant which adds a schwa that looks like a dotless 'i'.
ReplyDelete