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08-08-2015, 09:56 AM | #1 |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Defaults between Celtic languages and which languages to count as dialects
I'm trying to determine what defaults to older and dead Celtic and Brythonic languages it would be fair to give a 20th century academic of Celtic Studies from Oxford.
The character speaks modern Scottish Gaelic (Native) and has a few points to spend on being able to read manuscripts and inscriptions, which she did at university. She's established as being able to read the most common Gaelic and Welsh manuscripts with ease and the oldest with some minor difficulty, which probably means Middle Welsh and Middle Irish at Accented or better, but I hadn't statted out what that meant in game terms. Which Celtic languages should default to Scottish Gaelic at one step lower? Which should default at two steps lower? Are modern Welsh, Middle Welsh and Old Welsh seperate languages?* This is important now, because she'll be meeting people who speak languages that defaults to Old Irish and Old Welsh, so it's important to know precisely how good her spoken Old Irish or Old Welsh would be, defaulting from spoken Scottish Gaelic and knowing how to read manuscripts from Wales and Gaelic areas from the 6th century on. *Ditto for similar examples with Scottish Gaelic or other evolving languages.
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08-08-2015, 10:31 AM | #2 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and some other bits.
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Re: Defaults between Celtic languages and which languages to count as dialects
It's been quite a while since I stopped speaking Welsh, but from what I remember...
Welsh and the Gaelic languages seem about as mutually incomprehensible as English and German. I guess about Broken level from Native? Certainly bad enough that people with relatively poor English (I don't think any Welsh or Gaelic speakers are likely to have English at worse than Accented) would rather use that as a Lingua Franca than rely on the common ground between the two languages. I've never met a Cornish speaker, so I'm not sure how easy it would be to cross the language divide in person, but written Cornish seems to be very close to Welsh. Possibly you could class them as distant dialects of the same language, or closely related languages. As far as I can tell, it's about the same difference as Portuguese and Spanish or German and Danish (bearing in mind that I don't speak any of those languages, so my understanding is probably a bit off). Middle Welsh is closer to Modern Welsh than Middle English is to Modern English. The original Mabinogion, for example, is at least as readable to a native Welsh speaker as Shakespeare would be to an English speaker. I never really looked at Old Welsh, but at a glance it seems about as distant from Modern Welsh as Middle English is from Modern English (i.e. I can't read it, but some of it seems vaguely familiar and when I look at a translation it makes sense, so I think I could get some vague idea of meaning given a lot of time and effort). At a guess, I'd say -1 level from Modern Welsh to Middle Welsh or Cornish, -2 from any of them to any form of modern Gaelic. Early forms of Welsh and Gaelic are probably closer to each other than the modern versions, but I couldn't say for sure. |
08-08-2015, 10:34 AM | #3 | ||
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Re: Defaults between Celtic languages and which languages to count as dialects
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Breton and the dialects of Welsh are about as similar to each other as Icelandic is to the more divergent dialects of Swedish, and they diverged somewhat before the period of Old Welsh, so those probably should have a decent default. Quote:
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08-08-2015, 10:54 AM | #4 | |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: Defaults between Celtic languages and which languages to count as dialects
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Is Middle Welsh possibly just a dialect from Modern Welsh, realistically?
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08-08-2015, 11:21 AM | #5 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and some other bits.
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Re: Defaults between Celtic languages and which languages to count as dialects
Depends on where you draw the line between language and dialect, really. If you lump Shakespeare and AAVE into one language, I'd certainly do the same for Modern Welsh and Middle Welsh. You have the issue that Middle Welsh is probably close enough to Modern Welsh and Old Welsh that it counts as a dialect of both, but the two forms at either end are different enough to count as separate languages, but that kind of problem happens no matter where you draw the line.
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08-08-2015, 12:09 PM | #6 | |
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Re: Defaults between Celtic languages and which languages to count as dialects
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08-09-2015, 05:41 AM | #7 |
Join Date: Mar 2015
Location: Kernersville, NC
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Re: Defaults between Celtic languages and which languages to count as dialects
...a warning. I love languages.
First, I'd say Scots Gaelic and Welsh are distinct languages with no real default between them. Not to go into too many details, the surviving Celtic languages are basically divided into two groups: Goidelic (Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic and Revived Manx) and Brythonic (Breton, Revived Cornish and Welsh). There's a third (more theoretical) group as well, Continental Celtic (Celtiberian, Galatian, Gaulish, Leopontic and Noric), but all of these languages are extinct and most of them have very, very few surviving examples, so their relationship to one another, grammatical structure and linguistic differences are tricky, at best, to tell today. The other important thing to remember is that the Celtic languages that survived to the modern day didn't change nearly as much as English did over the course of its history. They were heavily influenced by Latin (mainly in borrowed proper nouns) in the Middle Ages, but otherwise didn't change as drastically over the centuries. English, by comparison, has a Germanic grammatical structure, borrowed continuous tenses from Celtic, a large body of words from French (about a third of the words in the English dictionary are French) and a huge array of borrowed words from other languages (frex, we tend to use Latin and Greek for scientific and medical terms, Dutch words sneak into terms related to shipping, Spanish words for concepts related to warfare and Italian words for musical concepts and some food). Another important thing to remember is that there are precious few examples the writing of older versions or modern Celtic languages surviving into the modern age. Examples of writing in Old Welsh, for example, are mostly some poems that survived and, I think, an inscription on a gravestone is the longest surviving example of Old Welsh. And it still wasn't all that different from Modern Welsh. Summary (TL;DR): I'd say the Goidelic Languages and the Brythonic Languages have no default to one another... they're separate Language Advantages. Between languages in each group, I'd give a two step default: Scots Gaelic to Irish Gaelic would be Native to Broken. When going backwards, I'd say its just one step: Modern Welsh to Middle Welsh would be Native to Accented and Modern Welsh to Early Welsh would be Native to Broken (and even that may be too much of a penalty to reflect the lack of differences...). In your example, being a native Scots Gaelic speaker would give no default to any of the Welsh languages (because they're in different language groups), but I'd say it would give a two-step default to Irish Gaelic.
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08-09-2015, 12:40 PM | #8 | ||||
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: Defaults between Celtic languages and which languages to count as dialects
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Also, the languages that the PC will encounter are analogus to those spoken in Dyfed ca 500 AD. Dyfed was settled by Irish, but the language spoken there devoloped into a dialect of Welsh. It seems that the two weren't so far apart at the time, at least. Quote:
She'll also have a couple of points in whatever Goidelic language most Early Medieval written material exists in. What ought she have learnt to be able to read most extant post-Roman/pre-Saxon British literature? Quote:
That seems very harsh. Are they really so different? What about defaults to older languages from modern Scottish Gaelic?
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08-09-2015, 03:50 PM | #9 | ||||||
Join Date: Mar 2015
Location: Kernersville, NC
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Re: Defaults between Celtic languages and which languages to count as dialects
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In contrast, Scots Gaelic developed in Dál Riata because the Celts of Western Scotland were, essentially, Irish and the Grampian Mountains were enough of a physical barrier to prevent the language from spreading into the Pictish and Breton-speaking lowlands. Quote:
In contrast, the earliest Irish writing we have beyond inscriptions is the Book of Armagh, writing some time in the 8th century. My point here is that there's no real evidence that there was much literature being written down in 500 AD on either side of the Irish Sea, except in Latin by monks. If you want to read existing Early Medieval manuscripts from the British Isles, you'd best know your Latin. Quote:
To my knowledge, they are generally considered different languages, not dialects of one another. They are as distinct as, say, French and Spanish... while two people unfamiliar with the others' language may be able to get some words across and have very similar alphabets, a native French speaker is going to have a heck of a time writing any real prose in Spanish without having studied Spanish. At best, they might be as different as Spanish and Portuguese, which are a bit closer, linguistically, but still distinct languages. Admittedly, I don't speak either Irish or Scots Gaelic, so I can't speak from personal experience. I'm basing this on the study of linguistics and how they're classified in linguistic charts. Quote:
Now one thing I _might_ consider is giving someone with Scots Gaelic (Native) the equivalent of automatic successes on a Linguistics roll each month to learn Welsh, particularly if she's immersed in the language (meaning it would take 200 hours per point to learn without a teacher instead of 800 hours per point). Also, I should note I'm basing most of my recommendations on RAW GURPS. If there are supplements that cover language defaults, point me the way and I'll likely change my suggestions.
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08-10-2015, 04:52 AM | #10 | ||||||||||
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: Defaults between Celtic languages and which languages to count as dialects
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And the South Irish that raid/trade with/settle the kingdoms of the western coastline, mostly in modern Wales and Cornwall, will they speak Archaic Irish that is completely unintelligable to Common Brittonic speakers? I thought that the Romano-Britons and the Irish could communicate, even if their languages were not perfectly mutually intelligable. Quote:
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The fantasy analogue world that the PCs are visiting will have languages that are recognisable as being more-or-less close relations to post-Roman British languages* and the socio-political situation is meant to reflect the latter half of the 5th century CE. I do mean to exaggerate cultural differences and even have major physical differences in some extreme cases. I want the seafaring Gaels of the western coast to be very different from the forest-dwelling, horse-loving, poetry-obsessed Britons of sub-Roman Britain. And the invading Saxons, Jutes and Angles*** should be more different still. I'm considering a 3' tall Old People race which will inhabit Pictland along with the Picts**, still retaining flint weapons and making up for it by having access to much more magic than the more standard 'human' races. *Sometimes to the point of being just dialects. **Which in that scenario would be a mix between a Celtic people and these non-Indo-European, Neolithic tiny folk. ***My first thought was to play with the fact that their later cousins, the Vikings, arrived in ships rigged with fearsome dragon heads when they came raiding. These fantasy analogues could tame dragons and be the Dragonlords. Quote:
If she was trying to reconstruct the Celtic culture of Scotland as an enthusiastic teenager growing up near Edinburgh* in the 1920s, however, what language would she learn for that? Early Modern/Classical Irish at first and then delving back into older languages as her education progressed? *On an estate with several Scottish Gaelic speaking people in jobs such as ghillies and groundskeepers. Quote:
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Her learning Welsh is explained by desiring to know more about the Hen Ogledd and the Brythonic-speaking peoples who lived where she grew up before Northumbria, but she'd only learn Irish as it related to Scottish history. Quote:
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Rating French and Spanish as an example of a -2 default wouldn't be utterly crazy. Broken proficiency from a default is pretty much 'can communicate simple concepts by repeating, slowly, words you imagine might be common between related languages'. If we want -1 default to exist at all in settings based on the real world, I think we shouldn't restrict them to two languages that are comfortably mutually intelligable.** That's the job of dialects and accents, which are bits of characterisation except when trying to pass for someone else. *On the theory that individual Spanish dialects sometimes differ as much between themselves as Portuguese does from some Spanish dialects. **Danish as taught in univerisities, i.e. with minimal regional variations, and Norwegian Bokmål are really dialects of one another, not just related languages with a -1 default between them. There are larger regional variations within Danish. It just so happens these two dialects have different armies and navies. I'd use -1 defaults between Swedish and Norwegian or Danish, and vice versa. Quote:
How she'll do speaking with Common Brittonic speakers might be different, of course, but then again, she has spent almost a year trying to reconstruct and interpret the myths, poetry and stories of people in Dyfed between 400 and 600 CE, so she might have a working knowledge of how they spoke.
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