Reflection's Edge

English for Time Travelers, part 1: The Past

by Evelyn Browne

I don't have any trouble with time machines.

I love galaxy-spanning empires, connected by ansibles and faster-than-light (FTL) drives.

I will even suspend my disbelief so far as to permit a universal translator (UT), if there's no way to tell the story without one.

But accepting any one of those impossibilities doesn't leave a lot of credulity to spare. The input and output of that universal translator needs to sound like a plausible language to keep me reading - and only Dr. Who is allowed a time machine that also works as a UT.

Alien languages, admittedly, are a matter for pure speculation; but human language is an area in which much is known, and, moreover, is known to be known. And just as the physics buff who accepts your FTL drive happily will still stop reading if the torpedoes you sling in your space battle don't move with perfect Newtonian accuracy, the language buff who accepts your time machine will still be thrown out of the story by an Anglo-Saxon poet speaking in rhymed couplets or a minor Elizabethan courtier addressing the queen as "thou."

But at the same time, you are writing for contemporary English speakers, and all the linguistic accuracy in the world will do you no good if your readers can't understand you. Writing SF that involves other forms of the language, past or future, is a tricky balancing act - all the more so because linguistic distance - linguistic oddity - is one of the most useful world-building tools and distancing mechanisms in the speculative fiction writer's toolbox. Bringing a twenty-first century English speaker a thousand years into the past or future puts many demands on her, whether she is the protagonist you've sent hurtling through time, or just a reader following her journey.

In this article, I will go through some of the most challenging of those demands and suggest strategies to meet them, and areas in which thorough research might head some of them off. In part two, I'll talk about ways to plausibly extrapolate near- and far-future forms of English. But we can't extrapolate without data; and so we'll begin not in the future but in the past, with a short history of the English language.

Old English, circa 500-1150 CE

Twenty-first century time travelers to Anglo-Saxon England will be struck by how little the language sounds like their English.

In grammar, it resembles modern German or Icelandic more than modern English:
In sound, too, the language will ring foreign; the inventory of distinct sounds (phonemes) is smaller than in modern English:

All these differences come together to make Old English look very strange to modern English speakers, and sound even stranger. The time traveler's ear will notice the guttural fricatives and the wealth of diphthongs; her eye will be drawn to the letters no longer in used in modern English: <æ>, ash, representing the short a sound; <ð>, edh, and <þ>, thorn, both representing "th"; and the long s, the runic letter wyn for the [w] sound, and the yogh for all values of /g/. And to understand what she hears and reads, your time traveler will need either weeks of study or immersion, or a Babel fish or other translation gimmick.

As you cannot count on your readers having either advantage, you will do best to treat OE as you would any other foreign language: focus on what the viewpoint character understands, not on what is actually spoken. And not on what the character hears, either - if all she can make out is gibberish with a few words here and there, you only need to transcribe the gibberish if you mean the reader to understand more of it than the character.

(And if you choose to transcribe spoken OE "phonetically," please be consistent: decide at the outset what system you are going to use (modified International Phonetic Alphabet, the simplified systems used in some dictionaries, the spelling of a rhyming English word) and use it faithfully - and be aware that you'll be alienating or confusing some readers with each system. Phonetic notation of any kind is not called for nearly as often as some SF writers seem to believe, and you'll lose more readers by attempting it and failing than by leaving it out altogether.)

If your character does understand at least some of what is said to her - and if she can answer back in the same tongue - then unless you are willing to take several chapters to give your readers a primer in the language, you will need to adopt the conceit of translation: tell us the characters are speaking Old Mercian or Late West Saxon, but write their dialog in Modern English. It's no different than dealing with conversations in Arabic or Tlingit or Betelgeusan, except in one respect: your word choice can trip you up in many more ways than if you were dealing only with modern languages.

Much classically-derived vocabulary is unobtrusive to the point of invisibility in Modern English prose - doubly so in SF, where sesquipedalian Latinate terms can be the simplest and most transparent way to convey world-building detail. But you cannot disguise the modernity of such words - they simply do not look or sound native to English - and putting them in the mouth of an Anglo-Saxon speaker will make them stand out. And that might be just what you want: for example, if your viewpoint character thinks in highly Latinate language and you want to show that she has such an effective translation gimmick that the words she hears and speaks feel just like her natural idiom. But etymological anachronism - like so much else - needs to be used deliberately or not at all. If your Alfred the Great says "obtain" where he could say "get" or "primarily" where he could say "foremost," you will lose linguistically-attuned readers (who are the readers most likely to pick up a book starring Alfred the Great in the first place.)

This is not to say that the presence of borrowings is always more jarring than their absence. Consider Poul Anderson's famous essay, "Uncleftish Beholding," which uses no non-native English words at all [1]. While it's the quotable passages that tend to stick in the mind, as where Anderson renders E=mc2 as "work is like unto weight manifolded by the fourside of the haste of light," the essay's wonderful strangeness owes just as much to Anderson's complete avoidance of such common, invisible - but non-native - words as "very," "because," and "use."

These words, of course, all came to English via Norman French, and have been in the language for longer than the Greek and Latin terms (mass, energy, multiply) Anderson translates in his version of Einstein's equation; and they stand out less to the reader's eye and ear. As a general rule, the older a borrowing, the less obvious its roots: early loans from French, Latin (tile, seal, priest) and Norse (skin, sky, egg) stand out not at all, while substitutions like Anderson's - "folk" for "people," "stead" for "place" - leap out as archaic and exotic. And sometimes archaic and exotic is exactly what you want.

Tolkien, of course, is the master of the etymologically-appropriate word, and of carefully-modulated levels of linguistic archaism. An interesting exercise, and a good way to spend a really fun couple of hours cat-vacuuming, is to find two or three contrasting passages - descriptions of Hobbiton versus descriptions of Minas Tirith or Edoras; conversations among the hobbits versus their conversations with Aragorn or Theoden, or the heroic characters' conversations with each other - and compare the percentages of native English, French, and classical words. You will find that very nearly all the truly archaic English, with the exception of mathom, is associated with the heroic characters, with Gondor and Rohan, while very nearly all the French and Classical vocabulary is associated with the hobbits, whose linguistic modernity helps mediate the story for a modern audience.

Whether you aim for noticeable archaism or for a more timeless vocabulary, your best friend in all matters of etymology is the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which gives the dates and sources of the first known citations for all its headwords, and often for distinct usages of a word, for idioms, and for grammatical constructions. The OED is available online, and all its updates appear there long before they see print in the supplements; the online version is subscription-only, but many subscribing libraries permit cardholders to access it remotely through their own portals.

Lastly, there is an Old English poem called "The Rhyming Poem." They call it that because it's the only one. Rhyme is a Middle English innovation; OE poetry depended on a flexible but obligatory pattern of alliteration and on clever kennings - riddling names, like "whale-road" for the sea. And, in the case of the riddles, on some really lurid double entendre. But not on rhyme.

Middle English, circa 1150-1400 CE

Middle English (ME), while it will still take your time traveler some time to get used to, will be more easily comprehensible than Old English, both for your characters and for your readers. Except for very early ME, you won't need to resort to the conceit of translation, and in fact I recommend that you don't - it will look too much like simple anachronism. Don't take it out of your toolbox quite yet, though: anything set between the Norman Conquest and Caxton's Mallory will likely involve some conversations in French or Latin. In fact, if your characters are noble, educated, in the church, or any combination of the three, you can probably get them to converse entirely in French or Latin if you prefer to avoid writing Middle English.

But don't be too daunted at imitating the language of Chaucer or Layamon - prose is not poetry, most modern grammatical structures were available (if not always common) to ME speakers, and you can write stripped-down, simple-but-passable Middle English dialog without getting into full-blown pastiche. (Though, really, if you're not excited about writing pastiche in the language of the time period - whichever time period - you might want to ask yourself why you're setting a story there in the first place.)

But whether you intend to write whole chapters of pastiche, or as little as you can get away with, you'll need to do your homework. Read the literature of the time and place - and look for texts from as close to the time and place of your story as you can find; these few centuries compassed great and rapid change in all aspects of the English language.

Most immediately noticeable to time travelers, whether they come from the past or the future, are the changes in phonology, the sound system of the language. Travelers accustomed to OE will be struck by the increase to the consonant inventory, as [v], [z], and the "zh" sound of measure and leisure enter English via French loanwords; to the twenty-first century traveler, the vowels are the greatest shock.

Middle English had not yet undergone the sound change known simply as the Great Vowel Shift - indeed, the start of this change marks the boundary between Middle and Early Modern English. The Great Vowel shift was a chain shift; if you have ever noticed the distinctive accent along the Great Lakes between Buffalo and Chicago, then you have heard a chain shift in progress, the Northern Cities Shift. In a chain shift, each affected vowel moves into the space previously occupied by another. So, for example, speakers who have the Northern Cities Shift tend to pronounce the word stuck with a rounded back vowel, so that it sounds like the word stalk; to pronounce stalk like stock, stock like stack, and stack like stake or even steek - the vowels essentially play a game of musical chairs.

No one knows precisely why the Northern Cities Shift took off. It's theorized that chain shifts are a way to preserve the same number of distinctive vowels when one or two particular distinctions are lost, but no one knows why speakers of a language will go to such lengths to preserve distinctions in some situations but not in others; the first part of the Northern Cities Shift to occur, the conflation of the vowels in stalk and stock, has happened in many other dialects of American English - along the west coast, for example - without triggering any compensatory changes in the rest of the vowel system. Likewise, we don't know why the Great Vowel Shift occurred, but there is a general consensus among linguists that it was either triggered or helped along by the loss of distinctive vowel length.

The so-called long vowels of Modern English were just that in Middle English: long. The words hate, meet, bite, dole and rune and the words hat, met, bit, doll, and run were all pronounced with the five vowel sounds of modern Italian or Spanish. The final, non-silent e - it was schwaed [2], but present - and the doubled letters both denoted a vowel of longer duration; and it was this difference in duration, not any difference in vowel quality, that was distinctive.

The Great Vowel Shift would change this, raising long a to [e], long e to [i], and long i to the diphthong [ai]; raising the long o of goose to [u] and making a diphthong of the long u in house, and introducing a host of new distinctive sounds for the short vowels. But as of Chaucer's death, it hadn't yet taken off; time travelers will find that words they know, and can recognize in print, may still be incomprehensible on first hearing.

In other words, Middle English looks more modern than it sounds. And as the standardization of English spelling did not even begin until William Caxton introduced the printing press to England in 1476, it can be spelled to look more or less modern at your discretion; while a time traveler without benefit of study or translation gimmicks will be confused at first, your readers need not be, unless you choose to employ archaic spelling as a distancing device.

The grammar may throw your time traveler for a loop, or it may pose no problem at all - it depends on when she visits, and when she's coming from. Early Middle English grammar is basically Old English without gender or half the cases. Late Middle English grammar is basically Elizabethan English with inflected infinitives and plurals (as in "Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages") and temporal augment (as in the Wife of Bath's "If I so oft might have ywedded bee" - past participles, whether in complex past tense constructions like this or used adjectivally, as yclept, "called," generally take this y- or a- prefix.)

But smaller details vary so much with time and place that any overview would be so long, or else so incomplete, as to be nearly pointless; if you need to precisely imitate the language and style of one decade and one region, you have a lot of reading ahead of you. But the big things changed very slowly, and hold true - with local adjustments - for the whole of England until well into the seventeenth century, and even later in poetic or heightened speech. And so I'll move on now, and cover these grammatical differences as part of the Early Modern period.

Early Modern English, circa 1400-1700 CE

The most thorough and far-reaching linguistic changes are often the fastest. Between the influence of Norman French in the south and Old Norse in the Danelaw counties of the north, eleventh-century Old English shed most of its noun case system within a few generations. The Great Vowel Shift was accomplished just as quickly, at least in London and its environs - it never fully took hold in much of Scotland, which is why many Scots to this day pronounce "house" with a long [u].

But smaller linguistic changes may occur very gradually, over a span of centuries. Some of the most noticeable differences between the English of the twenty-first century and the English of the fourteenth or seventeenth century are the results of such slow and gradual changes. Here, then, is a rundown of some grammatical features absent from modern English, but common to Early Modern and Middle English (and, for that matter, to Old English):

And some phonological processes were just as slow to change: throughout the whole of Middle and Early Modern English, and poetically well into the nineteenth century, my and thy became mine and thine before vowels, as in mine oath, thine eyes. /h/ often counted as a vowel for this purpose, as it did for a/an alternation - an horse, mine host, and so on.

It's another comparatively rapid change, though, that makes the largest stumbling block for unwary time travelers: the loss, in the seventeenth century, of the second-person singular pronoun thou and its associated verbal inflection.

Grammatically, thou is not hard to use. It has an oblique form, thee, which, the Quakers notwithstanding, is never used as the subject of a sentence; it belongs anywhere you would say him and not he. And it's not hard to conjugate a verb in the second-person singular: In the present tense, the ending, -est (or just -st or -t on some auxiliary verbs) is used everywhere you would use a third-person -s ending, and nowhere you wouldn't. Unlike third-person -s, it's also employed in the past tense: so, randomly opening the King James Version of the Bible, we find "I forgave thee all that debt, because thou desiredst me: Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee?" (Matthew 19:32-3.)

If you are confused, try recasting the sentence in the third person and seeing how it works. I was once thrown out of an otherwise delightful -and professionally published - story when Rosaline told Mercutio "thou must slippest" some drug into some drink. I'm sure the author would never have written "he must slips," and the errors are precisely analogous.

The grammar of thou is not hard to master. Where modern English speakers mess up is in the usage - and given the pronoun's tumultuous history, this is no surprise.

To condense several centuries of linguistic, political, and religious turmoil into two paragraphs: The converse of the royal we was the royal you; a monarch referring to himself in the plural was addressed in the plural. Over the years, in most of the countries and languages of Europe, the nobility arrogated to themselves the right to this form of address, and it finally spread throughout the upper classes, until it came to represent, not the absolute rank of the addressee, but the relative ranks of addressee and speaker: inferiors addressed superiors with you [3], and were in turn addressed with thou. Parents thoued their children, bosses thoued their workers, nobles thoued commoners; and the children, workers, and commoners replied with you. Equals, on the other hand, addressed each other by the same term: you in the upper classes; thou in the lower.

Singular you is first cited around 1350. By 1550, the thou/you contrast was in full bloom. And in 1648, something happened that would eventually expunge thou from the language and leave English the only major European language without a singular or a familiar second-person pronoun: George Fox founded the Society of Friends. The Quaker insistence on addressing all folk by the familiar singular was a revolutionary act, an outright refusal to observe the forms of worldly power structures. As a backlash, you was embraced so completely that it became the default, and within a century thou was in a sharp decline, soon to vanish entirely from most English dialects (though, as with so many other features of early English, it held on much longer in the North.)

For the most part, once the Great Vowel Shift is well underway, your time travelers should acclimate reasonably quickly; and your readers' advantage over them will become much slimmer. It won't vanish altogether, of course - accents will change with time and place and none of them will be quite what a twenty-first century speaker is used to; Shakespeare's rhymes can attest to that. But grammatically, there is very little a modern speaker can say that an Elizabethan listener cannot parse - word order was more flexible, but its flexibility permitted everything today's English allows.

Indeed, from the introduction of the printing press in 1476 onward, "flexibility" is the keyword. England was a merchant power, then an empire, and the language enjoyed a constant influx of borrowed words; and, almost as if in competition with the foreign vocabulary, native wordsmiths invented new words at a faster rate every year.

Because of all this glossopoeic exuberance, anachronism is less of a worry for you than if you are writing about the days before printing. The rules for building new words, and the ways of modifying old ones - changing the part of speech or the transitivity of verbs, making common nouns out of proper names - have changed very little in the last 600 years. If a word is put together according to the rules of English word-formation, the lack of a citation need not stop you from using it. Shakespeare's many coinages are known because his plays have been constantly performed and seen, but he was not the only person of his era to coin new words; there must have been countless obscure poets and balladeers and raconteurs whose new coinages never saw print until someone else used them, years or decades later, and countless words independently coined by many speakers in many places and times.

(Comparatively) recent English, circa 1700-present

The closer you approach to the present day, the less demand the language of the time will make on your time travelers and your readers. Unfortunately, it doesn't become correspondingly simpler for you: because the texts of the time are easier to read, they will be more widely read, and any mistakes or glaring anachronisms you commit will be noticed by far more readers than will note your missteps with Anglo-Saxon.

Since 1700, English phonology has undergone no changes so great as in the preceding centuries: accents have arisen, but for the most part they are mutually comprehensible. Grammar, likewise, has changed hardly at all. Where the time traveler - and the unwary author - is most likely to misstep is in the area of usage: in altered shades of meaning, in class markers and shibboleths [4], and in the limits of polite and respectable discourse.

Fortunately, we can usually turn to contemporary writers for advice on just those matters: beginning with Johnson's 1755 Dictionary, the second half of the eighteenth century saw a flood of grammar books, usage manuals, spelling handbooks, and dictionaries hit the presses - a tide of prescriptivism that has hardly ebbed since. For any place and time in the modern English-speaking world, the researcher will find no shortage of sources documenting how people were enjoined to speak; and no shortage of sources showing how they did speak, either - novels, plays, humorous essays, and the prescriptive screeds that fulminate against common errors. And for questions about the usage of single words, the OED, as usual, has saved us all the trouble of going to primary sources.

The primary sources, however, with their great anxiety over correct speech and their imposition on English of unsupported Latin-derived "rules" from which standard written English has not yet freed itself, tend to obscure several important points:

Your intuition is not necessarily the best guide to polite and respectable discourse, either - and it is here that you will have to take the most thought for your readership. You must be certain not only to present the language of the time accurately, but to present it in such a way that your readers can correctly construct the rules behind it.

Profanity is, perhaps, the area in which the tension between historical accuracy and modern effect is highest. The Victorians, on both sides of the Atlantic, knew our full repertoire of sexual and excretory profanity - indeed, that vocabulary has scarcely changed in a thousand years - and considered it rude, but not, strictly speaking, profane; and they did not draw much on that vocabulary for the sake of strengthening their speech. Not until the 1890s is "fucking" recorded as a simple intensifier. Blasphemy, however, carried a weight much greater than a simple "fucking" does today, as we can see if we compare the paltry handful of euphemisms for it - "frigging," "freaking," "effing" - all recent except the handful of hobson-jobsons of French foutre - with the wealth of taboo deformations of "God," "Devil," "Jesus," "Christ," "Lord," "damn," and "Hell:" gog, cokk, and Gis through 'sblood, zounds, gadzooks, oddsbodkins and Deuce to gosh, golly, drat, Great Scott, good grief, Jiminy Crickets, gee whiz, jeez, jeepers, Judas Priest, criminy, crikey, cripes, for crying out loud, lawks, lor, lumme, Sam Hill, heck, darn, durn, doggone, and dozens more, spanning the whole recorded history of English.

The result is that if you are accustomed to allowing dialog to carry the weight of the worldbuilding and the emotional landscape, you may need to rethink that strategy with regard to invective: while listeners in 1850 will hear "God damn it!" as shockingly coarse, most modern readers will perceive it as the very mildest of curses, and euphemisms for it as laughable; any language that might seem sufficiently coarse to modern ears will be anachronistic in the extreme. This does not mean that you cannot draw on profanity as an intensifier in older English; merely that you will need to incorporate it into your world-building, and make the emotional valance of your curses clear to your readers.

And if you are writing for an SF (speculative fiction) audience, your readers should be able to do most of the work for you. I remember, as a teenager, getting the same thrill of cracking the world-building from noticing that only the eldest Miss Bennett was so addressed, and the younger Misses Bennett were all called "Miss Elizabeth," "Miss Mary," and so on, as I got from speculative fiction. Anything you need to look up in an etiquette handbook or similar source, you can interleave into the text in ways that make your readers eager to crack the code.

I'll deal more with worldbuilding next month, when this whirlwind tour through linguistic history moves on to part two, The Future.

[1] With the exceptions of "ymirstuff," "aegirstuff," and "helstuff" for uranium, neptunium, and plutonium, which translate the Roman gods with the corresponding Norse deities, as their proper English names have not been preserved.

[2] The schwa (ə) is a phonetic symbol which represents an unstressed mid-central vowel. It is pronounced like the "u" in "but" or the "a"s in "America."

[3] The singular you of respectful address was used as both a subject and object pronoun; where you was plural, it was an originally only an object pronoun, the corresponding subject pronoun being ye.

[4] A shibboleth is a word, pronunciation, or gramatical construction which distinguishes one group from another - anything from a high-class accent to an unusual slang term.

© Evelyn Browne

Evelyn Browne took second place in the First (Annual?) Commie Pinko Three-Day Novel Competition with a novella about cannibal frogs in space; currently, she is writing the glossary for an academic study of Harry Potter fanfiction. She recently fled graduate school and is now underemployed but much happier.






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