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On My Desk: Random Diacritical MarksSeptember 18, 2008 Today I picked up Eldest (Knopf, August 2005) by Christopher Paolini, sequel to the famous Eragon (Knopf, August 2003). Our YA editor was mentioning that the third book, Brisingr, was about to come out, and she suggested I might like them. "You like dragons, right?" she said. "And made-up languages."As it happens, ten years ago I was a linguistics major, had studied four foreign languages (French, Russian, Japanese, and Irish Gaelic, none of which I now remember much of beyond how to say "please take pity on this stupid American and speak English if you can"), and was a devoted follower of the CONLANG mailing list for people who thought making up languages was fun. I don't just like made-up languages. I have theories about made-up languages, and I have very strong opinions. Those theories and opinions may be ten years out of date at this point, but strangely enough, that makes them no less strong. Elizabeth handed me a copy of Eldest and I flipped to the glossary. My eye fell on "Atra guliä un ilian tauthr ono un atra ono waíse skölir fra rauthr", a farewell blessing. I immediately started translating and parsing: "atra ilian tauthr ono" is very directly "may happiness follow you", so that's SVO, simple enough... but it looks like "Sé mor'ranr ono finna" is "may peace you find", that's OSV... the article placement is kind of weird, "dull the knife" but "stop arrows those", and an explicit article in "dull the knife" and "raise the water" but not in "compress [the] air"... why on earth would the phrase "compress the air" appear in a fantasy novel in any language anyway... "Is it supposed to look Welsh?" she asked, pointing at "Eyddr eyreya onr!", which means "Empty your ears!". (Of what?) "It's like quasi-Germanic pseudo-Welsh with random diacritical marks," I said. Elizabeth is a smart, perceptive woman. She took the book from me, closed it, placed it on top of her copy of Eragon, and changed the topic. I've said before that one of the most important parts of my job is finding the right reader for a book. In this case, that reader was emphatically not me. Posted by Rose Fox on September 18, 2008 | Comments (1)
October 15, 2008
In response to: On My Desk: Random Diacritical Marks Ere Be Gone! commented: I read an interview in which Paolini said that, for one of his dragon novels, he "invented" three languages. Well, no, he didn't. I've read and studied Tolkien and, young Paolini, you're not Tolkien. Being able to borrow a little here, a little there, and throw in some accent marks does not a language make: Tolkien was a philologist; he had also worked on the OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY. He, in fact, was inspired to write THE LORD OF THE RINGS because it would provide context for his invented languages, which had solid underpinnings.
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