Eneh Akpan Writes: English language

Showing posts with label English language. Show all posts

Saturday, September 27, 2014

Does a Fantasy Setting Need Its Own Language?

Inscription: "No Good Deed Goes Unpunished"
quote from "Wolves of the Calla" by Stephen King

A good fantasy series does not need its own language. There is simply no reason for it to exist unless the author has a penchant for linguistics because any time it would actually appear in the book, it would have to be translated into an actual language, thus mitigating its usefulness as a distinct language. There are a few conceivable exceptions, like a short phrase or message that is presented in a native form, that is left concealed until later events. However, this usage is no different than a closed door or a locked chest in terms of plot devices.

Any fantasy author, by at least throwing in a few words and phrases in a made-up language, can communicate to the reader that multiple nations or multiple culture-groups exist in this world, which helps to make it believable.

Language is deeply tied to culture so when trying to create distinct cultures or subcultures within a fantasy novel it (language) can be a very useful tool. Language and culture are so inextricably linked that creating a language is essentially creating a culture and doing this really helps to flesh out and define a culture and particular characters from that culture.

Basically language is great for an epic, a story in which we see different cultures. GRRM (George R. R. Martin) does this well in A Song of Ice and Fire, because he uses it sparingly.

It becomes less and less practical to have one common language as the geographical and cultural scope of the story increases. Having various languages that work will also show that the author has put extensive thought into how their ethnic groups have developed—trade languages, regional dialects and divergent forms can all hint at how civilizations have progressed given their relationships to each other and to any observable barriers.

If a distinct vocabulary has been established, the reader might also be able to see distinct cultural values given the right opportunities. Do family names come first or second for individuals? Is poetry terse and succinct or long and flowery?

“

The area of Wheel of Time was somewhere between the size of Europe and USA. Nevertheless, all people spoke the same language with only few unique phrases per country. In Song of Ice and Fire the Seven Kingdoms are the size of South America, but there is only one common language.

”

In Stephen King's Dark Tower Series. They all speak English, but in Roland's world if you want a quick snack, you don't have a sandwich, but rather a popkin, and when your grandfather was a kid, he didn't walk five miles (uphill both ways) to get to school, he walked three wheels to get there. Frankly, ‘ka-tet’ sounds a lot better than ‘group of destiny-linked brothers-in-arms.’ However, when you are creating a new race or species, I don't think it's farfetched to come up with a new language.

Hope you learned a thing or two from all the suggestions. By the way, these were all clipped from comments from a post I published a few years back. I thought turning it into an article would make the whole thing an easier read. You can get the full gist here: Should You Create Language for a Broad Fantasy World? Knock yourself out!

Keep your pens bleeding!

Akpan

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

On Identity

If you talk to a man in a language he understands that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.

—Nelson Mandela

If you don’t define yourself for yourself, you’ll be crushed into other people’s fantasies of you and be eaten alive.

—Audrey Lorde

My childhood home was the twisted variation of a family guesthouse; we always had some member of a distant family crashing with us. They came and went in a randomized fashion ultimately concocting nature’s own nonpareil interludes. Once, a long time ago, when we were just kids, Sir told my brothers and me, “You ought to make something of a habit out of conversing in your native dialect at home. English of course, should come easy enough in school.” Sir always had one such thing or another to say when he was still around. “It’s vital that you preserve your heritage,” he’d say. “And besides, since I don’t want to play your interpreter when you visit at the village, I would recommend you get the hang of your patois.” ‘Sir’ was what we called our father.

To the relatives we bunked, because he wasn’t their father (though old enough to be for some) and to demonstrate their sense of gratitude and respect, my father became Sir. That is typical Ibibio practice. “Sir” is a monosyllable but we somehow managed to override the laws of phonetics and made the word come out in two syllables. I grew up to observe folks around my home call Father that and I got hooked on it like a drug. Sir didn’t do much by way of setting us straight. I guess he figured it didn’t pretty much matter one way or the other what word repped “father” as long as the attitude clicked.

Sir was a big fan of local dialect—“a man ought to master his own language before any other”—and he stood by his belief until his translation to glory in 1995. (“translation to glory” I think that’s a refined way of depicting death, don’t you?) Through the years, I’ve bumped into sizeable opportunity to reeducate myself on its peculiar and dead level candor. And I make no bones about it but Sir’s opinion makes an intrepid kind of sense.

The kind that feeds its voice into customs trapped beneath the lid of the coffin of a flung way of life and makes them scream out in a sort of energetic shout that shatters the woodwork like a strong morning light piercing the horizon.

I was a Calabar boy in Lagos. I suppose if you were Nigerian, you’d enjoy poking fun at me about how with those seven words you knew my entire story. Yet, you’d be several miles wide. Looking back, I realize I‘ve always been like an actor in a struggle to identify his role in a play filled with casts who shared apparently similar parts. For me, the idea has been, when my turn comes to make an entrance, not to wind up as an archetype or worse, a flat character. Sir was probably trying to save my brothers and me the unease that trucks with the horde of out-of-placeness among people of our own tribe when he had us learn Ibibio. But you see, when you have to climb life’s ladder while trying to dig three make that four, languages at the same time, the heat is tuned up to the nth degree.

Growing up in Nigeria has not exactly been camping out on Easy Street. I’ve spent a large chunk of my life trying to define who I am in a multi-cultured, multi-layered society. The challenge has not been without its out-of-the-usual-run-of-things type of fun. On the one hand, the Nigerian school system pitched the British English as its official language; on the other hand, I had the American movies, literature and hip-hop that I grew up with. I’m better acquainted with the American version. I even take a sense of pride in the fact that I speak Yoruba to a degree that I make original speakers question my true origin sometimes. But I am the son of my father cause I speak his language; I’ve dipped beneath this black body and fetched up who I am.

A couple of years before, I usually got stuck in a pretty fix when natter shifted to questions regarding my ethnicity. You’d have had to drag the confession out of me with a chainfall. (The unease sprang up from what you’d expect in a society glutted with copious dialects coupled with the reality that my patois was a minority). I’ve had a hard time trying to figure out how exactly I got along way back when I lived in denial—when I’d not yet defined myself for myself to coin a phrase. Then again, another question prays to be tackled. What happened that finally peeled the scales off my eyes and pushed realization, ripe and full across the threshold into where I lived?

Writing happened. You gotta know yourself, know what you stand for to be a writer worth a darn. In my drive to become a better writer, I turned up a knockout identity.

Yes, writing happened and it introduced me to the sense of who I am, to a sense of place. It’s consumed me with a love for words that’s grown out of a plain desire to express the me of myself to a life-long dream to write anew the details of this macrocosm through the novelty of language.

Keep your pen bleeding.

Akpan

Friday, May 18, 2012

Have You Seen My Childhood?

Me in third or fourth grade.
That's actually a passport photo from my report card

I remember growing up as a child and learning to read and write – ha! ha! That’s a laugh – I couldn’t read worth a darn until fourth grade. But I could write and it was a thrill to know there was no law against that.

The first big vocabulary I taught myself to spell (it’s never quite escaped my memory, you know) was the word: Because. Go ahead and laugh your head off if you have to but back then in third grade, Because was a whole mouthful for me. I can recall sitting in the middle of the classroom, inside one of those makeshift school buildings called Jakande Blocks; the then governor of Lagos state, Mr. Jakande had set off building of low-cost classrooms at the onset of the Free Education Program. I was staring at the chalkboard and wondering for the life of me if ever I was going to master the English language with so many vocabularies to memorize.

Things and places have souls. I think I can attest to that fact being one weaned by the navel of the soul. Childhood dreams which, by and large shape our adult lives are one of these things with souls.

I hydroplaned through first to third grades having my examination and test papers read to me by my class teachers. Was that fair? It wasn’t a special privilege, if that’s the question on your lips; there were several other pupils as dumb as I was, and a few were royally bird-brained. At least my teachers didn’t have to feed me the answers. Give me that much credit.

You see, I was a smart kid trapped behind the language barrier. The last time I checked even diplomats were not beyond the ugly beast. Why else would they hire the service of an interpreter?

My life has always been a drive to decipher the mystery of language, to interpret its nuances, the tone and mood of sentences, and the rhythm of words. It seems to me that my entire life is hooked on the poetry of language.

And here’s the reason, I think, that ties it all together and gives my thirst wholeness of purpose: as a child, I copied sentences from books and the dictionary–my family owned this early hardcover edition of The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English. (Of or in, I can’t remember which though; I think one was replaced with the other by the publishers in subsequent editions.)

“What do you think you’re doing, Eneh? You know you can’t read!”

I do remember my brothers teasing me. Often, if I could afford the luxury of altercation, I gave my enthusiastic reply:

“Yeah, but someday I’ll be able to and then, I’ll return to these pages and figure out for myself what exactly I was up to all that time!”

I think that fixed them though, I don’t think they meant any harm. I suppose they were just curious.

Many waters have passed under the bridge since that bout of analphabetism was broken. The force of the realization was as audible as cymbals clapped really close to one’s ears. I’ve devoured books spanning literally every subject under the sun since my childhood years.

It appears to me that my fascination with books and language thus far has been in defiance of the humiliation I endured growing up preliterate; I feel renewed like a leaf going its metamorphic rounds each time I read or write. It’s like a message from that kid copying notes he couldn’t read:

“I guess I figured it out for myself, after all!”

Keep your pens bleeding.

Akpan