Dorpish (not a conlang exactly)

[sasasha]

So for a fiction project, I have been imagining a future sprachbund of Dutch and English, with a little influence from Northern English, Scots, Danish and French thrown in for good measure. Thing is, it's not a serious conlang project -- because I want the (non-linguist) reader to be able to more or less, but not completely, glean its meaning. It is probably going to be mainly used in dialogue between the characters that speak it (a minority culture), and more for colour than anything else -- though at first I wanted to write a whole novel in it, Nadsat style, but that is probably not on the cards.

It can only really absorb a smidgeon of grammatical influence from Dutch otherwise the sense is going to get truly difficult to track for the monoglot Anglophone. The majority of the influence is lexical (and a bit phonological, represented orthographically with absolutely no systematic logic). The lack of systematic logic is a key feature... because I'm thinking about the reader, not good conlanging! But also because this is a pretty nasty future without things like formally standardised spelling and, like, school. I do have some notes on grammar, and it is maybe a little more thought through than it looks, but I also want it to have a slapdash piratey feel.

So what I want to do is put a little sample here, with no context, no gloss, no nothing, and ask for your thoughts on the use of Dorpish. This is the first text longer than a few words I've tried to make in it so thoughts at this stage would help me work out what directions to go with it. Particular questions: To what extent is it intelligible to you as a speaker of English? As a person who knows about other Germanic languages? What does it seem like to Dutch speakers specifically? Is the density of non-English words too high? From this sample what might you say about the kind of language-contact going on here -- could I be thinking of a creolisation process here, are there other processes that might more closely match the effect I want to achieve, or is there simply no known linguistic process on God's green earth that would produce such a monstrosity?


**

It war de dag o de Coleby Cop. All morgen de shellies drove into de haven in d’Vest, an voonboats war a-trecked up de upright in de Oost. De zailors got a-browseled sheer zoon as zey zet foot on de hard: zey drank neet just a spinkle van de glimmin an glancin cranes o beer det out o de bar van de grootly natty youngfrow Meyer sprooted — neet a spinkle, nay, but a bayster flood ov it. Zee, de tamely youngfrow, was slittin a feen lilly drag roond her stoor bosom, an laughin while zee war treckin pints, an everyman, van de prince to de burse-gents to de shurks had a turn grouperin roond her an undraggin her wit zer eyes.

Zee took to tellin sprookies as a way to pass de tide. Neet normally one t’entertain de shitsnack o de browseled, today war neet any normal dag. Today de Dompers felt zummat zey might never normally fool: zey felt dat zey belang. An zo de sprookies felt good to tell, an Meyer lapped up her audientie publique as zey verckly pooled emselves like de rused pickheads zey war.

[bradrn]

Particular questions: To what extent is it intelligible to you as a speaker of English?

I’m a monolingual English speaker. (Though my father can speak a bit of Afrikaans.) Let’s see how much I can understand:

It war de dag o de Coleby Cop. All morgen de shellies drove into de haven in d’Vest, an voonboats war a-trecked up de upright in de Oost. De zailors got a-browseled sheer zoon as zey zet foot on de hard: zey drank neet just a spinkle van de glimmin an glancin cranes o beer det out o de bar van de grootly natty youngfrow Meyer sprooted — neet a spinkle, nay, but a bayster flood ov it. Zee, de tamely youngfrow, was slittin a feen lilly drag roond her stoor bosom, an laughin while zee war treckin pints, an everyman, van de prince to de burse-gents to de shurks had a turn grouperin roond her an undraggin her wit zer eyes.

It was the day of the Coleby Cop. All morning the ?shellies drove into the haven in the west, and ?voonboats were ?tracked up the upright in the East. The sailers got ?browseled ?sheer ?zoon as they set foot on the ?hard: they drank ?neet just a ?spinkle of the glimmering and glancing crates of beer that out of the bar of the greatly natty child Meyer sprouted…

And I’ll stop here, because this clearly isn’t making coherent sense. I think the biggest issue here is the intelligibility of words — I’ve marked words I can’t understand with question marks.

[sasasha]

Thanks!

This chimes with my feeling that Nadsat is successful in being the vessel of a whole novel because it uses its Nadsat-only words more sparingly and the context helps bear the semantic load more effectively, but I think this version of Dorpish is never going to be able to do that for the following paradoxical reason:

Say I wrote

"De zailors were all a-browseled by noon on account of de beer bein poured down zeir necks all morgen."

1) It should be clear that browseled means 'drunk'? Context (well, English) is supplying more of the meaning.

But

2) It seems kind of pointless (and annoying) to spell zailors, de, bein and zeir like that, since the language overall is not really different enough from English to require a whole separate orthography - it's just a bit dialecty. Why not just remark on the speaker's accent and spell it all normally?

When Nadsat borrows one or two words a sentence from Russian, they stick out like a sore thumb. Yes many are impenetrable at first (to the extent that the glossary at the back is necessary, I think, unless you just want to read in a dreamlike state of semi-consciousness) but the whole effect is both an interesting challenge and an easy concept to swallow for the reader. When I borrow a Dutch word, it is very likely extremely close to an English one already, and there may be a transferral of some sense (maybe not the right sense) from the word itself. This leads to issues which encourage me to make the language more extreme in its borrowings and phonological spellings... until you get gobbledygook.

If I'm going to restrict the language to minor illustrations for colour, then perhaps this level of initial intelligibility is ok. But any heavier use of it looks risky! And why not, then, make a real conlang of it and just use that, if intelligibility doesn't matter much?

I shall ponder more and maybe come up with some other test passages...

[din]

Minor comment: I didn't realize there was a glossary at the back, and it never occurred to me to look for one. When I found it after reading the entire book, I felt like it was something an editor would insist on to avoid alienating readers, despite the author not wanting it to exist (and probably did want to alienate the reader to a small degree). That's completely unsubstantiated, by the way, and fully based on my own impression.


--
As for your other question:

As a Dutch speaker, it looks like you were tasked to translate the speech of a stereotypical Scottish sailor from a century or two ago into Dutch without losing too much of his character. Instead it would have been wiser to choose a divergent dialect of Dutch to achieve the same effect.


(None of that was your goal, of course, but you asked me what it sounded like to a Dutch speaker)

[sasasha]

As for your other question:

As a Dutch speaker, it looks like you were tasked to translate the speech of a stereotypical Scottish sailor from a century or two ago into Dutch without losing too much of his character. Instead it would have been wiser to choose a divergent dialect of Dutch to achieve the same effect.


(None of that was your goal, of course, but you asked me what it sounded like to a Dutch speaker)

That's really interesting, in that you felt it had been translated into Dutch without losing character of the original idiosyncratic English, rather than the other way round. And I find your comment about the divergent dialect even more interesting -- good idea, though I don't know what you mean by saying it would have been "wiser" to take that approach. Could you point me to a dialect(/s) the kind of which you are talking about?

[din]

'Wiser' perhaps in the sense of being more readily accepted and less alienating. But obviously alienating the reader to some extent could be a good thing, if you want to be exotic. It's just that the more exotic you make it, the fewer readers will stick around.

As for divergent dialects of Dutch... Urkers might work well here, since it seems to be taking place in a fishing town

[Bob]

So for a fiction project ...

I actually can or have been able to read and understand to a high degree any Germanic language of any era. Though I have to have a sizeable text to read, not just a single sentence. Though my North Germanic languages have never been as good as the others (I think the rest are mostly West Germanic).

I can do the same thing for Romance languages and Latin; and both using extensive study of Proto-Indo-European and word etymology and key languages from both branches of Indo-European. Yet I read a lot more Romance languages because it's easier to find large texts like that (Dante's Divine Comedy!). Though for scholarship, I've read a ton of German.

This all is notably useful for me in that French, German, and Latin are very useful to my scholarship in ancient languages and then Spanish Italian sometime Dutch also are sometimes useful. But very rarely Swedish.

I likewise have been slowly learning Mandarin, and Japanese to a lesser extent, the past 5 years or more. But I'm not anywhere near as advanced with it and it's slow going because there's a whole swath of hieroglyphic aka logographic and ancient languages for which Mandarin nor Japanese offers nothing at all.

I could follow it quite well but there were some odd things about it which caused me trouble. The modern and even historic Germanic languages, or Romance languages, are of a limited number and have standard spelling systems which one gets used to and even builds memories of, which can be refreshed as needed. There was something about your spelling system which threw me off.

There also maybe be an etymological consistency to any given (Germanic) language which might have been lacking in your work here. But I'm just guessing, it would take time to sort that sort of intuition out. And I beg your patience with the same and welcome you posting this here.

Some of my recent conlangs have been comparable, even ones I've posted samples of here.

It also reminds me of the slightly famous Rin Tin Tin conlang or pseudo-conlang. Which I think was based on Slavic languages. I take a special interest in conlangs from tv movies and books in part because few do and in part because I'm partial to theatre, art, and all such collaborative endeavor.

...

And while I'm telling of the languages I can actually read, as opposed to the many that I've mostly just studied, my abilities with Ancient Greek and Biblical Hebrew are also notable. But my Biblical Hebrew is not that impressive and I really rely heavily on interlinear glossed texts that I have and have not spent a ton of time memorizing anything but the most common word parts and words.

This is, by the way, and in part, what becomes of forsaking the regular watching of television. It's also a difficult hobby because only my closest friends and relatives have any esteem for it whatsoever. It is almost as if I cannot speak of it at all to anyone else, so loathesome to people find it. It is a rare thing for people where I live to get much into languages. I try to communicate to others what it is like but it is such a complex thing and against their preconceptions that I have little success with it. But it's all worth it.

[sasasha]

...

Re etymological consistency - sprachbunds (like English) are by nature etymologically diverse. There are still areas in Northern England where 'kirk' and 'church' sit side by side, for instance, the usage influenced by register, medium etc.

Re spelling systems - my model here is early Middle English (after centuries of significant language contact with Old Norse, and still in the white hot period of the contact with Old French). In such situations, some spellings are modelled on the fairly standardised language which was in situ before the incursion of another language. Some spellings are modelled on the incoming language. Some spellings are confused between the two, especially if there is a low level of literacy and learning in general in the population. Some texts (and communities of speakers, learners and writers which they represent) are more conservative, some are the opposite, and everything in between. There isn't consistency here because there wasn't consistency in Middle English either.

Re Rin Tin Tin - I shall check it out.

Thanks, genuinely, for these points. You should know that the rest of your post, about languages you have studied, was frustrating to receive. Honestly, I'd invite you to edit it and see how much better you come across as a correspondent if you only include the parts of your post which are intended to help other people, or inform them about relevant things. Because those helpful parts are, to use your wording, really "welcome"!

[Bob]

Well, I don't understand you. Your post is about Germanic languages and I write to you about how I can read Germanic languages very well. And then I talk about the few other language family branches I can read well, being mostly a studier of languages and not a speaker or reader so much.

I think you ask too much. I work so hard and have so little time on the internet and you're like, "I don't like this part."

Well, I'm a scholar myself. I've been all over the world and read all sorts of books and articles. I don't criticize people from other parts of the world for not acting in a particular way. I specialize in the study of different mindsets and beliefs, though, and study anthropology a lot.

I let people have their say even if they're not doing a very good job of it. At least when I'm reading the scholarship they've written.

Other people from around the world do not see things as you do. And they're not wrong. They're different and approach reality in a different way.

This is basic anthropology stuff.

[sasasha]

'Wiser' perhaps in the sense of being more readily accepted and less alienating. But obviously alienating the reader to some extent could be a good thing, if you want to be exotic. It's just that the more exotic you make it, the fewer readers will stick around.

As for divergent dialects of Dutch... Urkers might work well here, since it seems to be taking place in a fishing town

Interesting, thanks. Re alienation: are you imagining a Dutch reader? Because I don't quite see how an English reader unfamiliar with Dutch would find the use of a divergent dialect of Dutch less alienating/exotic! Or were you using that as an analogy - do you mean that I should use an already extant divergent dialect of English for these passages?

I guess what I'm trying to do is create that divergent dialect (one with a heavy language contact feature from Dutch), which will at first alienate the reader but eventually become something... I dunno... warm and fuzzy to them. Once it is familiar (I don't mean fully intelligible necessarily, but familiar) it should feel like a fun, colourful secret they have been let into - mirroring the experience one of us would have if thrust into an unfamiliar fantasy world but then invited for tea by a faun, I guess.

I think therefore it needs to (a) occur only briefly here and there where this complex of effects is needed, and (b) be slightly more intelligible to the average English reader than this passage.

I will definutely check out Urkers. But this language contact arises because the Netherlands is mostly underwater (sorry!); the Dorpers are refugees in Eastern England. This makes me feel that basing Dorpish on colloquial but standard Dutch may make more sense... what do you think?

[sasasha]

Well, I don't understand you. Your post is about Germanic languages and I write to you about how I can read Germanic languages very well. And then I talk about the few other language family branches I can read well, being mostly a studier of languages and not a speaker or reader so much.

I think you ask too much. I work so hard and have so little time on the internet and you're like, "I don't like this part."

Well, I'm a scholar myself. I've been all over the world and read all sorts of books and articles. I don't criticize people from other parts of the world for not acting in a particular way. That's bizaare and ignorant.

I let people have their say even if they're not doing a very good job of it.

Other people from around the world do not see things as you do. And they're not wrong. They're different and approach reality in a different way.

This is basic anthropology stuff.

I quite agree. And when you travel, I assume you dislike causing discomfort, frustration and offence to the people you visit? I assume you remove your shoes in Japanese temples, don't shake hands with members of the opposite sex in the Middle East, don't walk on the grass outside King's College Cambridge, and tip 20% in the USA?

I told you how your post made me feel, because you should be aware of the effects you have on others. You are also interacting with someone, and you also should think about what effect you leave them with.

[KathTheDragon]

@Bob:

I believe what sasasha is getting at (but please correct me if I'm wrong) is that you talk about yourself way too much, far beyond what could ever be necessary to make a decent response to a post. You probably only actually needed to include paragraphs #5, #6, and the remark about being reminded of Rin Tin Tin (but not the follow-up sentence about your interests). Paragraph #1 works as an aside afterwards, and maybe #2 as well. The rest are all fluff that does nothing to actually answer any of sasasha's questions.

Self-editing is a really valuable skill when you're having a conversation. I've reworded that first paragraph at least twice, and that's just what I realised I was doing. Criticising someone else for the lack of it isn't wrong and you should question yourself for finding it rude. So what if you have little time? Lots of people do, and they can still manage it.