The presentation was given by Logan Kersley. Any misinformation is the fault of the note taker
- Create a sign language for movies and books
- Show, don’t tell: Using language.
- Language identifies members of a nation
- Slang is used and identifies which social groups you belong to or do not belong to
- In what world they use, inflections and grammatical constructs identify personality.
- War and Peace vs Dances with Wolves. W&P is known as the Great Russian novel. The hirockery knew French and Russian so French in the book. In the movie Dancing with Wolves. The audience is not expected to know Dakota. They use secondary language for narrative purposes and they have to explain to the audience.
If you use a secondary language?
- What language would your characters actually speak?
- Aliens would not be speaking in an Earth language
- There is a temptation to use an unfamiliar earth language. The Indian film Baahubali. Are you willing to appropriate someone’s real language is assigning culture traits to an already existing Earth culture?
- People notice patterns;
- Phonology: selection sounds, how they are arranged.
- Morphology: how worlds are put together–bits of words that have meaning.
Patterns vs. sets of letters.
- Syllable shapes & frequencies: the frequency of certain letters in a word is different by language.
How do you use a new word?
- Levels of exposure. Can use individual words. Easiest ways to use it. Maybe rearrange the word enragement in the sentence.
- Words
- Phrases
- Sentences
Type of exposure:
- Diegetic: something exists in the story. Someone can translate for the alien.
- Nondiabetic: rely upon footnotes in the story.
Secondary language techniques:
- Doing a screenplay, you can put in subtitles.
- Someone can translate.
- Have foreign language and then translation next to each other.
- Someone explain the meaning or the narrator explains.
- Make the meaning irrelevant not relevant to understand what is said. Fake swear words.
- If bring up names from a foreign culture, they don’t care what the name means.
- There are ways you can make the meaning obvious.
- You can use context clues for people to understand the word.
- Techniques are getting better or language translation.
Media influence on how to employ secondary language.
- What techniques work best for films: subtitle Avatar verse Hunt for red October. The characters start speaking Russian and then speak English.
- – What techniques work best for written media? Footnotes, apposition, explanation the meaning.
- What techniques work best for audiobooks? Voice-overs as in: Bouha U mup. Russian is spoken quietly in the background while the audiobook speaks in English in the foreground.
- link: http://www.reddit.com/r/fantasy/comments/ia2ppd/trouble_with_A memroy_called_emire/
Trying it all together:
- Use language in multiple ways so you can teach the reader. Star Trek III. The first time beam me up was in Klingon. The second time Kirk said the phrase in Klingon.
Q: how to pronounce words or names such a Heroine’s name (in Harry Potter)? Most popular is
– a. just make it irrelevant.
- include a glossary: Kevin Hues for iron druid > has all the foreign and has a pronunciation guide.
- A Memory Called Empire has a pronouncing guide. Book language of power > has techniques.
Q: how to make one name unique that will be associated to a specified language.
- The language needs to be very distinct.
- The name may be longer to illustrate their uniqueness.
Q: Game of Thrones:
Foreigners insult a character because they think she does not speak their language. She does know the language. This illustrates how language shows a culture / national identity
