On Writing: Foreign languages in an English story

[Tio_Narratore]

I'd never suggest Croat wasn't a Slavic language; I merely noted that Slavs who wrote in Cyrillics looked askance at the Romanization of Croat.

As to dumbing down further, I hardly think it really necessary to dumb down at all if your story carries itself. After all Eco's The Name of the Rose" is full of Latin (and some interesting other bits), and it was a best seller. I saw many a commuter reading it, and few, I expect, had any knowledge of Latin; they simply read around it, approximating the meaning from the context.

 

[Verdad]

I'd never suggest Croat wasn't a Slavic language; I merely noted that Slavs who wrote in Cyrillics looked askance at the Romanization of Croat.

I don't want to nitpick, but I too would like to react to this. If I'm reading you correctly, you're saying all Slavs used Cyrillic alphabet to a point, after which some of them converted, which earned them perennial disapproval of the rest. That, however, is simply not true.

The details of early Slavic literacy get messy, what with the Glagolitic alphabet and all the micro-regional intricacies, but roughly speaking, one can rarely go wrong if one but goes a bit back and remembers the split of the Roman Empire, or more concretely, the split of the church to Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox. The usage of a given alphabet largely follows this division line, as do various other cultural traditions that pertain to 'Eastern' and 'Western'.

Croatian, or Czech, or Polish, among others, were thus never typically written in Cyrillic. Cyrillic wasn't their original form from which they could be romanized. Rather (roughly speaking again) the languages of Catholic areas developed their written form in the Roman alphabet from the beginning, and the same is true, respectively, of Cyrillic alphabet and the areas dominated by Orthodox Christianity.

 

[BrazenFellow]

Ah, the linguistic nitpickings make me smile.

Verdad: Your 'rough generalization' is accurate enough save for a few outliers that I'd call it an acceptable truth.

 

[Epmd607]

Continuing to transliterate it is. Though, Tio_Narratore, the Croats are as Slavic as the Serbs and the Serbs are as Slavic as the Czechs who in turn are as Slavic as the Bulgarians. South and West Slav, as opposed to Central and East Slavic, but Slav nonetheless. Those languages, save for Bulgarian, are commonly written in Roman; all Russians (that I have met thus far) have a working knowledge of the Roman alphabet and can and will transliterate at will.

My technique for implementing foreign language is to hint at what I've just had a character say afterwards, or use soemthing obvious to the average English speaker, or even just repeat it in the narrative at some point. In the example I gave, it's literally "[This is] Galinov speaking; she's ours, over", which is close enough to the English text as to make no difference.

Does this go far enough towards the goal of not alienating readers (when executed skilfully) or do I need to dumb it down further?

First Person should react to foreign speech in the narrative and translate what has been said, doesn't have to be word for word, just provide the context. But I think that should be a rare case, since having a character say line after line in some foreign language will get tedious for the English reader. If the narrative isn't first person, should probably have even less foreign language.

The safest approach usually just seems to have the speaker Spanglish their speech, it's cute, no matter what the language. I've seen Indians do it well on this site, use words I'd never know had they not been in the context of broken English. In a sex story there's no reason to try and write like Umberto Eco, especially when you're not getting paid to be extra crafty. People get dumber when they're masturbating, most people don't write while masturbating, maybe take that into account.

 

[Epmd607]

...

Croatian, or Czech, or Polish, among others, were thus never typically written in Cyrillic. Cyrillic wasn't their original form from which they could be romanized. Rather (roughly speaking again) the languages of Catholic areas developed their written form in the Roman alphabet from the beginning, and the same is true, respectively, of Cyrillic alphabet and the areas dominated by Orthodox Christianity.

This made me chuckle. The Glagolitic alphabet was developed for the reason that the scripts the Slavs were already using(pre-Christian) didn't resemble the Roman alphabet at all, and probably more importantly, the Greek missionaries were the first on the scene(they preferred their own alphabet.) Cyrillic vs. Roman script really has little do with the later East/West split. Cyrillic was entrenched long before there was something called Eastern Orthodox. If Latin speakers had been the first missionaries on the scene there would be some latin/old slav hybrid that we would call 'Cyrillic'. Then again, we wouldn't call it 'Cyrillic', cuz St. Cyril was a Greek.

 

[Tio_Narratore]

I don't want to nitpick, but I too would like to react to this. If I'm reading you correctly, you're saying all Slavs used Cyrillic alphabet to a point, after which some of them converted, which earned them perennial disapproval of the rest. That, however, is simply not true.

The details of early Slavic literacy get messy, what with the Glagolitic alphabet and all the micro-regional intricacies, but roughly speaking, one can rarely go wrong if one but goes a bit back and remembers the split of the Roman Empire, or more concretely, the split of the church to Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox. The usage of a given alphabet largely follows this division line, as do various other cultural traditions that pertain to 'Eastern' and 'Western'.

Croatian, or Czech, or Polish, among others, were thus never typically written in Cyrillic. Cyrillic wasn't their original form from which they could be romanized. Rather (roughly speaking again) the languages of Catholic areas developed their written form in the Roman alphabet from the beginning, and the same is true, respectively, of Cyrillic alphabet and the areas dominated by Orthodox Christianity.

OK, but I was simplifying and generalizing for the sake of space...it's a thread, not a treatise...

 

[Epmd607]

OK, but I was simplifying and generalizing for the sake of space...it's a thread, not a treatise...

It's also Pure, and not The Truth. Go Figure.

 

[Verdad]

OK, but I was simplifying and generalizing for the sake of space...it's a thread, not a treatise...

Oh, no problem. I gave a way simplified version too, as it's a complex topic and not important for the thread. Just saw it and couldn't resist; it looked like a rough guideline might be of some use. It's either that or I was being OCD.

As far as the thread topic goes, I guess I'd give the same unhelpful answer as with anything else: using foreign languages can be great so long as it works. It can have a wonderful effect, giving the story flavor, or it can become annoying. Like most things with writing, I guess it's an "I know it when I see it" thing.

 

[Scotsman69]

Croat language

Sorry to be a pedant, but there is no such language as Croat. There is Serbo-croat, though of course there are dialects within it it.

When I studied in Yugoslavia many years ago, its true that Croats were inclined to use the roman alphabet, whereas Serbs stuck to cyrillic, and that trend may have solidified since the creation of Croatia nearly 20 years ago.

Sorry to be a pedant. A fascinating and wandering thread!

 

[driphoney]

Croat language

Sorry to be a pedant, but there is no such language as Croat. There is Serbo-croat, though of course there are dialects within it it.

When I studied in Yugoslavia many years ago, its true that Croats were inclined to use the roman alphabet, whereas Serbs stuck to cyrillic, and that trend may have solidified since the creation of Croatia nearly 20 years ago.

Sorry to be a pedant. A fascinating and wandering thread!

Things are changing in Serbia. Lots of roman advertising, kids are taught both in school and are comfortable with both apparently.

 

[Verdad]

I hope I can be forgiven both for pedantry and for painting it in broad strokes, as it's hard not to do both at the same time. The day is kind of slow and I'm kind of snowed in, so I figure it at least won't hurt.

There is such thing as Croatian language. A linguist could perhaps debate whether Croatian and Serbian are disparate languages or disparate dialects, but disparate they are, and have been for a long, long time.

Over ten centuries of written documents testify to that, and in spoken form, there's probably been some kind of 'Croatian' and 'Serbian' for as long as there have been Croats and Serbs as disparate tribes.

How long that has been, might be, admittedly, a bit of a mystery. Prior to the big migration of the V century that took them over the Carpathians and into the lands they occupy today, Slavs in general are a bit mysterious. Some stipulate they used a runic system of a kind, but as far as I know, there are no records of pre-Christian Slavic literacy.

Byzantine records from the VI century distinctly mention both Croats and Serbs, though, and from there on, whatever their original differences, it's not hard to imagine how the new ones got etched in. The area they were about to settle was a cultural San Andreas fault already at the time of their arrival.

From the East, the Byzantine Empire advanced. It went through one its last bouts of expansion in the VI century, sweeping all the way through today's Italy. Soon, it would settle back in boundaries barely East of today's Serbia, remaining a major power for centuries to come.

In the West, Franks were rising to prominence. The Western Empire was, in truth, succeeded, more than it was fallen. Roman laws and alphabet and Christianity were carried on. The X century founding of the Holy Roman Empire would be just a step in that continuity, and the borders would go just West of today's Croatia.

Between the two, as through most of the rest of their history, Croats and Serbs would be in turns pressed together like between hammer and anvil, washed over by waves from either side, or split apart, falling on the different sides of the big divide, and the sides were chosen early on.

By the IX century, when both founded their earliest kingdoms and principalities, Croats were Frank vassals, Serbs, Byzantium's.

By the IX century, both were mostly converted to Christianity. The conversion occurred in waves, originating from both Constantinople and Rome. In theory, it was still one Christianity, but differing languages (Latin vs. Greek), rites, cultures and political interests drove it ever nearer to the final split. The Photian schism of the IX century and the big schism of 1054 would be merely the culminations, and Croats and Serbs would mostly know their sides in that division as well.

In the IX century, Cyril and Method were sent on their mission. They came from Byzantine Greece to Moravia, in today's Czech Republic. There, as among Southern Slavs, Christianity had already been adopted to a large degree. The race for dominance was on, though, and the Moravian monarch's invitation, motivated by a desire to distance himself from the Franks, was a welcomed chance for Byzantium to extend its influence by bringing Slavs Christianity in their own language.

To that end, Cyril translated the Bible. He did so in a Slavic dialect originating from around his native Thessaloniki. The dialect he used became a basis for Old Church Slavonic, a liturgical language that's still in use in Eastern liturgies in a modernized form.

He also worked on developing a new alphabet. The alphabet was to be better suited to the sounds of Slavic languages than either Latin or Greek. That alphabet would be known as Glagolitsa. The first Slavic script, it spread among both Eastern and Western Slavs, only to be rendered obsolete as Frank missionaries pushed back. By the XIII century, some pockets of usage excepted, it was gone.

The creation of the second script, the one that would get to bear Cyril's name, is in truth more commonly attributed to a disciple by the name of Clement, a future saint himself. This script was here to stay. Cyrillitsa spread from the centers in today's Serbia, Macedonia, and Bulgaria, supported by Bulgarian monarchs who saw it as a way of resisting Greek influence. By the XII century, it was firmly rooted among the Slavs that still use it today, as well as among some Orthodox non-Slavs, such as Moldavians.

Due to these developments, from the IX century on we can have a look at Croats' and Serbs' own writings, and this is the story they tell:

For Croats, the oldest preserved documents come from the IX century. The script is Glagolitic and the language is Croatian, which is to say, an archaic form of one of Croatian dialects.

For Serbs, the oldest surviving documents come from the X century. They're written in Cyrillic, and the language is a mixture of Old Church Slavonic and archaic Serbian.

Between IX and XII century, Croatian is written in both Glagolitic and Latin, then gradually the Latin script takes over for good. Serbs continue as they had begun, using Cyrillic to the present day. Their entire histories of literacy and literature show independent development, if at times interlaced.

Lest it gets lost in the discussion of alphabet, let's emphasize this too: Croatian and Serbian are not merely one language written in two scripts. Languages themselves differ, in vocabulary, in some grammatical constructions, in treatment of borrowed foreign words, and so on.

Although someone could object to talking about Serbian and Croatian before there was a standard form of either, that level of detail really isn't needed. Both languages have dialects of their own, and the standardization occurred as late as the XIX century. Suffice it to say that members of each nation used dialects distinctly their own, long before the XIX century reformers set out to define the standard forms.

By contrast, Serbo-Croat was never a language. It was rather an umbrella term meant to cover the two. The term first appeared in the XIX century during the pan-Slavic movements that had the Slavs as enamored with their similarities as they would later become with their differences.

More importantly, it was the name of the official language of ex Yugoslavia. There, too, it was a name superimposed on the two, rather than an actual hybrid form. In practice it mostly meant that Croats continued using standard Croatian and Serbs continued using standard Serbian, while both called what they used Serbo-Croat. Superficially, both alphabets were taught in schools, but in practice, Cyrillic was rarely used outside of the areas where it belonged historically.

Overall, the umbrella idea was rather well conceived, and it worked well too, at least until it blew up. The reasons for the blow up don't belong in this discussion, though, and have likely more to do with economy than with any number of linguistic complications or medieval feuds. The languages, after a period of closer convergence, continued their separate ways.

 

[Verdad]

The above is probably more than anyone ever wanted to know about Croats and Serbs, but it so happens they're a great example of a broader point I'd like to make:

'Eastern' and 'Western', as applied to Slavs, have a few meanings that tend to be conflated.

In public memory, the latest, briefest-lasting, and now obsolete geo-political meaning tends to dominate. The so-called Eastern Bloc of the Cold War era comprised all Slavic nations. In that sense, they were all Eastern.

Those fifty years are merely a blink compared to centuries in which Eastern meant "Byzantine", though, and because the two senses overlap in some cases, it's often assumed the overlap is complete.

Slavs are often thought to be all Orthodox and all Cyrillic. Sometimes, they're even conflated with non-Slavic nations toward the East, probably due to a couple of –stans' usage of Cyrillic script.

Often, it's talked of Slavs' westernization, and that gets pretty amusing to those of them who'd never been anything else. Czech writer Milan Kundera wrote a lovely essay about that, which I unfortunately cannot find, but it's easy to imagine his expression if he had been asked whether he had trouble converting to Latin script. What, after a mere millennium of use?

To introduce a final complication, there's another sense of Eastern and Western, which makes Serbs, Byzantine though they may be in some ways, Western. Their language linguistically belongs to the Western group. Serbs today use Latin script just as much as Cyrillic, too, and that too is a matter of more than twenty years. If it's amazingly misguided to ask a Czech about their Cyrillic, it's prudent to remember as well that some real Cyrillic folks have a century of digraphia under their belt.

As I said in the beginning, none of this is particularly important for the thread topic, but it was fun to write, and who knows, perhaps it can even be of help in wooing Slavic hotties, real and literary, of various kinds.

 

[Scotsman69]

Well Verdad, you know more than I, that's for certain. My knowledge of Serbo-croat dates from when I was a student of the Yugoslav economy, in Beograd and Zagreb, in the early seventies. I bow to your wider knowledge.

But the last time I looked, I could only find a Serbo-croat dictionary.

I'm beginning to think the difference between Serb and Croat languages must be a bit like the difference between Scots and English, or Norwegian and Swedish, though in the latter two cases the alphabet has been the same for hundreds of years.

Which is about where I resurrected this thread, a few days ago............what is a different language?

 

[BrazenFellow]

I think for practical purposes a different language could be taken to be anything that is not immediately understood by the English - as English is the working language of commerce, aerospace, international military endeavours, education, etc - speaker. Scots Gaelic is not; a Western Highland Scot's accent is, though with difficulty and much context needed.

Serbo-Croat is not.

Ukrainian, to a Russian, is a different language in the same way that Croatian is to a Serbian. But to an Anglophone, they're different languages.

This is an effective piece of guidance for LitErotica's purposes, but we can of course debate semantics some more.

 

[Verdad]

Well Verdad, you know more than I, that's for certain. My knowledge of Serbo-croat dates from when I was a student of the Yugoslav economy, in Beograd and Zagreb, in the early seventies. I bow to your wider knowledge.

But the last time I looked, I could only find a Serbo-croat dictionary.

I'm beginning to think the difference between Serb and Croat languages must be a bit like the difference between Scots and English, or Norwegian and Swedish, though in the latter two cases the alphabet has been the same for hundreds of years.

Which is about where I resurrected this thread, a few days ago............what is a different language?

You will certainly know more about Scots than me! The difference between Croatian and Serbian is smaller, though. The speakers of the two can generally understand each other without much trouble, while I can only stare at Scots in helpless awe.

And of course, the question you ask is very good. Languages don't have rigid separation lines, especially not without standardization. Prior to standardizations of their languages, Germans or Italians from various regions could barely understand each other's dialects. Standardization is of course connected to nationality which is connected to politics, so it's entirely possible we'd be talking of Serbo-Croat in the future, had the things played out differently. For the story-writing purposes, Brazen Fellow has it right. It all depends on the perspective of the readership which the story addresses.

 

[driphoney]

On the lighter side: Do You Speak English? (Apologies for the commercial.)

Just for fun.

 

[Scotsman69]

Not a commercial. The BBC is a public service broadcaster. Always has been, and always, I hope, will be.

 

[driphoney]

Not a commercial. The BBC is a public service broadcaster. Always has been, and always, I hope, will be.

When i start it up, there's a short commercial, and even the words that the vid will start in so many seconds. Maybe this is different in different countries?

 

[Epmd607]

...

In the IX century, Cyril and Method were sent on their mission. They came from Byzantine Greece to Moravia, in today's Czech Republic. There, as among Southern Slavs, Christianity had already been adopted to a large degree. The race for dominance was on, though, and the Moravian monarch's invitation, motivated by a desire to distance himself from the Franks, was a welcomed chance for Byzantium to extend its influence by bringing Slavs Christianity in their own language.

To that end, Cyril translated the Bible. He did so in a Slavic dialect originating from around his native Thessaloniki. The dialect he used became a basis for Old Church Slavonic, a liturgical language that's still in use in Eastern liturgies in a modernized form.

He also worked on developing a new alphabet. The alphabet was to be better suited to the sounds of Slavic languages than either Latin or Greek. That alphabet would be known as Glagolitsa. The first Slavic script, it spread among both Eastern and Western Slavs, only to be rendered obsolete as Frank missionaries pushed back. By the XIII century, some pockets of usage excepted, it was gone.

The creation of the second script, the one that would get to bear Cyril's name, is in truth more commonly attributed to a disciple by the name of Clement, a future saint himself. This script was here to stay. Cyrillitsa spread from the centers in today's Serbia, Macedonia, and Bulgaria, supported by Bulgarian monarchs who saw it as a way of resisting Greek influence. By the XII century, it was firmly rooted among the Slavs that still use it today, as well as among some Orthodox non-Slavs, such as Moldavians.

....

The Slavonic languages
By Bernard Comrie, Greville G. Corbett

"The formal problems are many, and they all centre around the one fact, that there are two alphabets both clearly 'created' to fit Slavonic needs: Glagolitic and Cyrillic."

"The traditional view is that the alphabet...was created specifically in response to the Moravian request to Byzantium for a mission. Skepticism about this has centered around the speed with which everything was done, apparently no more than a year having past between the request and the mission, a short time for the creation of an excellent alphabet plus the translation into a Slavonic language, using the new alphabet, of at least the Gospels."

http://books.google.com/books?id=uR...epage&q=Pannonian/Life/of/Constantine&f=false

The problems are many and not so easily glossed over by a few reads through wikipedia articles:

a. There were already literate Slavs before the known Missions.*
b. There was likely a proto-Glagolitic(read: c. Glagolitic) which was refined by St. Cyril to translate the Gospels.
c. Glagolitic was never considered a formal alphabet by the Empire and therefore Cyrillic was commissioned. Most likely because it was a non-sanctioned working Greek adaption -- a people's alphabet.
d. The fact that Cyrillic was 'created' after there was already a working Slavonic alphabet, and that the new alphabet is almost identical to the old alphabet.

It's insulting that you're taking away literacy from these people. There were literate Slavs, they could read and write Greek, they created/adapted their own alphabet for their languages and dialects long before St. Cyril, the Empire and Christianity. All you have to do is look at a map. The distances between Thessaloniki and any of these major Eastern Euro cities is like a trip inside of New York State or PA.

*Origins of Slavonic Literacy: The Lexical Evidence. H. Leeming
The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 49, No. 116 (Jul., 1971), pp. 327-338

 

[Verdad]

On the lighter side: Do You Speak English? (Apologies for the commercial.)

Just for fun.

LOL, just saw this now. (I was persuaded to go out in the snow yesterday after all!) I wonder if they intended it as an eerily apt portrayal of some forum communications.

 

[Epmd607]

...

Croatian, or Czech, or Polish, among others, were thus never typically written in Cyrillic. Cyrillic wasn't their original form from which they could be romanized. Rather (roughly speaking again) the languages of Catholic areas developed their written form in the Roman alphabet from the beginning, and the same is true, respectively, of Cyrillic alphabet and the areas dominated by Orthodox Christianity.

Croatian is a South Slavic language divided in three dialects, all South Slavic languages first writing systems were derived from Greek/Glagolitic/Cyrillic. The Romanization occurs after literacy, and along Catholic lines. But for hundreds of years the Croatian language, along with the rest of the South Slavic languages, were primarily written in Glagolitic and Cyrillic. Latin is not what the Croatian monks wanted to write in, they get special permission for a while to continue to write using Glagolitic/Cyrillic script. I've seen the monuments in Povlja and Selca on Brac.