aphanon_meme | part 353 whalers on the moon

part 353 whalers on the moon

We've been here over a year now! I can hardly believe it! Dreamwidth's been pretty good, I'd say, with almost no downtime to speak of and all that! Anyway... how is your spring going? Or I guess it's almost summer, isn't it? Hopefully it's been well! I've been catching up on work and new movies, all very exciting stuff, I'm sure.

Enjoy part 353!

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I heard Putin speaking German for the first time today, he sounded kind of soft-spoken to me (although I have like no German so hard to judge) and it's weird because he's soft-spoke in English too so now I'm wondering if he's soft-spoken in Russian as well.

Speaking of German, I don't care how many linguists and phonological inventories tell me Japanese has Ich-Laut I can't pronounce it to save my life. I know you're not supposed to study a dialect until you're proficient in the Standard but goddamn it Berliners and their Ik are so tempting to me at the moment. (Auch-Laut is a pipe dream at this point lol).

As for the bonus, I often wonder how Hetalia characters go through language change. Like does England still speak/understand Middle English? How do they know when to start adapting changes in their native language, because language change naturally occurs across generations not in one person changing their idiolect within their lifetime so how do nations tell the difference between fads/regionalisms and actual change they'll have to know later in life. When did Germany and Prussia learn Hochdeutsch for example!? What is Germany's native dialect anyway in that case, Berlinisch!!!?!? Does Prussia use Ik not because it's Berlinisch but because Proto-Germanic used Ik!?!?!?!?!

Okay that last one was obviously a joke but still. I want to knowwwww. Ugh.

ITT: Linguist thinks WAY TOO HARD about eternity and language change.

Prussia going "Ik lieb dick."

"The hell are you laughing for, the awesome me is being romantic here!!!"

wouldn't it just start to sneak into their language gradually and wouldn't instinctive code switching come into play? Like for instance, think of slang on the internet, it just creeps its way into our vocabulary when it's cool, and sneaks the fuck back out when it's not.

your major is scary and confusing answer my questions

Well it depends the scale we're talking about. If it's just the vocabulary then yes people gain and lose words and grammar bits all the time. Preussisch for example had lots of words with Lithuanian influence (including a different word for bier!!) that I could see Prussia dropping as soon as he permanently relocated to Berlin. And at least with learning Hochdeutsch the Germans are probably all bidialectal at the least.

But phonology is a lot harder. Like take for example a change that happening in the US at the moment, we call it the caught-cot merger. Are the words caught and cot pronounced the same for you? For me they're not, and for most people in NY/NJ and northern PA they're not. But for most Americans, at an increasing rate they are (I was always a guinea pig to explain this at Uni because I went to school in Mass lol). But the thing is I've lived in places with the merger more than without, I have full academic knowledge of it, and of the fact all Americans will probably have it eventually the way dialect change is going, and yet I can't pronounce them the same if I tried. They're just naturally different.

Now that is just one little change to one little word, but consider at the time of the American Revolution America and England would have sounded exactly the same. And in 2014 America likely speaks General American English and for simplicities sake we'll say England uses Received Pronunciation. That's a lot of changes going on, I mean RP English has ~7 more vowel sounds than we do!!

Codeswitching will almost assuredly occur to a degree but it's a matter of when. Neither of us speak General American English but America wouldn't need to codeswitch for us, but if he still sounded like he did at the Revolution he would have to to not sound 'foreign' and it's worse with England, after all Shakespeare is Modern English, the transition from that to what we speak today was slow but with nations' fucked up sense of time it could have been in the blink of an eye for them.

And the thing is, even if you take the approach that they just adopt every sound/vocab/grammar change they come across (ludicrous!!) and they're polydialectal, all languages even your native one need use to maintain, so it's very possible they can't understand their past selves at all!! (sidenote: Germany could, he's too young. But Teuton and HRE are likely incomprehensible) And oh god, Germania probably sounds like a mix of all of their dialects plus weird sounds and words they think they've heard before but don't understand of jesus he might as well be speaking chinese!

oohh, this is all very interesting but I'm too dead inside to really respond in depth. I actually pronounce caught/cot the same unless I really focus on saying them differently and I grew up in NJ/NY for most of my life. But I'm a rule bender bc I have phonetic issues anyhow. I think if we're just talking about how nations pronounce words, i can't imagine if I was an immortal being, I would bother to change my pronunciation just to suit the place I was in. I wonder if someone of them just have a funny way of pronouncing some things some times. Maybe all nations have quirks that kinda give their timelessness away.

BUT THIS is all over my head too but definitely some food for thought. I do think they'd be capable of fluidity with it. It's really a tricky thing to attach human limitations to nations, especially since they all seem to fuck reality and understand each other regardless of language differences...unless they all pick a sole language to speak in but idek. CONFUSING CANON THINGS THAT WILL NEVER HAVE A CLEAR ANSWER

I like the idea of them having a dormant ability to return to languages/dialects that have gone into retirement, but I do also really really love the idea of them having trouble speaking to their little selves and being rusty and having to get back into the swing of things and then getting all confused over it and mixing things up. TORN TORN TORN but interesting, shit will keep you up at night.

Phonology and sound inventories are considered the most important criteria when talking about language change so that's why I'm focusing on that, but really it's combination of pronunciation and grammar, then with vocab being like the least important thing because of how volatile it is (think slang) but can still make a difference if there's enough permanent ones (think regionalisms).

To massively simplify, imagine language change is a color scale from red to purple to blue, where each generation is a little less red and a little more blue. A person who speaks red language (say Old English for example) would have kids who speak red with just a speck of blue. The parents wouldn't adopt that speck of blue though, everyone understands them and that's just kids these days rabble rabble! Then those kids have kids who speak red with two specks of blue, and so on and so forth. If we look at one language over its lifetime we might say pure red is Old English, pure purple is Middle English, and pure blue is Modern English (with blue-violet being Shakespeare) but how to classify the gradients and how to say when exactly one language became the other is something linguists fight about all the time.

As you say the natural thing is to not change your own speech (beyond slang usually, within one dialect anyway) just because there's a new generation, everyone around you can understand you after all!! But with an immortal being like the nations, the question is at what point in the gradient do they give in and learn the change? And is it like learning slang or do they hold out so long it's like learning a new language? To what degree do they remember the old versions the further they get away from them?

I handwave canon with nation language just so I can think more in-depth about them with human limits but obviously that's because I love this shit lmao

BUT YES I'M OF TWO MINDS ABOUT IT TOO I love the fact that all Ludwigs I've ever played with figure out who Julchen is by 'dat German' and I like Teuton being lost about all the things, but on the other hand I always assume they can talk to Germania fine oops. this keeps me up so often you don't even know sob

WHAT A GREAT EXAMPLE. I think Language is a living thing and maybe it just depends on the nation how long they hold out to the old?? I can imagine there's not much resistance to change, though. I think it's just within a nation's nature to just adjust constantly, to play all roles and speak all tongues. Even within human limitations, the brain has amazing capability for language. We're built to communicate and modern trends probably sneak into their lexicon without an issue. If it's all on a range of colors, then nations must be an equal gradient of red and blue, right? I think it's something they probably have a lot more awareness about than we do and a longer memory for older versions. They have to remember an eternity of events, why not a lifetime of languages too? with degrees of rustiness though...but YEAH it's realy hard to even pick at this topic because it can go either way.

FOR GERMANIA THOUGH, since in canon, he and Rome sit around in heaven watching the living world and apparently watching TV, I like to think he adjusts his language to the kids, but the more angry he is, the more archaic he gets until he's 99% incomprehensible to his children. Interesting though /pats your passionate head and gives you a sticker

Oh yes totally, my absolute favorite thing is language as a living thing with its own behavior, adaptions, changes, history, routines, etc etc I'm such a nerd when it comes to this. Linguists are a lot like language biologists!!

It's also interesting how having a Standard language effects their adaptions, because that's relatively new for all of them as well. Especially our precious baby who is probably so thrilled Hochdeutsch is basically Hannover German /sarcasm

I AM DYING IMAGINING GERMANIA RANTING AT PRUSSIA IN OLD GERMAN AND PRUSSIA JUST LIKE IN MUTE HORROR BECAUSE ONLY EVERY FIFTH WORD MAKES SENSE AND THE REST SOUNDS LIKE DRUNK TONGUES AND ffffff /sticks sticker on forehead =3=

posting late because i typed this on the train with no wifi orz

I like to think they can (if they wish to) hang on to past languages for a good long while, even while it comes to feel like a distinct language from the modern one, like speaking multiple foreign languages. I don't have any doubt that England could still use some form of ME easily, considering how modern speakers can still pick it up! I tend to assume he can still also do some form of Old English. And he must have been able to clearly pick out the Romance elements when those started becoming part of English... If you assume the nations aren't ridiculously mobile or at least maintain something that feels like an area of residence for a solid chunk of years, then I think 'it works the same as for people' reasonably well solves the problem of which they pick up of the hundreds+ regional dialects each constantly changing in tiny ways- they persist or transition to new ones about the same way any person would, and just live long enough to rack up a lot (being more likely to do a shift/switch when they make a big physical or political move?). This is my linguistic version of 'let's make it happy OT3+ and everyone wins everything', and I seem to have added infinite language memory/facility in as part of the immortal nationhood thing, for which I can make no apologies.

I don't know how to define a good backwards stopping point; Proto-Indo-European seems way too much of a stretch, but I don't know how many Scandi nations would use Old Norse vs something else they might have like Old Swedish (which looks fucking weird, in my completely unnecessary opinion, so if he wants to troll...). Iceland absolutely has to still be totally proficient in the saga language though, and for Norway-- perhaps there are some languages where he has reading knowledge of a centuries-old form but really doesn't speak the present language. Old books and all that.

Also the only good answer I can come up with for phonology is a) it's at least not impossible for adult language learners to acquire/merge new phonetic contrasts and b) I want one of them to speak something from 600+ years ago so we can hear it, oh please, but what an unproductive thought. Well, it would be kind of funny if sometimes their pronunciation shifted unconsciously over the centuries based on influence from their current language's phonetic inventory and the lack of any other speakers of the old one to maintain with, just written sources, so they don't realise they're talking any differently, but...

Not a problem at all anon, though it's 3am so forgive me if my reply is an incoherent mess lmao.

They most certainly have the ability to pick up on all the language changes I agree (and to borrow from assby, if they have to remember 1000s of years of history surely they can fit 1000s of years of language), and I'd even say they can understand many more dialects than they can speak, even beyond what what a human might consider the edges of mutual intelligibility, but yeah it's just the massive amount of change most of them have seen over their lifetimes in their languages...like damn if they were real you could learn so much about the boundaries of mutual ineligibility and processing synchronic change and just wow. AND THIS ISN'T EVEN TOUCHING THE FACT MANY OF THEM ARE LIKELY MULTILINGUAL ON TOP OF THAT.

It works like humans but on a much more massive scale is a nice answer when I'm not staying up 'til 3am contemplating the intricacies of it all and why my modern Prussia and my Teutonic Knight can talk to each other lol, that's mostly the context in which I fret over this.

For the stopping point though, oh my god, could you imagine if any of them did know PIE though, so many people trying to get their hands on them. Of course Austria at least has a canon birth year (976) so I think it's PRETTY SAFE TO SAY PIE is way outside the realm of possibility. Though it makes me wonder how far back Germania goes...maybe he spoke Proto-Germanic??? The Scandis bring up an important point about how the cultures use and view the older variants of their language too. I bet retention rates vary wildly despite the absurd language facility we're giving them for our amusement. Japan is another nation I can see with a confident grasp of the older variants of his language.

Given all the national variations on how to read Latin, I would say despite the fact many of the European nations probably had Latin as a native or highly productive L2 as kids, they probably do fall into your last point of unconscious pronunciation shifts. Imagine Grandpa Rome coming to visit from heaven and the Italies, France, and Spain all have the strangest and different accents to him.

I know I'm gonna dream about this now lmao.

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part 353 whalers on the moon

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