How to tell a tale that has no time and that all will fathom
The Past of English
Each tongue has its past. And the talesman, though the heart of his tale may go past all dress and custom and tongue of any land, still must speak in one tongue or other, and set his tale in one land with its dress and custom. Thus we find the great talesmen master both these styles of tale at the same time.
I speak English, and my tales must wear the dress of that tongue.
English has two coats, or we might say, it wears a coat over its clothes. Its clothes are Germanic and Anglo-Saxon, and its coat, thanks to the conquest of England by Duke William of Normandy, is French and Latinate. And so English has two terms for many a thing, a Germanic word and a Latinate or Romance word.
The German words (on the whole) have more consonants than vowels, begin and end with consonants, and sound ‘rough.’ There are many German words that have only one syllable, and to build new words German tongues take two of these one-note words and but them up end to end. ‘One-note’ might be a case in point, as ‘talesman.’ These words yet hold the sound of each word from which they were made, since the part-words show up whole.
The Romance words (on the whole) have more vowels than consonants, begin and end with vowels, and sound ‘smooth.’ They also have more syllables than not. Romance tongues build up new words through a root word with a prefix and a suffix, which once may have been whole words themselves, but have been shortened and sanded so they fit smoothly only the root words. ‘Pre’ in ‘prefix’ and ‘suf’ in ‘suffix’ are both prefixes.
Now another difference in these two kinds of tongues follows straight from how many syllables their words have. For a word of only one syllable will carry its main stress right there on its one back. But a word of many syllables has many backs, and the stress must be put upon only one of these backs. But if the word has too many notes, it might also take a second stress upon another of its backs.
The Romance tongues with their many many-syllabled words thus have a rhythm built into the words themselves, and they can make poetry by stringing the right words in the right order. And this poetry can be sun quite well, for the words are ‘open’ in the sense that they end with vowels, and so the notes that are to be sung can be held purely.
But the Germanic tongues with their one-syllabled words must make their rhythm ‘in between’ the words and use the sense of the words and word order to make their poetry. Singing German poetry is harder but chanting it easier, if you see what I mean.
Now the rulers of England in the first centuries of the second millennium were the sons of Duke William’s captains, good Normans out of France that spoke the old French. But the common folk were the beaten Anglo-Saxon, and they spoke their Germanic tongue. From this there came about, as will happen, a sense of class that touched on which tongue you spoke. The ruling class spoke French, the peasants and slaves spoke Anglo-Saxon. Courtesy and manners and good breeding all were French, coarseness and plainness and rudeness were Anglo-Saxon. And the Germanic-speaking Anglo-Saxons despised the French rulers with their dainty ways and courtly tongue.
Snobs Upside-Down
From these two tongues English came about, with its clothes of Anglo-Saxon and its French coat on top. Now the tale of England and France that followed Duke William’s conquest was far from simple, and some 400 years after the Conquest the English were feeling the beginnings of nationalism, and many sought to throw off the mastery of French even in the matter of how they spoke. These men turned the French snobs on their heads and said that the good old Anglo-Saxon words beat out the fancy French Romance words. This attitude reached its head, maybe, in the 19th century, when England ruled the world but France yet was the cultural heart of the West.
This is from H.W. Fowler’s The King’s English, 1908 edition, chapter I:
“Any one who wishes to become a good writer should endeavour, before he allows himself to be tempted by the more showy qualities, to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid.
“This general principle may be translated into practical rules in the domain of vocabulary as follows:—
“Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. Prefer the short word to the long. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.”
The See-Through Tongue
Those of us who write tales of Eartherea, the land so few have gone into and come back out alive (or sane) have an added burden on our backs. For how to tell of such a place with the words we use to tie our shoes and shop and use computers? If we speak as we normally do, then the words and way we string the words will smack of the lives that we lead and not the lives we dream on. So then should we use the strange and fanciful words, the words that are out of fashion, old words of old times, and archaic forms of speech? Then how will our audience understand us? And such usage of quaint and elder terms will smack of what the French critics called ‘préciosité’ and sound too ‘precious’ for words.
The answer I think lies in that core or heart of our English tongue (of any tongue I think; but I can only be sure for English). I think there must be a group of words that for any folk or time are so common that they lose all their taste in and of themselves. And these are words that we can use in any tale, one of today or yesterday or tomorrow, one of Earth or Eartherea alike.
What do I mean by ‘taste’ then? I mean that a word like ‘hep-cat’ has a sort of ‘taste’ or ‘flavor’ that makes us see it as a word apart from other words. It belongs to one time and place, one culture, one cultural movement. To use a jazz-era term in a tale of ancient Egypt would strike the audience straight off as weird and out of place, ‘wrong.’ (Roger Zelazny had a lot of fun playing with this same clash of tastes in his Amber series of tales. Amber is the mother-world from which all other worlds were made in imitation, and the princes of Amber can walk from one world to another. So they know 20th century American jazz but in Amber they wear Elizabethan dress and fight with swords. Zelazny made this clash open and clean, he put it at the heart of his conceit, and so he pulls it off with a hell of a lot of dash.)
And by this same reason if a talesman uses an elder word or construction, say ‘methinks’ in a tale of teens text-messaging one another on their cells, it would also smack of strangeness and wrongness, and the we in the audience will only swallow it in the case that it is used with irony or a way to tell that one character or other is weird, or out of place, or loves such quaint archaisms.
But a word like ‘shoe’ or ‘the’ or ‘heart’ falls into a group of words used 700 years ago, 100 years ago, and today (and we can only think 200 years from now). These words are so basic that they are the first words we learn, and seem eternal — that is to say, they have no taste of any one land or time. Even if we think of what the Greeks would say or the Argentines or the Maori, we can hear them say ‘eat, drink, sleep’ and find no strangeness in this.
In English, most of these ‘core’ words are Anglo-Saxon, though there are as well many Romance words among them (such as ‘core’ itself, as well as ‘clear’ and ‘pure’). They also tend to be of one note or syllable.
So we who tell of Eartherea are well-minded to use these monosyllables and such two-syllabled words and ‘join-words’ in the Germanic style as much as we can, and so we may find we can tell of any age or land with a sort of tongue that, by cleaving to the heart-words alone, and using none but words that have no taste of any time or place, ends up with its own taste of no-taste, that seems as eternal as a fairy-tale. And by this we can invoke Eartherea best of all.
There is also this to say for the one-note words, that these core words are easiest to understand, and easiest to read as well.
(Composed on keyboard Saturday, February 9, 2008)
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