Languages used in Westeros and Essos

[Anthony Appleyard]

Which are we to assume of these 2?:-

(1) The main language of Westeros is English.

(2) The main language of Westeros is another language, here called Westerosi, which in the books has been without comment replaced by English. If so, the only clue about the nature of Westerosi that we have is some proper-names, which show us that in Westerosi the sound "q" is common, likeliest a sound like "k" but pronounced further back.

Latin is not recorded as a language in Westeros and Essos, but Latin seems to have influenced GRRM when choosing names, for example the Valyrian surname Velaryon, a family whose power is not in dragons but in ships, and Latin "velum" means "sail". And compare the land mass name Ultros with Latin "ultra" = "beyond". And "sept" (where 7 forms of a god are worshipped) looks like Latin "septem" (meaning "seven").

 

 

[Rufus Snow]

Neither. The main language of Westeros is the Common Tongue, as it says many times throughout the canon. We have few if any clues about the language itself, because the English* text we are reading is itself a translation.

 

*other editions are available, of course

[Anthony Appleyard]

 

On 10/2/2019 at 6:48 PM, Rufus Snow said:

Neither. The main language of Westeros is the Common Tongue.

 

Sorry. Herewith corrected:-

(2) The main language of Westeros is not English but another language, in the books called the Common Tongue, which in the books has been without comment replaced by English. If so, the only clue about the nature of the Common Tongue that we have is some proper-names, which show us that in the Common Tongue the sound "q" is common, likeliest a sound like "k" but pronounced further back. 

[Gingin]

In Essos there are different peoples and different cultures, therefore there are several languages, such as Dothraki.

[The hairy bear]

Martin was asked about languages in Westeros and he admitted he is not very good at creating them or devising linguistic relationships. I think that in George's mind, the common tongue just happens to be English and he is happy to leave it at that. Everything else would complicate things too much.

To support this we could argue that the metrics and rhymes of the songs fit English perfectly, that Jeyne and Reek do rhyme with pain and meek, that "rain" and "Rayne" are homophones, that the short for Aegon is an "egg", ...

 

[Aebram]

I'm convinced that the common tongue is just English. Many of the Westerosi characters have English names such as Stark, Connington, or Bolton. Also, many of the towns and other places have names made of English words, such as Kings Landing,  High Heart, Etc. On the other hand, across the Narrow Sea, we have person and pace names that sound completely different.  A few seem European, such as Tycho the banker, but most look completely made-up to me.

Also, a little study of the map makes it clear that Westeros is fantasy England, and the Free Cities are fantasy Europe.  Valyria is fantasy Rome:  a once-great empire that has collapsed, leaving behind some great engineering works, and a language that evolved into several modern tongues.  Slaver's Bay with its pyramids is fantasy Egypt, although the geographic parallels start to break down at that point.

[Paltogue]

11 hours ago, Aebram said:

I'm convinced that the common tongue is just English. Many of the Westerosi characters have English names such as Stark, Connington, or Bolton. Also, many of the towns and other places have names made of English words, such as Kings Landing,  High Heart, Etc. On the other hand, across the Narrow Sea, we have person and pace names that sound completely different.  A few seem European, such as Tycho the banker, but most look completely made-up to me.

Also, a little study of the map makes it clear that Westeros is fantasy England, and the Free Cities are fantasy Europe.  Valyria is fantasy Rome:  a once-great empire that has collapsed, leaving behind some great engineering works, and a language that evolved into several modern tongues.  Slaver's Bay with its pyramids is fantasy Egypt, although the geographic parallels start to break down at that point.

Read the appendix in The Lord of the Rings. 'Frodo Baggins' was not actually called that. Presumably Martin is doing what Tolkien did with his Common Tongue (i.e. replacing it for the most part with English and English-like names), but probably without thinking about it in the way Tolkien did. It's about creating familiarity as opposed to places like Essos or Rhun which are meant to be viewed as unfamiliar (and so no or less attempt is made to change the language(s) used in those places to something familiar).

[Aebram]

Martin is not Tolkien (as he likes to point out from time to time). ASOIAF is full of story elements that are just exaggerated, fantasized versions of actual English history.  With so many Westerosi characters, if their real names were not what we see in the text, he would have needed a long list to keep track of their real names and the English versions. That just seems unlikely to me. But maybe someone can ask him about this at a future con or other public appearance.

[Paltogue]

57 minutes ago, Aebram said:

Martin is not Tolkien (as he likes to point out from time to time). ASOIAF is full of story elements that are just exaggerated, fantasized versions of actual English history.  With so many Westerosi characters, if their real names were not what we see in the text, he would have needed a long list to keep track of their real names and the English versions. That just seems unlikely to me. But maybe someone can ask him about this at a future con or other public appearance.

Yes, he may not be Tolkien, but he's using the same technique, whether he knows it or not. Most of Tolkien's characters were not given 'real' names either, even in Tolkien's unpublished work. The method is to use English or similar linguistic elements to represent the Common Tongue to represent that which is familiar, and not to do the same for the languages of unfamiliar cultures.

[The hairy bear]

13 hours ago, Paltogue said:

he's using the same technique, whether he knows it or not.

So, Martin may not know what he's doing, but you do?

I don't think so. Tolkien main interest was languages, their evolution, and their relationship. His initial purpose when creating his mythts was to create the setting where his Adûnaic, Sindarin, Quenya and Westron could evolve and interact.

Martin, instead, always looks for the easier solution when approaching world-building aspects he doesn't want to invest time in. He uses a ruler on a map to calculate distances, ignoring the inaccuracy of medieval cartography and the effects that a spherical planet should have on them. He combines colors on shields at will, ignoring heraldry rules and the fact that many of his banners would be impossible to distinguish on a battlefield. And in this context, making English the common tongue is the easiest approach.

[Paltogue]

2 hours ago, The hairy bear said:

So, Martin may not know what he's doing, but you do?

I don't think so. Tolkien main interest was languages, their evolution, and their relationship. His initial purpose when creating his mythts was to create the setting where his Adûnaic, Sindarin, Quenya and Westron could evolve and interact.

Martin, instead, always looks for the easier solution when approaching world-building aspects he doesn't want to invest time in. He uses a ruler on a map to calculate distances, ignoring the inaccuracy of medieval cartography and the effects that a spherical planet should have on them. He combines colors on shields at will, ignoring heraldry rules and the fact that many of his banners would be impossible to distinguish on a battlefield. And in this context, making English the common tongue is the easiest approach.

What's the alternative? That the characters in this imaginary world, which isn't earth, somehow are actually speaking English, with its French and Latin loans, its close relationship with Dutch and German, etc.? And obviously I can't tell what's going on in Martin's head, but that doesn't mean we can't identify a method that's being used (and for what it's worth, I'm a professional linguist and have some understanding of these things, though it's obvious anyway). It's a commonplace in fantasy fiction that English-speaking writers use English as the default for the 'local language' and even for place- and personal-names, without meaning that the local language is actually English. Why's that a stretch?

[Aebram]

6 hours ago, Paltogue said:

What's the alternative? That the characters in this imaginary world, which isn't earth, somehow are actually speaking English, with its French and Latin loans, its close relationship with Dutch and German, etc.? 

Yes.

It's a fantasy; GRRM can make it work however he likes.

It's a commonplace in fantasy fiction that English-speaking writers use English as the default for the 'local language' and even for place- and personal-names, without meaning that the local language is actually English.

But it's not commonplace for a story and accompanying maps to have dozens of clear parallels to actual English geography and history.

[The hairy bear]

On 10/6/2019 at 1:32 PM, Paltogue said:

What's the alternative? That the characters in this imaginary world, which isn't earth, somehow are actually speaking English, with its French and Latin loans, its close relationship with Dutch and German, etc.?

Do you assume that the characters in ASOIAF are shiny cephalopods, but Martin adapts them for our convenience and makes them be homo sapiens? After all, how it could be than in this imaginary world, which isn't earth, there are humanoids exactly like us?

[Lady Dacey]

I truly don’t see how this is relevant... 

I mean, there are several cases of words that could never exist in Westeros, but what’s wrong with that? Like, how could you have a word such as “romance” in a world where there’s never been a Rome? It’s only that it doesn’t make any sense to try and pretend we aren’t people who understand English reading stories writen in English. 

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OrphanedEtymology

About orphaned ethymology, I think this is important:

“Depending on how deeply and pedantically you're willing to go, this is pretty much unavoidable whenever you're using modern-human language in a time or setting that isn't modern Earth. Because of the way language evolves, it's hard to come out with a sentence or two that doesn't somehow reference some real-life history.“ 

Martin isn’t pedantic at all.

[Paltogue]

Fair points all. I do still think it is possible, whether he has reflected on it or not, that Martin is using English as a familiar stand-in for whatever language the Common Tongue really is, perhaps one that bears similarities to the 'unfamiliarised' languages of Essos to which it may be related. Maybe names like 'Qhorin' give us odd glimpses of it. Who knows?

[Damon_Tor]

It's pretty clear the Andals are an analog for the Angles: as such it would be reasonable to call their language "Andlish". Those in Essos might call it "Andali". But nobody in the novels calls it either of these things, so this is speculation.

Apart for the meta-explanation (ie, "GRRM doesn't much care for fiddling with languages") there's not a great reason why a continent the size of Westeros would have a single, unified language. It's the size of Europe, after all, one would expect the languages to diversify about the same amount over time. 2000 years after the fall of Rome and Latin has split into several distinct languages: a Spaniard cannot understand an Italian who cannot understand a Romanian. And we know GRRM understands this, because Valyrian has diversified realistically in Essos after the fall of Valyria, so what's the excuse?

The best explanation I can come up with is the influence of the Citadel. A single authority on language, who diligently send out teachers to every noble house on the continent to instruct the ruling class in said language, could have the stabilizing influence needed to combat the natural drift of language toward regional dialects and eventual regional intelligibility.

In our world we had only the Church holding on to Latin, and we can see how poorly it fared as a language, but then again the Church's goal was not to maintain Latin as a language, and to some degree the opposite was true: by keeping Latin as a "secret" language for the clergy, it gave them a monopoly on interpretation of scripture. The Citadel, as a secular organization, had no such motive.

[Here's Looking At You, Kid]

On 10/2/2019 at 12:03 PM, Anthony Appleyard said:

Which are we to assume of these 2?:-

(1) The main language of Westeros is English.

(2) The main language of Westeros is another language, here called Westerosi, which in the books has been without comment replaced by English. If so, the only clue about the nature of Westerosi that we have is some proper-names, which show us that in Westerosi the sound "q" is common, likeliest a sound like "k" but pronounced further back.

Latin is not recorded as a language in Westeros and Essos, but Latin seems to have influenced GRRM when choosing names, for example the Valyrian surname Velaryon, a family whose power is not in dragons but in ships, and Latin "velum" means "sail". And compare the land mass name Ultros with Latin "ultra" = "beyond". And "sept" (where 7 forms of a god are worshipped) looks like Latin "septem" (meaning "seven").

 

 

The Andal majority brought the Common Tongue.  The people of Ghis now speak bastardized Old Valyrian mixed with Ghiscari.  The Common Tongue as spoken has to be a bastardization of pure Common Tongue and what the First Men spoke.  I know the FM were primitive but they did more than grunt at each other. 

[Aebram]

If the Common Tongue is English, then by historical parallel, the Old Tongue would represent the Celtic languages that were spoken in the British Isles before the Anglo-Saxons arrived.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_English

[The hairy bear]

On 10/8/2019 at 12:53 AM, Damon_Tor said:

The best explanation I can come up with is the influence of the Citadel. A single authority on language, who diligently send out teachers to every noble house on the continent to instruct the ruling class in said language, could have the stabilizing influence needed to combat the natural drift of language toward regional dialects and eventual regional intelligibility.

The problem is that only the upper classes would have access to a maester. In Westeros there are no public schools, no widespread press, and most people won't leave the valley they are born in. The fact that the citizens of some remote village in the North, who would never met a maester or a septon in their life, speak or even understand "Andalish" is completely outlandish. The only explanation I can think of is "magic".

On 10/8/2019 at 12:53 AM, Damon_Tor said:

In our world we had only the Church holding on to Latin, and we can see how poorly it fared as a language, but then again the Church's goal was not to maintain Latin as a language, and to some degree the opposite was true: by keeping Latin as a "secret" language for the clergy, it gave them a monopoly on interpretation of scripture. The Citadel, as a secular organization, had no such motive.

I don't know where this "the Church tried to keep Latin a secret" comes from. The mass was still in Latin 50 years ago. All the prayers that the Church insisted that every good Christian had to learn (Lord's prayer, Credo, Ave Maria,...) were only in Latin.

Also, the use of Latin wasn't restricted to the Church. It was the language of the Universities, and the one used by learned men (Descartes, Euler, Gauss, Newton) to write their works.

Latin "fared poorly as a language" not because of some hidden conspiracy, but because it was a language of the elites. And the language of the elites has nothing to do against the language of a huge uneducated majorities. (Just as French never took hold in England or Russia even though it was once the language of their courts).