World building -- Part II

 I watched a BBC television series that explored the birth and growth of something I really hadn't considered previously:

The English language.

We know that English is a diverse and complex language, though compared to others that I don't understand, I can't say if it's THE most complex. Asian alphabets blow my mind. They look like they are a lot of work.

Aside from that, if you know your tongue, you speak it and rarely do you consider that there are three or four ways to describe a 4-legged farm animal known as a hog.

Sow, pig, swing, porker ... oink oink oink.

To the point, for writers who would build worlds with new and exciting people and places, events, tragedies, dangers, love, hate, fear ... all emotions that are based on human knowledge ... on account of, it's hard to talk to your cat about emotional issues that occur under the coffee table where Tabby hangs out.

But people on other planets don't speak like we do. How do I know this? Because people in Mexico don't speak like I do and it's a fuggavalot closer. People in Mexico don't speak like people in Spain, and neither of them speak like the native tribes, who spoke differently before Spain tried to make Mexico speak like it does.

All that has changed over the centuries. English from the 16th century is hardly discernible. It's not close to the tongue they wrote in Beowulf's time.

So if you are building a world and pretend English is just 'what it is,' you don't know your language. Even the experts ignored that.

Arthur C. Clarke, the master of science fiction, had his characters speaking a dialect and tongue that would have been much different in reality -- because some of it just would naturally have changed. It would have changed because that's what language does. There are hundreds of words in Russian now that didn't exist in the 1950s.

Writers who endeavor to do world building need to learn to write new languages -- though getting us to understand them is a craft. The novel 1984 called it Newspeak. Orwell was a genius!

And we're at that point if 'u' know what I mean. 'b4' long that will be.

Listen to the music. That will guide you. If that's not clear, listen to the people who listen to the music. If you are over 50 and you can't understand them, Orwell was probably right.