Meta Month, Day Five: Archanea Language Meta

[mark_asphodel]

I once read a quote attributed to Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire that went something like this:

“French is the language of diplomacy and Italian the language of love.  German is for speaking to soldiers and cattle, English for speaking to birds.  But Spanish, Spanish is the language for addressing God.”

My initial views on this were formed by the NoA Adaptation of Shadow Dragon, with its lower-class Brit accents for Gra soldiers and such.  More on that later...

One key thing to remember about Archanea is that the Holy Kingdom of Archanea has been the primary seat of human government and culture for six centuries.  The Academy at Khadein was founded scarcely one hundred years before the events of the Marth games, after the first war against Medeus.  The royal houses of the primary nations-- Aurelis, Macedon, Grust, and Altea-- date to approximately the same time.  Gra and Talys are even more recent, the former being a splinter faction of Altean royalty, and the latter having emerged from tribal factionalism during the lifetime of the current characters.

This is not Elibe or Magvel or Tellius with its centuries of stable dynastic rule.  All the royal houses except Nyna’s forebears are new arrivals to the political scene.  Basically, they’re all hicks and arrivistes.  Anri was a farmer.  Iote was a slave.  So the current crop of royals are only a few generations removed from being peasants, slaves, and relative nobodies.  Caeda is, as far as we know, the first person ever born into royalty in the history of Talys.

[This is why I made Marth a representative of the Midwestern nouveau riche in “Until the Sun Cries Morning,” as compared with the more respectable and pedigreed Innes and Ephraim.  Marth’s great-grandfather was just some kid whose brother did some really cool stuff with a magic sword, and his great-great-grandfather was, well... nobody cares.]

So.  With that as our canonical base for speculation, what does everyone sound like?  

The NoA adaptation of FE11 paints Gra soldiers as Cockneys, and I swear Norne’s dialogue makes it seem to me like she has a North Country English accent, Yorkshire or Mancunian maybe.  This lead to my initial conception of Altea/Gra = England as split by a dynastic conflict, not unlike York and Lancaster.  The commoners have distinct linguistic quirks, whereas the upper classes have IMO been educated in the standard form of speech, which originates from the educated people of the Holy Kingdom.  Thus, Marth sounds more like Princess Nyna than he does his own subjects.  Though I’d wager that, to Archanean nobility like Jeorge and Midia, the Prince of Altea still comes across as a jumped-up backcountry hick.  

[Note: from what sailorvfan10

and shimizu_hitomi have said, Japanese!Marth (the real deal) does not speak with the same level of formality as does his NoA/NoE counterpart.  So, yeah, he’s not going to come across as King George, here.  Maybe that’s one reason he’s able to attract such a diverse crowd under his banner?]

Grust is definitely hicksville; I believe it was Hitomi who said that Camus has pretty rough speech even for a great knight-- far more “soldierly” than someone like, say, Seth.  It appears to be a highly militarized society, which is why I’ve always seen it as the “Germany” of the archipelago-- think 18th century Prussia, or Charles V’s earlier “soldiers and cattle” comment.  Not that I’m saying Germans are hicks.   But to the Archeanan (Roman) nobility, clinging to power in their decay, the Grustians would definitely be a lesser sort of people-- equivalent to the image of the German-as-Hun, perhaps.  They’re sure treated that way!

Macedon is an interesting case; I assume that their sheer isolation has led to the development of their own spoken and possibly written language.  Archanea in general has always felt vaguely Hellenic, but Macedonia feels very, very Greek.  Ancient Greek.  But King Osmond of Macedon was very friendly to Archanea (so much so that it got him killed) and I assume his children and possibly that generation of nobles and soldiers were brought up to think of mainland speech and manners as “normal.”  I also assume that this was part and parcel of what Michalis was rebelling against.  So Minerva, Maria, and their knights would sound more “normal” to the mainlanders than would Macedonians of an earlier era... but not that normal.  

[Anyone familiar with my FE11 stories will have likely noted the Macedonians as Other theme, as it comes up a LOT.]

Archanea is totally the “fallen” Roman Empire in my head, and its speech is the standard tongue of the continent the way Latin was once the language of all educated Europeans.  The five political divisions of the kingdom (Menedy, Samsufe, etc), differ from one another in the way that the various regions of Italy might differ (Piemonte, Romagna, and so on), and people are sensitive to this.  Someone like Jeorge would be able to place his fellow Archaneans on the map by hearing them speak.  

I kind of think of Aurelis as the France to Archanea’s decadent Rome.  The Aurelian upper classes would, IMO, sound more or less like the nobles of Archanea, to whom they are related by blood and outlook.  The plainsmen of Aurelis are a big damn question mark, but we can assume that the elder Aurelian knights-- Wolf and Sedgar-- probably betray their heritage at every word.  Roshea and maybe Vyland might be more assimilated and come across as more “cultured,” though.  Hardin’s brother probably speaks just like an Archanean noble, but Hardin himself may’ve picked up some inflection and mannerisms from his posse.  He had to have been quite a young man, possibly still in his teens, when he became an advocate for the plainsmen, and therefore would have spent about half his life around them.

Talys is “the Celtic place,” so everyone has sexy Welsh/Irish/Scottish accents.  Don’t think they’re stupid, though-- remember Ireland was once the beacon of learning in the Dark Ages, and Scotland used to have substantial cultural ties with France.  And Mostyn traveled widely, so his court may well be a cosmopolitan place until war breaks out.  They don’t appear to have that much trouble absorbing exile factions.  

[I am on the fence about whether or not Marth and co. picked up anything from Talys in terms of language.  On the one hand, Marth was only fourteen, and was hanging with Caeda, and probably acquired something of her speech and mannerisms.  On the other hand, the exiles may have clumped together and been vigilant about keeping their essential Altean-ness.  Could go either way.]

Khadein may be culturally “Persian” or Turkish, but in terms of language I think it’s an artificial atmosphere, one created by Gotoh and intended as a standard the way modern Italian was  codified as a standard literary language.  The kids and scholars from all over have to understand one another, after all.

And that brings us to Dolhr, bastion of Dragon Culture.  What was it like?  Well, given the dragons “civilized” humans, Archanean culture as we see it is probably based off whatever the dragons taught humanity back in the day.  But things change over several thousand years, so it was certainly not “just like” whatever we see in the games.  Khadein, under Gotoh’s administration, may have actually been a deliberate throwback to the earlier era-- he’s the main link of cultural transmission, after all.  Well, besides Medeus.  Heh.

Oh, yes.  And Dragons from Archanea can converse easily with humans from Jugdral, and Macedonian Peg knights understand Valencian princesses just fine.  It all says to me that dragon colonizers were the foundation of civilization throughout Planet Kaga.

Comments

[crimsonmorgan.livejournal.com]

I have nothing to say about the rest but the quote is this::

'I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse' (Though I thought some Prussian Friedrich said that, hm.)

[amielleon]

I recall that what is now the standard American accent was a rather low accent of a bunch of country people in Britain in the 1400s. It's cute how dialects branch off and earn differing prestige with time.

The recent-ness of the nobility of Archanea is intruging. Personally I can't begin to imagine the experience of dealing with a noble who sounds like a hick.

Must make Archanea the country pretty cocky.

[sailorvfan10.livejournal.com]

I wish I had something to say aside from "l love this" but I don't. But I absolutely love this meta post, probably because I am a geek for accents and languages.

[mark-asphodel.livejournal.com]

Hm. The version I saw definitely had the line about the English in there and was definitely attributed to Charles V. But a lot of the history books I used to read from the library were from the 1930s-1950s and didn't apply the most rigorous sourcing to their anecdotes.

[samuraiter.livejournal.com]

*headscratch*

This is quite thorough, and I ought to bookmark it, but I wonder where it leaves oddball Pyrathi?

[mark-asphodel.livejournal.com]

Pyrathi's natives probably have a pretty "quaint" dialect owing to their isolation and the influence of dragons. However, given its use as an exile colony, a stream of exiled mainlanders would naturally affect the language used there, bringing a constant infusion of "modern" traits and a variety of accents.

[samuraiter.livejournal.com]

And there you have the "America" of Archanea. :-)

[crimsonmorgan.livejournal.com]

I've heard the quote a few times, but English was never a part of it. Might be worth to search for the original.

[samuraiter.livejournal.com]

I read a variant of it from the other end of Europe:

"Arabic is for prayer, Persian is for making love, and Turkish is for cursing."

[mark-asphodel.livejournal.com]

Or Australia, heh.

[mark-asphodel.livejournal.com]

Hey, look at this:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_V,_Holy_Roman_Emperor

[crimsonmorgan.livejournal.com]

Which makes me somehow doubt that anyone truly said that but that some chronicle writer thought "hey that sounds like it would give Ruler XYZ a good image". Which probably happened more often than we think. (Especially if the chronicle writer write the chronicle of someone who lived 200 years ago...)

[crimsonmorgan.livejournal.com]

Uuh nice~ I do like those versions better. Well, I like all of them because they're fun (reading opinions about the sound of German is funny because sometimes they're so contrary XD) I was actually thinking, when you mentioned that you read it in books from 1930s-50s, that there miiiiight have been biases. It's kinda frightening just how much some researchers were biased (and still are sometimes).

[mark-asphodel.livejournal.com]

Must make Archanea the country pretty cocky.

Well, they definitely are. Both the way Nyna's father treated his fellow (lesser) kings and the way that Lang (representative of Archanean nobility) acts toward the satellite kingdoms indicates a massive imbalance in prestige. And also the way that Cartas of Archanea squashed the manakete-integration program that King Ordwin had rolled out in Grust. Nice people...

[writerawakened.livejournal.com]

Very, very cool. I'm a major linguistics geek, so this was all very interesting to read. Especially about the hicks in Grust. LOL! And I can definitely see the glamorization of the military vibe going on there.

I've always wondered if the "Translation Convention" (as TVtropes would put it) is in effect in FE, and we're just supposed to imagine all these different people from all over the place are really speaking their own different languages to one another (auto-translated for our convenience :P). Or, if there's some sort of continental standard language that everyone speaks, and all the variants thereof are just dialects. Even if they shared a Archanean-standard prestige language, well...a large number of the characters aren't exactly prestigious XD. I don't recall hearing much about languages in any of the FE games, really, so this is one realm where meta really helps to fill in the gaps ;)

Good stuff.

[writerawakened.livejournal.com]

I recall that what is now the standard American accent was a rather low accent of a bunch of country people in Britain in the 1400s.

Really? None of the major dialects of Middle English (Northern, West Midland, East Midland, Southern, and Kentish) are very similar to modern General American; although, the E. Midland dialect (the one spoken in London and most used for business transactions and written documents) is supposedly the progenitor of all "standard dialects" including RP, GA, and Canadian English.

[mark-asphodel.livejournal.com]

I also recall reading once upon a time that the current upper-class accent of the Brits didn't develop until well after the rupture with the American colonies, and that the aristocrats of the time sounded decidedly more "American" than their posh descendants. The way I heard it was that Lord North and George Washington would've sounded more like one another, and more like modern Americans, than North would've sounded like, say, the present Duke of Cambridge.

Dunno how true that is, but it definitely caught my attention.

[mark-asphodel.livejournal.com]

Realistically, I think a Translation Convention MUST be in effect. Even in Valencia, the smallest FE continent, the two main nations aren't really in contact with one another outside of battles. When you consider the difference between, say, Middle English and the Early Scots of the Kingis Quair... yeah, it's improbable that the people of Rigel and Sofia speak a completely standard dialect throughout.

And Archanea, again, is a frigging archipelago. With that built-in isolation, the people would unquestionably have developed distinct dialects, if not outright separate languages over the thousands of years of canonical history leading up to the game events. IMO, the most simple explanation is-- nobles and educated people may speak a common standard "court" language derived from the language used in the Holy Kingdom. Everyone else is speaking divergent dialects, if not outright separate languages. Also, Archanea has barbarians, and I sincerely doubt they speak any kind of standard court language!

[amielleon]

To be more precise, standard American evolved from some dialect in Britain, and I confess that I have no good memory about which one it was or when it was. 1400s is a totally erroneous number because I'm shit at history and I forgot that 1492 was Columbus, not the pilgrims.