User blog:Marcusandreas/Language and Safehold

I love this series of novels and everything about them. Except for one thing: language. The use of names and the spellings thereof drive me crazy. And it takes me out of the story every time.

I accept that language changes and that Weber needed an easy mechanism to show that language had changed significantly from the Creation to the present Year of God. What I can't figure out is what has changed and how it has changed.

Take for example some names of some characters:  Zhaspar Clyntahn, Paityr Wylsynn, Zhoshua Makgreygair, Zhulyis Pahlman. Do these spellings represent merely the pronunciation of their names? That is, were we to see their names written down would we see Jasper Clinton, Peter Wilson, Joshua McGregor, and Julius Palman? I certainly understand the point being made with these spellings: the pronunciation of standard English has changed over time. A hard 'j' has become a soft 'j', several vowels have reduced to a shorter vowel (or whatever the hell that 'y' is--it drives me crazy because I don't know how it's meant to be pronounced). All of that makes sense—pronunciation changes over time.

But are we to understand that the spelling has changed along with the pronunciation? Why would it do that? That's not how languages work. For example, the English word grace used to be pronounced like the word grass. When the sound changed from [græs] to [grejs] in English, it was not accompanied by a spelling shift—that is, we didn't start spelling it greyss, or something like that. Instead, we recognized that 'ace' was now pronounced [ejs] rather than [æs].

So, here's the thing, if every J on Safehold is now pronounced in the French way rather than the English way, why change the spelling? Why ever need to write Zhoshua instead of Joshua? The link between spelling and phonetics is always in flux--especially in English--so why not let it be?

The only way this makes sense to me is if the bulk of the population were illiterate for a significant period of time and only became literate after the language's sounds structure had changed. Then, they just started to transcribe their names into the Safeholdian alphabet without any thought as to how those names had been previously spelled. But even then, if by that time a J had come to sound like "Zh" then why not use the J?

If, on the otherhand, the spellings are not the actual spellings but just phonetic transcriptions of the 9th Century YOG pronunciations, then it's unnecessary. It would be enough to say something like, "Merlin still had a hard time with the way these Safeholdians pronounced their vowels in such a long fashion--Haarahld for 'Harold'--but he was getting used to it." Then we could just read these stories about Jasper Clinton, Caleb Armok, Gregor Stonar, Eva Parsons, etc. and know in the back of our minds that these names would sound a little different on Safehold. To me that would be less distracting.

I know that this is just a pet peeve of mine because I'm a language guy. But it seems to me that given a series of novels that goes to great lengths to explain sail rigging and cannon production, an odd paragraph here or there explaining this language stuff would not be out of line.