TLC Forum

English, right?

Frank and Helen were English.

Telmarines did not change that, so there would have been English pirates among their ancestors. Even if names sound slightly Spanish to Sindarin.

Even Calormen, despite titles and names very exotic, must have spoken English if Shasta and Aravis could understand King Lune and Edmund and Susan and so many others - including an 'edge'og - and same for Northern Wilderness.

So, what exactly was the language Prince Caspian was studying for Doctor Cornelius in the book by Pulverulentus Siccus? Latin? For what precise occasions?

English hardly needs a whole textbook for accidence (a k a morphology).

And how exactly was English preserved identical to 19th C London + some Middle Ages and + some Pirates of 17th C. for thousands of years between Creation and Telmarine times?

If Hebrew was preserved from Adam to Abraham basically unchanged, at least lifespans were longer and therefore more overlapping.

English, I assume. It would have been rough on the Pevensies and Eustace and Jill coming to Narnia otherwise.

Unless there was some magic which made them switch language without noticing.

But yes, I assume so too.

How do you account for Narnia existing much longer than the distance between King Alfred and us and still having the same English?

I mean there were about 1000 years between first and second arrival of Pevensies.

and forġyf ūs ūre gyltas, swā swā wē forġyfað ūrum gyltendum. = And forgive us our guilts as also we forgive our guilters ?

Same language?

That's a question I wondered about too. But I think the appearances of the other peoples in the Narnia universe (Telmarines, Calormenes, etc.) may partially explain it.

I believe they said they were speaking Narnian. Didn't Tumnus mention that? I do believe Aslan would have purposely done the language switch idea so that it wouldn't be hard on them. He knew they spoke a different language there. I think what happened can be related to what happened at the Pentecost, in the New Testament.

I think they would call it Narnian, just as we call English English, not Anglo-Saxon-Norman. Somehow America hasn't started calling American English American, but we might if England wasn't a place that we could go.

And that is an interesting question about what Caspian was speaking. Perhaps the high born of Non-Narnian countries had distinct dialects by the time Telmar took over?

While linguistic evolution didn't seem to take place in Narnia (Must have driven Tolkien mad ) one reason for there only being one language and a slowing of the language changing would be that there's no equivalent of the tower of Bable in Narnia so there would be no reason for there to be a massive language shift due to mingling with people that spoke something different.

It's possible too, that with everyone being spread out over the world of Narnia, different regions would have different vocabularies over time (most notably to our knowledge, the Calormenes as opposed to... everyone else we know of). As for the basic preservation (or non- or slow evolution) of the language over such a great span of time, I have no explanation.

I wonder if talking animals and walking trees can have contributed some conservatism.

Telmarines are obviously English Pirates only if the Telmarines in Narnia speak English - otherwise it is not so obvious from what nation the pirates came.

Telmarines and Calormenes seem to have had access each to another language than English, to judge from names. As for Archenland, there might have been Irish as that other language. Telmarines seem also to have studied Latin - Pulverulentus Siccus might have been a learned Pirate's self mocking translation of a nickname like "Dry-as-Dust".

So this is kinda my answer to the question. I must add that I wrote it over four years ago and before my Masters degree in which I had properly studied historical linguistics and language change (although having studied it now, some of the questions raised are even more relevant).

http://hedgepickle.blogspot.co.uk/2011/ ... arnia.html

Wonderful refreshment, I had seen it already. But forgotten about it.

I had written a Google doc about it, I think, yes, the Philologica article about Narnian Philology is not it, and I don't know how to get to my google docs after they switched system.