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New multi-volume big space adventure starts up at Book View Cafe!
Book View Café Releases Exordium: The Phoenix in Flight by Sherwood Smith and Dave Trowbridge
Exordium: The Phoenix in Flight (Science Fiction)
Sherwood Smith and Dave Trowbridge
$3.99 ISBN: 978161138 059 0
I'm very excited about this! All of Sherwood Smith's character and world-building skills applied to SF? And David Trowbridge is not only an old hand at SF, he's also the spouse of writer Deborah J. Ross, author of the excellent Northlight and Jaydium. This promises to be great stuff, and at an unbeatable price!
So -- until my Nuala sales are high enough to let me write the next book, here's some good SF for your Reader. I'll be getting a copy for my Calibre, and will report back as soon as I finish the other six reviews I have to write!
Here's the basis of the story:
Brandon nyr-Arkad, the Emperor's scapegrace youngest son, defies protocol and evades a ceremonial duty, a defiance punishable by death. He's just ahead of an attack on the Panarchy of the Thousand Suns by Eusabian, a revenge twenty years in the making.
Phoenix in Flight begins the five volume arc of Exordium, as Brandon discovers what happened to his home after he left, and he has to make a decision: stay an outlaw, or return and deal with the smoking ruins of his rejected world?
Sherwood Smith and Dave Trowbridge are longtime science fiction readers as well as writers.
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I was wishing you were here this week for a question. I read somewhere that the Chinese can still read parchment that is four thousand years old -- the characters are still readily understandable and most still have the same meaning. How about the spoken language? Could someone Chinese today understand a person speaking five hundred year old Chinese? Or one thousand year old Chinese? I wonder if the same is true for Japanese or Korean?
These questions keep intruding and destroying my concentration for the current work!
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So the bit about being able to read parchment that is 4000 years old is at best an exaggeration. (Do we have parchment that is 4000 years old? Last I'd heard much more than 3000 years old it's all bronze, or written on bones...)
The peroid of classical Chinese I am most familiar with is about 2,500 years old. It is a different language. The grammatical structure is totally different. There are individual characters that mean the same things, but there are also ones whose meaning has changed, not to mention a lot of characters that aren't in modern use. An educated Chinese person who hasn't made a particular study of guwen might be able to stumble through a guwen document from this period, badly - and that only because everyone gets a little guwen in school. (And I've certainly run across native Chinese speakers who don't seem to realize that writings from this period have different grammar, and they just look up the characters they don't know and produce the most appalling bad translations.)
But seriously, pretty much all my Chinese friends who I don't know from a guwen scholarship context are all "OMG, you read guwen? That's so hard!" And as I said, I rarely read stuff much older that 2,500 years.
Also, the scripts are different. I think most literate Chinese folk would be able to mostly muddle through the scripts from, say, 3000 years ago. Less sure about older than that.
Spoken language... So, we know that the pronunciation of words in the language was substantially different. My recollection is that there is a scholarly consensus that Chinese was non-tonal during that period I know best (okay, my modern is better, but of the older forms of the language) and there are a lot of reconstructions of what it did sound like - I don't know how accurate they are.
Five hundred year old chinese is a lot more modern... and in many ways I have no clue. But keep in mind that there are a lot of dialects in Chinese, that are mutually semi- or in- comprehesible. As you go back further, the likelihood that anyone you meet is speaking a dialect you don't know goes up. So it would be far more likely that someone would be able to understand someone from their home town but five hundred years ago. But I would expect you'd still see a lot of changes in the spoken language. (And five hundred years ago most writing was still using the grammatical rules of Chinese from 2,500 years ago, but that was not the spoken language. It's kind of like how latin was preserved as the language of the literati in Europe.)
Japan, Korea, and Vietnam (among others - and heck, the region and people who are counted as "chinese" has changes a lot over time) all adopted guwen as their written language at various times, and they adopted the pronunciations of the Chinese characters that were being used at the time of adoption... more or less. So a literate person from those cultures could write in a way that would be understood by other guwen readers, but their pronunciation might have diverged a fair bit from anything a Chinese person would understand. (There are some exceptions to this - you really need to know your time period well. But more or less when the countries were in direct contact with China, it's a lot more likely the elite could speak comprehensible Chinese. And then for some period afterwards. And there were more or less common pronunciations used among scholars.) Modern Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese pronunciations of classical Chinese are incomprehensible to Chinese speakers. (This I know first hand. When I was studying guwen, a number students in the class didn't speak Chinese but were studying it for their research in one of the other languages. So they tended to get annoyed that the Chinese speaking majority in the class would often use Chinese to explain things - and retaliated by doing their readings in their language of choice. It was pretty cool, really.)
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Sounds like I will be smart about this and not try to reproduce any of the languages being used in the story. It's a contemporary fantasy, but one of the major characters is 500+ years old. He spent his first fifteen years being raised by Asian dragons, and then the next 100 years or so in Japan as it was -- before being forced (by the dragons catching up to him) to leave the part of the world he knew best and head for any place he could hide with a minimum of magic for others to sniff out.
The dragons are, some of them, very, very old. They have their own language, and speak more Sanskrit than anybody else still does. They also learn languages fairly easily and generally speak whatever is used in the area they live in, and whatever is the language of trade. I'm guessing that as my wizard raised by dragons wanders the world, finding other dragons, he speaks mostly to them in either the old dragon language, or whatever that tribe of dragons thinks of as their native language. (It could be English, Spanish, Scandinavian Germanic -- whatever.) Sounds like having lived during the Warring States period in Japan, he probably would have picked up both Japanese and Chinese.
Would the Chinese in this situation be a literati type of Chinese, or a port/trade type of Chinese? He became a samurai and served one of the shogunates before deciding he could no longer hide his apparent immortality and leaving.
I think I need occasional words he might use for naming a cat, for example, or a nickname for a lover. I think his real name might be Sanskrit, but when you come from a culture (dragon) next door to one where aristocrats take new names to celebrate every life change, what's "real?"
Thank you again for all your help! It helps to muse aloud and get sticky notes back! :^)
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For nicknames and the like, you could fake it with modern dialects. I don't know how much information we have on what was being spoken only a few hundred years ago. (But again, that's not really my time period.)
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Now I need a Sanskrit dictionary. (And a cold snap. Hence the icon.)
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I left the locks on at Amazon to deter pirates, but I understand pirates don't bother breaking e-books, they're more likely to scan an old book in (I guess this gives them the right to sell it, ha-ha...) So I should have left it off at Amazon, too. But I can't change that at Amazon now.
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So my insistance on DRM free is political rather than practical, really.
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I don't have a problem with people making a backup of their books -- and I've heard of publishers limiting how many times someone can re-download a book. Which I have a problem with -- either you allow them to download as long as that edition exists, or you don't. Everyone has a right to try and protect a book from common disaster, if they want to keep that book.
Eventually, the tech will evolve beyond the ability to transfer. But up to that point, there's several layers of mediums between, or so I've observed. People who want to go to the trouble should be able to do so.