zompist bboard

"Elcari never use language as a social marker. They distinguish themselves by dress codes or artistic style, but not by speech."

Does this mean that unconventional language uses, slangification, borrowing, and wordplay generally are alien to the elcari - maybe even taboo?

I presume they would be familiar with some non-standard uses of language - e.g. lying. Do they use sarcasm?

If elcari only distinguish by dress code and are incapable of sarcasm or irony in language...my god...that means they're a species of hipsters!

No, it just means you don't find cliques (like aristocracies or gangs) who make up their own slang.

It's true they don't go in for slang much, and prefer to invent names for human things and places rather than borrow words.

They do enjoy puns, as well as jokes and riddles. Their tastes in humor run to either the dry or the blunt; attempts to be clever, flowery, or witty rarely go over well.

Mornche Geddick wrote:No, it just means you don't find cliques (like aristocracies or gangs) who make up their own slang.

Language change doesn't does distinguish aristocracies or gangs; in human cultures it can distinguish what school you went to or what neighbourhood you lived in, or who your parents were. Language use isn't all that creative in everday speech; we heavily make use of the vocabulary and expressions of our peers when expressing ourselves. The elcari would have to be inhumanly careful to stop semantic drift to avoid distinctive speech patterns cropping up as marking particular groups of any kind (miners, merchants, metallurgists, etc.). I suppose given they seem to be fairly sedentary as well as long-lived, this would help.

So Haleza Grise wrote:

Mornche Geddick wrote:No, it just means you don't find cliques (like aristocracies or gangs) who make up their own slang.

Language change doesn't does distinguish aristocracies or gangs; in human cultures it can distinguish what school you went to or what neighbourhood you lived in, or who your parents were. Language use isn't all that creative in everday speech; we heavily make use of the vocabulary and expressions of our peers when expressing ourselves. The elcari would have to be inhumanly careful to stop semantic drift to avoid distinctive speech patterns cropping up as marking particular groups of any kind (miners, merchants, metallurgists, etc.). I suppose given they seem to be fairly sedentary as well as long-lived, this would help.

Well, it's helpful then that they're not human, isn't it. I guess their just elcarin careful.

So Haleza Grise wrote:The elcari would have to be inhumanly careful to stop semantic drift to avoid distinctive speech patterns cropping up as marking particular groups of any kind (miners, merchants, metallurgists, etc.).

As Atom points out, they are inhuman. This is one of the points where it shows; humans do have fast rates of sound change and lexical replacement.

But even humans don't really have occupation dialects.

zompist wrote:

So Haleza Grise wrote:The elcari would have to be inhumanly careful to stop semantic drift to avoid distinctive speech patterns cropping up as marking particular groups of any kind (miners, merchants, metallurgists, etc.).

As Atom points out, they are inhuman. This is one of the points where it shows; humans do have fast rates of sound change and lexical replacement.

But even humans don't really have occupation dialects.

Of course they're not human, that was a deliberate choice of words on my part. I know that humans don't have occupation dialects, although Labov's sociolect maps are impressively detailed, imho. "Chunking" means that once I hear a particular phrase, I'm likely to reuse it.

Of course, it's a different matter when someone has an average lifespan of centuries - if you are a metallurgist for 200 years, speaking mainly to other metallurgists, I'd say in humans at least you'd have some distinctive speech features. But I gather from the grammar that elcari don't like to do the same thing for extended periods, so there'd be a homogenising effect as they maintain contact with all members of the community.