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Timeline

Post by SandChigger »

(Language changes over time...and we're talking about a significant chunk of time here, so it will probably be helpful to define some periods for use in discussing the development of the language.)

OK, here's a tentative initial framework. Comments please!
  • Proto-Galach (Now to ??)

    English-Russian mixed language/creole phases (extending through period of colonization of the solar system.)

    (What's a good estimate for this period, 500 to 1,000 years? When will the first colony ship go out?)
  • Ancient Galach (11000 B.G. - 2000 B.G. = First interstellar colonization through foundation of Landsraad?)

    (This covers a period of 9,000 years, so further divisions will be necessary!)

    Language(s) of the "Slow Diaspora Period", characterized by dialectal divergence due to increasing physical isolation of speech communities and slower communications. (Virtually no travel and little communication between distant systems.)
  • Old Galach? (?2000 B.G. - 0 A.G.) The establishment of the Landsraad implies some faster form of transportation and/or communication and increased contact between formerly isolated peoples/languages. Over time this reduces dialectal differences. (During this period the name "Galach" first comes to be used?)
  • Middle (Imperial) Galach (0 A.G. - 10217 A.G.)

    (The OCB is compiled sometime around the beginning of this period, and while not universally accepted, it provides a ready exemplar of a new standard for the language. (= Classical Galach?))

    Again, this will need to be divided further. Guild-fostered improvments in communication and transportation and a centralized Imperial government will further erode (but not completely destroy) dialectal differences and help create a conservative standard variety which will continue to change, but slowly.
    • Early Middle Galach (0 A.G. - ?? A.G.)
    • Late Middle Galach (?? A.G. - 10193 A.G.)
  • Atreidean Galach (10193 A.G. - 13725 A.G.)

    [Edit: Let's go with Atreidean instead of Lanthanian. ;) ]
    • Early Atreidean Galach (10193 A.G. - ?? A.G.)

      The turmoil at the beginning of this period (Muad'Dib's Jihad) will no doubt see a massive influx of Fremen words into the language.
    • Late Atreidean Galach (?? A.G. - 13725 A.G.)

      Leto's clamping down on population movement would probably foster increased dialectal divergence across the Empire, with the variety spoken on Arrakis being the "standard". (Leto himself, by his presence not necessarily by fiat, might have exercised a restrictive effect on the Arrakeen dialect?)
  • Post-Atreidean Galach (13725 A.G. - 15240 A.G. & onwards)

    The population movements during this period will no doubt have an immense impact on the language. New dialects develop in the Scattering. (NB. The following are branches, not consecutive periods.)
    • Old Empire Galach

      Dialects spoken in the Old Empire
    • Scattering Galach

      Dialects which develop out in The Scattering
Comments? Refinements? Objections? :)

[2/17/08 edit: finally figured out how to do lists!]
[2/19/08 edit: incorporated some DE designations]
[3/30/08 edit: minor edits to dates at beginning]
Last edited by SandChigger on Sat Mar 29, 2008 8:27 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Post by Liege-Killer »

I just decided to browse the Dune Encyclopedia for language-related entries; there's one for Galach, as well as Fremen.

Might I suggest taking that as a starting point? Seems like it would save a lot of work.

The DE gives the stages of Galach as follows:


Old Galach: 7000 BG to 4000 BG

Early Middle Galach: 4000 BG to 1000 BG

Middle Galach: 1000 BG to 3000

Late Middle Galach: 3000 to 7000

Atreidean Galach: 7000 to 11000


The article is very technical, laying out the various sound changes between stages. Not much in the way of history or background though. The Fremen article is much more forthcoming in those areas.
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Post by SandChigger »

The scanning in the PDF copy I have of the DE is fairly spotty, so I never bothered looking at the sound change rules very closely; I hadn't gotten around yet to looking at the article since receiving my used copy of it recently...but it was on my agenda.

Looking over it again after reading your suggestion above, I remember one of the reasons why I had decided to dismiss it for the most part (even though it was prepared by a linguist, Walter E. Meyers). As you note, the "Old Galach" (a term I have held off using because FH uses it in the books and we need to determine as much as possible what he is referring to) period in his chronology begins in 7000 BG, but when you look at the sound and morphological changes he describes, it's obvious he's taking Modern English as his base (and that what he's giving us is a way of transforming ME words into Old Galach words). The problem with this is that 7000 BG is around 4,000 years in our future and it's therefore highly unlikely that anyone would be speaking the same ME that we are.

One thing I did find interesting in the article was the switch over time from the more analytic, minimally inflecting nature of Mod English to a more synthetic language using prefixation for inflection; reminded me of verbs in Navajo. ;) But more on this elsewhere, later!

If we can determine the reasoning behind the periods in Meyers' chronology, I wouldn't have any problem adopting them in part. But for the reason I mentioned above, I think it needs augmenting. (Due to when the DE was written, it doesn't include the periods of the later books.) :)
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Post by Liege-Killer »

SandChigger wrote:[...] when you look at the sound and morphological changes he describes, it's obvious he's taking Modern English as his base (and that what he's giving us is a way of transforming ME words into Old Galach words)
That's the same impression I got. Especially with the change in participle/gerund endings from -ing to -in, which is a change that seems to be happening in English right now.
SandChigger wrote:The problem with this is that 7000 BG is around 4,000 years in our future and it's therefore highly unlikely that anyone would be speaking the same ME that we are.
Yeah, I noticed that problem too. I also think there would be many more sound changes than those listed for a 3,000-yr period. The real situation would be far more complex.

But I wasn't thinking that much of the precise changes listed in that article. I was really just thinking that the general timeline might be useful. Or, even if the dates may need some changing, at least the terminology could be used.
SandChigger wrote:One thing I did find interesting in the article was the switch over time from the more analytic, minimally inflecting nature of Mod English to a more synthetic language using prefixation for inflection;
Once again, we're sharing similar thoughts. I also had that kind of change rolling around in the back of my head; although it was the Fremen article that started me thinking on it (it says that at some point Fremen became an isolating language). As the theory goes, over long periods of time, languages go through cycles of the different categories of morphological typology. And thus, it's very likely that any particular stage of Galach will have a different typology than its Earth-bound predecessor language. The question for us is: how long does this cycle take, and where does each stage of Galach fall in the cycle?
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Post by SandChigger »

Hey, we really do seem to be on the same page. ;)
Liege-Killer wrote:Yeah, I noticed that problem too. I also think there would be many more sound changes than those listed for a 3,000-yr period. The real situation would be far more complex.
Plus changes in grammar, especially with the prefixation. There could very well be a change in the basic word order, from SVO to SOV...or even something more extreme like VSO.
But I wasn't thinking that much of the precise changes listed in that article. I was really just thinking that the general timeline might be useful. Or, even if the dates may need some changing, at least the terminology could be used.
No probs with that, basically. We'd have to issue a caveat that what we refer to as "Old Galach" might not be what FH meant by it in the books, as I mentioned yesterday. "Atreidean Galach" also doesn't seem quite right, for the dates given. How do you interpret that? I take it to refer to the variety spoken by the Atreides (essentially Caladanian?), which didn't really become important Imperium-wide until Muad'Dib's Jihad, the Regency and Leto II's reign. How about we substitute "Atreidean" for my "Lanthanian"?
Once again, we're sharing similar thoughts. I also had that kind of change rolling around in the back of my head; although it was the Fremen article that started me thinking on it (it says that at some point Fremen became an isolating language). As the theory goes, over long periods of time, languages go through cycles of the different categories of morphological typology. And thus, it's very likely that any particular stage of Galach will have a different typology than its Earth-bound predecessor language. The question for us is: how long does this cycle take, and where does each stage of Galach fall in the cycle?
That's funny, because that's something I've been meaning to post about, the cyclic nature of change.

I've often thought that IE case endings might have originated in a system of postpositional clitic case markers like Japanese uses...and wonder if Japanese won't eventually a full case system. (We already see a limited hint of this with some pronouns in colloquial usage: ore no uchi > ore-n 'chi "my house", or omae-n toko "over your way, your place".) Japanese case particles don't change form (exhibit allomorphy) to agree with the preceding noun, but IIRC some Korean ones do (phonologically conditioned), leading to the possibility of different noun declensions eventually.

Another example is Mandarin Chinese, which has a reduced phonemic inventory and more restrictive phonotactics compared to Old Chinese, resulting in an increase in compounding to maintain lexical distinctions. Mandarin also uses fewer tones than Cantonese, for example, so it will be interesting to see what eventually happens to its tone system. (Not that I'll be around that long. ;) )

If we had a longer sample of data, we might be able to more clearly detect great, long swings from analytic/synthetic to agglutinative/polysynthetic.
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Post by SandChigger »

I've updated the timeline a bit. Again, I'm not firmly wedded to anything there, but I'd like to try to tie the periods to events and social changes that would have had an impact on the language.

The Ancient/Old divide should be earlier, probably. Whatever technological development improved transportation and communication and allowed the formation of the Landsraad (I personally think it was spacefolding, but let's get into that elsewhere) no doubt occurred before 2000 B.G., because a period of coalescence of the scattered human colonies (sometimes..."turbulent") would be necessary...maybe up to a 1000 years? (Note that I am assuming that there was not a similiar political body before this time which the Landsraad succeeded.) It would have been during this period of increased contact resulting from "reacquaintance" that the language would have changed.

Or at least that's the way I'm looking at it at the moment. ;)
"Chancho...sometimes when you are a man...you wear stretchy pants...in your room...alone."

"Politics is never simple, like the sand chigger of Arrakis, one is rarely truly free of its bite."

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Post by Liege-Killer »

SandChigger wrote:"Atreidean Galach" also doesn't seem quite right, for the dates given. How do you interpret that?
Ah yes, I thought you might question that!

My answer: Galach from the period 7000 to 11000 was a stable enough chunk to be considered a single stage of the language, and even though Paul was alive to speak it only at the very end of that period, it was retroactively named in his honor by later linguists and historians.

Anyway, how did you come up with "Lanthanian"?

By the way, the Jihad could have been one of those social changes you mentioned. Galach might have undergone quite a bit of change while the empire was being violently subdued. It's plausible that it might have absorbed a good many Fremen words during that time. So right around Paul's time might be a good break point in between language stages.
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Post by SandChigger »

Good answer!

Ha ha, we'll make a "fanficker" of you yet! :D
Liege-Killer wrote:Anyway, how did you come up with "Lanthanian"?
"Leto" evidently derives from the Greek verb lanthanein "to escape notice". ;)
By the way, the Jihad could have been one of those social changes you mentioned. Galach might have undergone quite a bit of change while the empire was being violently subdued. It's plausible that it might have absorbed a good many Fremen words during that time. So right around Paul's time might be a good break point in between language stages.
That's what I was thinking, too, when I started the (now) "Atreidean" division with the date of Leto's reign, but we could move it back to Paul's ascension to include his reign, the Jihad and Regency. You thinking Norman Invasion or Alexander in Asia? ;)
"Chancho...sometimes when you are a man...you wear stretchy pants...in your room...alone."

"Politics is never simple, like the sand chigger of Arrakis, one is rarely truly free of its bite."

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Post by Liege-Killer »

SandChigger wrote:"Leto" evidently derives from the Greek verb lanthanein "to escape notice".
Maybe. My Greek's far too rusty to be sure. Did FH say something about it?

By the way, I really like some of the details you've included above, particularly this one:
(The OCB is compiled sometime around the beginning of this period, and while not universally accepted, it provides a ready exemplar of a new standard for the language. (= Classical Galach?))
Nice touch.
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Post by SandChigger »

No, FH never used it (that I know of; it's not in the books, at any rate). I just came up with it because I wanted an adjective to describe things Leto...tic...ish? ;)

Little details like the OCB thing will be important for that DE-style article you've suggested, no?

It also occurred to me that there might be quite an involved honorific system develop in the court prestige dialect. (There's a Japanese influence for you! On my thinking, I mean. :) )
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Post by Phaedrus »

I think the correct adjective in the Duniverse for "of the Atreides" is "Desian," not "Atreidean" or "Atreidesian."
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Post by SandChigger »

Hmmm. Occurs only once in Chapterhouse. As does "Atreidesian", so after it.

Desian would be even more opaque than Lanthanian, no?

Will ruminate.... ;)
"Chancho...sometimes when you are a man...you wear stretchy pants...in your room...alone."

"Politics is never simple, like the sand chigger of Arrakis, one is rarely truly free of its bite."

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Post by Liege-Killer »

Hmmmm.... I was just doing a little googling to see if any Dune fans out there have used the word "Atreidean" and I found something interesting.

Take a look at this . Look at the bottom where the guy has a sentence in "Proto-Galach" and "Atreidean Galach." The guy before him claims this pair of sentences is from the DE article, but I can't find it in there anywhere. What are these guys talking about?
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Post by SandChigger »

I'll have to check that list of Galach references Omph posted (on the DN BBS?) again, but I think that thread was on it.

Anyway, I remember seeing that example before but never have been able to find the original source. It's definitely not in the DE Galach article, but it might be somewhere else in the book?

FOUND IT: page 239 (paperback), in "Fremen Language. History." ;)

It looks like Meyers was the author.
W. E. Meyers in TDE wrote:Proto-Galach: A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
Atreidean Galach: baradit nehiidit beed gwarp tau nubukt.
I see two problems with this: (1) he is identifying English as Proto-Galach with no Russian elements, and (2) the words are probably closer to the originals than they would be after 21,000 years. (More on this on the other thread.)

Back to descriptive adjectives...if enough people want to use "Desian", I'm not opposed, but it doesn't have as much textual support behind it as something like "Arrakeen" for the adjective referring to Arrakis, for example. "Atreidesian" is just a dur-awful mouthful. ;)
"Chancho...sometimes when you are a man...you wear stretchy pants...in your room...alone."

"Politics is never simple, like the sand chigger of Arrakis, one is rarely truly free of its bite."

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Post by Liege-Killer »

I don't like "Desian" because it gets too far away from the most important part of "Atreides," the reference to the ancestral Greek House of Atreus.
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Post by SandChigger »

I'll see if I can find my mammoth Scott & Liddell in the boxes in the office later this afton and look for a proper Greek adjective. ;)

(Failing that, I'll tool around online during a break. Doing grades this week. Bleh.)
"Chancho...sometimes when you are a man...you wear stretchy pants...in your room...alone."

"Politics is never simple, like the sand chigger of Arrakis, one is rarely truly free of its bite."

Arrakeen is an unawakened ghola.
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Post by Liege-Killer »

SandChigger wrote:I'll see if I can find my mammoth Scott & Liddell [...]
Now that brings back memories..... I haven't used one of those in years!
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Post by SandChigger »

;)

Yeah, I owned the smaller one when I was doing Greek at State, used the big ones in the Classic Dept. or main library when needed. Then a few years ago I started getting interested in the language again and had some extra of the "pretty" in hand and figured, what the heck, and splurged. Great investment, haven't regretted it. :)

(I piddled around overlong this morning and have decided to work at home for the rest of the afternoon. I'll try to find the "big guns" tomorrow morning. ;) )

Found this, btw, on the WP page for Atreus:

Atreidae
The plural word Atreidae or Atreidai (meaning literally "those of Atreus") refers to Agamemnon and Menelaus, sons of Atreus— in English, the Atreides. The term is also used for their children and (less often) for their further descendants.

In the Dune series, Frank Herbert tells the story of Leto, Paul and Leto II of House Atreides, the enemies of the Harkonnen clan. The Atreides claim to trace their ancestry back to the original Atreides of the Trojan War. In one of the prequel novels by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson, the Play The Oresteia is performed in Castle Caladan, during the reign of Duke Paulus Atreides.
Of the two forms given at the beginning, the first is obviously Latin and the second Greek. I googled "Atreidian" and got only 9 hits.
"Chancho...sometimes when you are a man...you wear stretchy pants...in your room...alone."

"Politics is never simple, like the sand chigger of Arrakis, one is rarely truly free of its bite."

Arrakeen is an unawakened ghola.
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