At 02:48 PM 9/3/2002 -0400, Mark A Mandel wrote: > >Hungarian is "much different" from most other European languages, being, >as far as modern linguistic science knows, totally unrelated to them. >(Distant kin to Turkish, Finnish, and Estonian.) Mark, are you certain? Finnish and Estonian I have known about for years; this is the first time I've heard of a relationship with Turkish (although it makes a certain amount of sense). > >#little or no language change for Dragaerans. So distinctly different >#languages probably imply *very* ancient divisions. > >This is one of those places where sf/fantasy authors simply don't deal >with the science, because it would mess up their main point, which is >telling a good story (and whatever else they want to do with it). Yes and no. Consider Quebcois and, for that matter, Hungarian. You know (in fact, you know better than I) that when I cultural group transported whole to a new location, one of the things that can happen is that the language "freezes." There are no dialects of Hungarian, and the language stopped evolving (with the exception of foreign loan words) some thousand of years ago. That is, according to the linguists I've read, and according to my late father, a magyar of five hundred years ago could understand a contemporary Hungarian with no difficulty. That is some of what I was playing with. I very carefully did not assert that this had happened with every language in the East.