The past is another country – we speak differently there
Most of us (well at least if you’re my age) encountered Chaucer, Shakespeare or Beowulf at school, making us aware that, if we travelled back in time, we might struggle to make ourselves understood. To paraphrase Spock, “it’s English, James, but not as we know it.”
Star Trek, and a universe of other well-known sci-fi series, use Universal Translators to overcome the conversations-with-aliens problem. These devices provide instant two-way translation between earthly and extra-terrestial tongues, and are becoming less fictiony with Google’s development of pixel buds. As Doctor Who has no trouble chatting with either the bard (The Shakespeare Code) or Chaucer (The Doctor’s Tale), the TARDIS’s telepathic translation field must deal as easily with ‘alien’ English as with alien anything else.
In Ken Grimwood’s novel Replay, Jeff Winston repeatedly travels back to an earlier point in his life. Foreshadowing Groundhog Day, he gets to live his time again, but with full recollection of the choices and outcomes of his earlier incarnations. Jeff takes care not to mention things that don’t yet exist, but his communication is otherwise trouble free. But would it really be like that? Recently I observed my mother and a friend of similar age greet each other:
‘How are you?’
‘I’m well, thank you. Oh people don’t say that now do they? Isn’t it I’m good?’
‘Oh yes, I think you’re right.’
‘OK. I’m good thank you. How are you?’
‘I’m good, thank you.’
If, like Jeff, I journeyed back to my younger self, I’m sure people would be perplexed by my “I’m good” in response to their “how are you”, and the dozens of other slips that would reveal that my English was no longer that of a native speaker. Watching my mother and her friend practise the new standard English greeting, I realised each generation creates its mother tongue afresh.
Bhee Bellew is Programme Manager on the Creative Multilingualism programme.
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