Language Barriers in Fairyland. A test.

I plan to use a Language Barrier in one of my Fantasy stories, with a Fish out of Water from Fairyland ending up in the wierd world that is Earth. While not ideal, I'm going for Swedish to represent Fairylandish (Icelandic or Old Norse would make more sense, but Write What You Know is a thing) and English for the Earth language.

Here is the same text in both languages. How different are they? on a scale from 0 (identical) to 10 (Totally different).

Här är en kort liten text för att jämföra två olika språk. Hur olika är de egentligen? Jag tycker de är ganska lika, vad tycker du?

Here are a short little text to compare two different languages. How different are they actually? I think they are quite similar, what do you think?

Thank for the help.

edited 23rd Sep '15 7:33:35 AM by TheBorderPrince

They are so different to me, a native English speaker, that if you had only shown me the first one, I could never have figured out what it said.

After the first six words, it looks like gibberish.

Yep, that's VERY different to me as another English speaker. I read it out loud (and probably mispronounced half the words) just to make sure. I can make out about two or three words, but that's it.

"Olika" in particular is very misleading since it sounds like the English word "alike" (meaning "the same") but it means "different."

Usually, the Germanic and Scandinavian languages sound similar enough to English to confuse me MORE, because it's got the Uncanny Valley feeling of "I should know what they're saying, but half the words are wrong."

edited 23rd Sep '15 12:25:40 PM by Sharysa

It would be interesting to hear the Swedish text pronounced to get an idea of how it would sound to those speaking the "Earth language".

I ask because I've heard a person speaking very basic Dutch (it was her second language after English and apparently she "speaks Dutch like a child" and she was speaking slowly) and I was able to get the gist of what was being said due to my (albeit limited) knowledge of German and the similarity of sounds of some words - while written Dutch might as well be Swahili to me.

I'm no expert in linguistics, but to my eye they look somewhat different, but not completely different: as with others above, only a few words look familiar. Nevertheless, it still looks somewhat European to me, and I believe that I could very well imagine a language significantly more different to English. On the suggested scale of zero (identical) to ten (completely different), I think that I might place the translation at about three or four.

(It might be worth mentioning, however, that I speak (rusty) Afrikaans, which I believe is a descendant of old Dutch and similar to modern Flemish, so words like "språk" are perhaps more familiar to me than to those who don't speak such a language.)

For the sake of comparison, look at the following translations of the English text produced by Google Translate; to my eye, all seem more removed from English than the Swedish above. That said, I'll note that I don't know how accurate these translations are, and that translation errors might exacerbate the apparent differences.

Chinese:

Zulu:

Maori:

It's a good idea, but one problem you'll run into is readers who actually know Swedish. Even worse if they can tell you just fed the text through Google Translate. Top that off with the overtones of cultural appropriation (since we're pretty sure Sweden is not a fairy-world and I doubt you're trying to imply that it is) and it can seem slightly squicky.

My suggestion is to use a Conlang instead. Either make one yourself or get someone else to devise it for you.

Oh boy, that reminds me of one of my ideas! I had a group of Elves speak an intentionally weird version of Danish. I swapped a whole lot of consonants (usually I hardened the soft consonants to make it sound more abrupt, changed some suffixes/prefixes, and switched around vowels accordingly). Also, the in-story Danes note that Elvish speakers of Danish use such archaic language that the average person off the streets almost can't understand it. (As the Elves live so long, their language would have changed much less than human speakers.)

Since I don't know Danish myself, but I DO know how to write archaic English, I basically used Translation Convention.

Maybe to take away the Unfortunate Implications, your Elf language could be handwaved as an archaic or forgotten relative of Swedish?

edited 24th Sep '15 2:15:01 PM by Sharysa

I have Swedish as a first language and English as a second (learnt in school). If the story will be written in Swedish or English is still a question...

Their language are "Scandinavian-ish" . It makes it possible for Fairies on Earth to pass off as Scandinavians as long as they don't run into anybody speaking a Scandinavian language or do anything wierd. A Conlang would be a good idea, but given my last atempts at Conlang building... I would have to work harder.

There are a few portals leading to this Fairyland, so handwaving in the language trough contact could work, but it seems a bit too handwavy...

By the way, those Danish Elves sounds really interesting.

Making a rudimentary conlang is surprisingly simple. Devise grammar rules, write up a lexicon that you add to over time, and should have what you need for your story.

My go-to suggestion is use Esperanto grammar (it's stupidly simple, fits on a short webpage) and make up words that sound right.