39,327
edits
You No Take Candle: Difference between revisions
m
update links
m (revise quote template spacing) |
m (update links) |
||
Line 8:
When a character or group needs to be portrayed as foreign, primitive, or inferior in intellect, yet still able to communicate and is intelligible, the language of these characters is spoken as a grammatically abhorrent mess. Characters could be speaking a mutilated version of the language they learned from another culture, or a [[Hulk Speak|butchered version]] of their own language, or simply a language so "primitive" it appears from an outside perspective to lack complexity. This trope is [[Older Than Print]], going all the way back to Chaucer.
If the work is taking on a superior versus inferior viewpoint, the superior beings might use [[Spock Speak]] or [[Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe]] to contrast the barbarism of the other group. The inferior race is often shown speaking pidgin English and omitting articles, auxiliary verbs, possessive pronouns, and sometimes prepositions. The speakers often refer to themselves in third person. It is quite similar to [[Hulk Speak]], though even non-combatants can or will use it. In some cases, it is a form of [[Aliens Speaking English]], in which the creatures have their own language and [[Eloquent in My Native Tongue|speak English as a very poorly learned secondary language]].
It is rarely pointed out that omitting speech elements is not actually incorrect for many languages. Many languages already do--such as Chinese, Russian, American Sign Language, and especially [[Japanese Language|Japanese]]. In English, "Me go Seattle three day ago, visit Uwajimaya, buy fifteen manga. Me new manga very good; you want read?" is still understandable, and many languages never employed more complexity. There is already a precedent for people copying the syntax of their native tongue into English (e.g., native speaker of Italian, Irish, Yiddish, German).
Line 26:
'''Shampoo''' ''(pushing Ranma into Koi pond)'': [[I Take Offense to That Last One|Shampoo selfish, not stupid.]] }}
**** Another segment of [[Fanon]] believes that Shampoo actually as intelligent as one would expect [[Country Mouse|someone from a remote village]] to be, but is simply [[Wrong Genre Savvy]] -- She never quite realizes that Ranma is a [[Chaste Hero]], and keeps going for what her peers insist is the best method for a cute Chinese girl to bag a stupid foreigner - [[Lamarck Was Right|She just wants him for his genes]].
** This might just be Shampoo's [[Running Gag]] or something though. In the dub, her Mandarin is almost worst than her English! If she doesn't speak Mandarin or English well, what ''does'' she speak?!
*** Considering there are well over ten major "dialects" of Chinese that are generally less mutually intelligible than Swedish and Norwegian, or Swedish and German, she speaks her native language well enough. It ain't all Mandarin or Cantonese in China.
* Ikuto/Keenan from ''[[Digimon Savers]]'' speaks Broken Japanese/English, due to having been raised by Digimon. However for some reason; the rest of the digimon speak ''perfect'' Japanese/English, including the two who were specifically his parental figures.
Line 85:
* The [[Eenee Meenee Miny Moai|Moai]] in ''[[Night at the Museum]]''. "Dumb dumb bring me gum gum?"
** You better run run, from Atilla the Hun Hun.
* Averted (or subverted) with Tia Dalma from ''[[Pirates of the Caribbean]]''. Besides having a thick accent, she speaks in a non-standard vernacular (such as "him carve out him heart, lock it away in da chest"). However, she's clearly a very intelligent, sly and mysterious character, and her unusual vernacular makes her even more [[Your Mileage May Vary|attractive]]. Some fanfics like [http://www.fanfiction.net/s/3042174/Dead_Men_Tell_No_Tales this one] have her [[Third Person Person|speaking in the third person]] as well.
** She's not supposed to be speaking English, but rather Jamaican Patois, an English-based creole. It actually does sound a lot like this.
* In ''[[A Bug's Life]]'', Dim the beetle has very simplified speech.
* Examples from westerns deserve a whole section, as Native Americans mostly speak in short sentences, dropping articles and stuff. Sometimes that's also a case of [[Eloquent in My Native Tongue]].
Line 163:
** In a similar vein, an early ''[[Star Trek: Enterprise]]'' episode features a lost colony of humans whose language has "devolved" into a primitive form after 70 years of non-contact with Earth.
*** To be fair, everyone except for the very youngest children had died off all at once several generations back; so everyone living there now learned to speak from people who had barely learned to speak themselves, having no adults to teach them better.
** There's the the epically cheesy "Brain and Brain, what is brain!" brought to us by the... questionable episode fittingly titled "[[Star Trek/Recap/S3
** Or "The Omega Glory" where warfare reduced two nations to "tribes" speaking a mangled, devolved English.
** Who could forget "Devil in the Dark", featuring the Horta, which at one point carves the words "NO KILL I" in the cavern floor using its searing-hot flesh?
Line 225:
{{quote|'''Tiger Lily:''' We go up now. Keep guard. Watch for pirates.}}
** Fortunately, the newest movie incarnation of Peter Pan has a very talented First Nation girl play Tiger Lily, who gives an extremely rude speech in one of the First Nation languages (Cree, if I recall correctly.)
** The original play of ''Peter Pan'' combined this trope with [[Asian Speekee Engrish]], oddly enough.
* Bloody Mary in ''[[South Pacific]]''.
* Chrismas Eve from [[Avenue Q]]. Combined with a [[Funetik Aksent]].
Line 275:
*** Also exhibited with the [[Proud Warrior Race Guy|Ronso]]. It's kind of hinted that this is merely a language barrier, since the Ronso Maester speaks perfectly eloquently, but Kimahri has spent at least ten years away from Mt. Gagazet and still hasn't learned a personal pronoun...
** ''[[Final Fantasy XI]]'' has the majority of the beastmen use simpler forms of the [[Five Races]] language, if at all. Goblins and Lamia are actually more fluent in the player's language, although for Goblins, being good at language is [[Honest John's Dealership|good for business.]] It's also subverted in that there's a very well-spoken Orc in ''Wings of The Goddess'', as said Orc is actually a cursed Elvaan. {{spoiler|Why is this text spoiler'd and not the earlier part? Because it's actually an aversion; the Orc is really a well-learned [[Genre Savvy]] [[Magnificent Bastard]] ''real'' Orc who puts this trope and the expectations of it to work in order to trick you into freeing him, and it's only until you meet him again in [[The Lost Woods]] that it's revealed you've been had.}}
* The Trolls in ''[[City of Heroes]]'' are a gang whose members take a drug that gives super-strength but mutates them into giving them their distinctive troll-like appearance; it also apparently causes their brains to degrade to the point they start speaking like this. Ironically, this is the ''only'' effect (well, that and rage issues) Superadine has on the brain. Trolls are still as intelligent as anyone else; it's just the language centers that are affected.
* In ''[[Runescape]]'', the Ogres speak a vaguely Jamaican accent, which is commented on multiple times. Some Ogres that have lived with humans speak grammatically correct, albeit short, sentences. They still use lots of slang, making some sentences almost unreadable. The goblins, though speak in a 'stupid' way with incorrect grammar. In an inversion of this trope, they are revealed to be very smart, but most tribes of goblins care more about warfare and physical strength than science, art, and intellectuality.
* In ''[[Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri]]'': planetmind speaks variously broken English, but is a vast planetary intelligence into which humanity may eventually merge.
Line 395:
* This trope may be the perception of speakers of relatively more [[wikipedia:Synthetic language|synthetic languages]] towards speakers of relatively more [[wikipedia:Isolating language|isolating languages]], and their accents when crossing the linguistic barrier. Isolating languages tend to have a low morpheme-per-word ratio, with word order usually being more critical to comprehension. Synthetic languages, on the other hand, commonly use words with many morphemes fused together in a high degree of inflection, and actual word order is less critical for comprehension (though may in fact help determine a sentence's emphasis).
** There is recognized a sort of sliding scale of languages being more isolating or more synthetic. Afrikaans and Chinese are less synthetic than English, which is less synthetic than Japanese, which is less synthetic than Finnish, which is less synthetic than Nahuatl.
* Patois in general does exist all over the place, and do SEEM to be full of errors when compared to "proper" language, but after a generation or so any apparent bugs have probably become features. For instance, in Nigeria "I went to the store to get milk" and "I went to the store for get milk" are both correct, but have different meanings... the second one means that you weren't able to get the milk. Note that this a shade of meaning that can't be conveyed quite as efficiently in standard English... note also that the sentence "I went to the store to get milk, but they were out" might strike someone fluent in Nigerian patois as ungrammatical.
* This really is something that happens, ''especially'' when people are first learning the nuances of a new language. What seems incoherent to us as an idiom, makes perfect sense to a native. Try saying "two birds with one stone" in another language, and you'd get blank stares from a lot of them.
** Phrasal verbs! As well as idioms, they are the bane of English-learners.
* Many Americans view [[Jive Turkey|Ebonics]] this way, since it changes about half our grammatical rules. For instance, there's no word for the present tense of "is" or "are" in Ebonics. It's just skipped over. As is the possessive -s. The result can sound like a very broken form of English, and has helped contribute to the "stupid black youth" stereotype.
** The irony of reliance upon the idea of Ebonics as an identifying language for a group as opposed to a descriptive language for a dialect is that a great many white people from Appalachia and the South speak a pidgin nearly identical to Ebonics with the same rules. Those with very little black interaction assume there is more there than actually is.
Line 407:
** That's because most of the Slavic languages (with the notable exception of Bulgarian) actually lack any articles whatsoever. And have a radically different phrase structure — what about having a free word order where the linguistic role of a word is determined by inflection, rather than position, which is used for emphasis instead. Thus, having learned English as adults, they simply carry the imprinted grammatic structure of their native language into English.
*** Additionally, at least in Polish, the repetition is strongly discouraged so the omission of "I", "you" etc. is common (the subject of sentence can be deduced from grammatical structure of sentence). The reverse projection of using the "I", "you" would be a stylistic error (especially in written text).
* A version of this used to be very common in English spoken by Irish people, because Irish grammatical structures were imported directly into the language, sometimes creating strange, convoluted sentences. The best known example arises from the fact that Irish has an extra form of the present tense called the "gnáth láithreach" (habitual present) used for actions which occur on a regular or ongoing basis, which uses "bíonn" (to be) as an auxiliary verb in its conjugation, resulting in constructions like "I do be going to the pub every day". Other typical "funny Irish" sentences like "Is it looking for a slap you are?" or "I have a great thirst on me" can be attributed to the same kind of imported grammar. Now that the English language has so strongly taken hold in Ireland, you rarely actually hear grammar like this outside of rural areas or those few places where people still speak Irish primarily - though [[With Friends Like These...|our friends the English]] were still using it in "Paddy the Hilarious Irishman"-type skits long after it fell out of general use.
* Speaking of, Cockney rhyming slang is intended to sound just like this: a bunch of idiot lower class people utterly butchering the language beyond comprehension. In actuality, it's code that relies heavily on local teaching and euphemisms, and virtually impenetrable because the key to translation -- the rhyme -- is assumed to be known to the audience already, and is not spoken: "I'll have a look" becomes "I'll have a butcher's", referring to "butcher's hook", which rhymes with "look".
** It gets even crazier than that. You can make up a new rhyme on the spot, never say the second half, and have it be obvious simply from the context. The listener will deduce that because the sentence makes no sense, it must be a new rhyme, will work out what it must mean from the context, then find the rhyming word to complete the phrase so they will remember it. From that point on, the group may use the rhyme when context isn't enough to deduce it, and the outsiders are stumped yet again.
* Chinese (even, and even especially, Classical Chinese) has a simple (or even simplistic for our tastes) grammar with only a few exotic things, which can lead to the stereotype of Chinese people speaking with simplistic grammar. Masterpieces such as the ''Tao Te Ching'' or ''The Art of War'', when translated literally, would seem to fit this trope. Of course, it didn't deter them from being such a prestigious civilisation.
| |||