Shards of Honor - readthrough!

[flourish]

To kick off our Vorkosiverse reread: Shards of Honor! I've just got some quick thoughts, and look forward to hearing all of yours too:

• Cordelia discusses herself as being somewhat socially awkward or incapable when she talks about the bad relationship she was in pre-Aral, but she doesn't actually end up being that way in the series later. Is this just self-doubt? Or could it be that Cordelia is "out of step" with Beta colony and for some reason has assumptions about the way people interact that's more suited to life on Barrayar (or, even, not on Barrayar either, but at least on Barrayar she knows her assumptions are likely to be wrong)?
• I've recently seen some people complaining about the question of "blood guilt" that gets brought up with the fetuses in replicators, suggesting that Bujold has some kind of anti-abortion axe to grind. Rereading it this time, I wonder if it isn't perfectly reasonable: on Beta colony there are not typically any unwanted pregnancies, nor would I imagine are they very common on Escobar. The idea that Betan culture - how does Cordelia put it? "has a respect for life"? - has a very different tenor than it does in the United States today, then, or on Barrayar for that matter. I don't have any opinion on the topic that I care to share, but it was interesting to me to meditate on how it affects our understanding of Cordelia...
• It's also interesting that Cordelia explicitly positions herself as a theist. I like that Bujold does not just allow the assumption that everyone is a theist, or everyone is an atheist, or whatever.
• It just occurred to me: Konstantine Bothari - he's Greek! And so is Elena, then. Somehow it did not occur to me that 'Konstantine' established him as part of the Greek minority on Barrayar.
• Rereading Shards of Honor reminded me of Xav Vorbarra's Betan wife. To refresh: Xav is the younger son of Dorca the Just, half-brother to Mad Emperor Yuri. He ended up living through the end of the Time of Isolation (or at least Dorca's reign overlapped the Time of Isolation's end, so I assume Xav lived through it) and ended up bringing home a Betan wife from his ambassadorship to Beta colony. I don't know if we know her name, but his daughter Olivia married Piotr and therefore was Aral's mother; another daughter was Padma Vorpatril's mother. Can we say wonderful fanfiction topic? I would love to dig my teeth into writing about the experience of a Betan going to just-post-Time of Isolation Barrayar! Holy jeez, talk about culture shock.

What are you all thinking about?

Remember: the next book in our readthrough is Barrayar, and we'll be discussing it on June 1!

Comments

[branchandroot]

The only two instances I recall the Greek minority being mentioned very particularly are in Warrior's Apprentice, when Miles has a run-in with a handful who mark him out as a mutant immediately upon arriving at Camp Permafrost, and in Civil Campaign, during one of the wedding campaign meetings, when Alys mentions infanticide among "certain language groups" in the backcountry. Which Ivan 'helpfully' translates as "greekie hicks". None of the characters with Greek names seem to display any cultural particulars.

I do find it interesting that Lois primarily identifies them as a "language group" rather than a cultural group; it suggests, in-universe, that Barrayar has a unified planetary culture while retaining four (I think) major linguistic divisions.

[flourish]

I wonder how a unified planetary culture on Barrayar would have come about. I suspect it would be through the fact that they were all settlers together at the beginning - but then why did the language divisions remain?

[raven]

Part of me wonders if it's because Barrayar is either a much smaller planet than Earth, or just has less in the way of landmasses - because they only ever mention "the southern continent", and, presumably, the one Vorbarr Sultana is on. Are they unified just because there aren't enough of them to maintain significant divisions?

[elf]

I don't think Barrayar's smaller, just considerably less populated. It took Earth a long time to reach several billion people, and that's without whole continents full of inedible plants.

It'd be easy to have a relatively unified culture, since it started roughly that way, with any pocket that retained a separate identity at all being considered weird.

[branchandroot]

I could see a general cultural unity coming about during the Cetagandan invasion; nothing like all-out war and us v. them for unification. If it happened that recently, that could also explain why the language divisions are still extant. It seems less likely that the cultural divisions that tend to follow language would have been that thoroughly erased, though.

We may just have to posit, in-universe, that none of our narrators has taken much notice of specific cultural practices, though that's really a bit of a stretch.

Out-universe, I think it was an oversight.

[naraht]

Yeah, it just doesn't make sense to me that you'd have language divisions without cultural divisions. People learn languages much faster than they lose cultures.

[bzarcher]

Ever been to Quebec?

Admittedly, there are some minor cultural divisions there, still, but the major divide is most certainly language.

[flourish]

Ooh, good call. I like the idea that language groups focused on preserving language as a carrier for culture... but then the culture ended up all mooshing around anyway so language divisions are now the primary thing.

[twistedchick]

The language differences might remain, despite cultural similarities, because of landscape. People in the mountains or in other geographically-separated areas, or those who don't get down to cities often, may be more likely to retain the language they grew up speaking. It's also possible that the common culture includes terminology in both languages, so that some people end up speaking a combined version that becomes Barrayaran, as opposed to the earlier separate languages.

(disclaimer: not a linguist.)

[bibliofilen]

Sweden ruled over Finland for 500+ years and the Finnish language still survived. I guess the same could be said for the Norman ruling class in Britain where the court spoke French and the people English. I think it is mostly about what language is used in what setting and how common it is that people switch back and forth between these settings.

[teluekh.livejournal.com]

Barrayar reminds me a bit of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as portrayed in /A Sailor of Austria/, except -less- linguistically messed up. Before World War II displaced a lot of people into ethnic nation-states, language enclaves were much more common. Many still exist.

Switzerland might be a good general comparison for Barrayar. Multilingual, high local autonomy. Districts are more comparable to cantons or even separate countries than U.S. states.

The Nexus isn't all that far future...somewhere in the vague vicinity of 1000 years?

[bibliofilen]

Yes, well. If Chaucer (some 700 years ago) is more or less easily read by a modern speaker of English what do you make of The Battle of Maldon?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Maldon#Other_sources

[bibliofilen]

Or the Charter of Cnut would be even more fitting - just a bit less than 1000 years old.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_language#Charter_of_Cnut

[teluekh.livejournal.com]

But the difference there is more due to invasion by the Normans than natural drift...

[teluekh.livejournal.com]

Naked weddings, not necessarily infanticide.

The new wedding customs among even the most marginalized in Barrayaran culture indicate that previous religion has mostly been lost. At least for Russians and Greeks (especially Greeks), it's reasonable to assume the previous religion would be some variant of Eastern Orthodox. Even if the religions no longer exist in anything resembling their past forms (both being very vulnerable to a loss in apostolic succession, "now what?"), their early presence might have helped maintain ethnic identity.

Cyrillic managed to become the alphabet of choice, somehow. Is recent Barrayaran English ascendancy a new development of Vorbarra unification, galactic recontact, and the Cetagandan occupation? It might be reasonable to assume the Vorkosigan district was previously Russian-speaking...

For all we know the Barryaran French were all Quebecois and skilled in resisting language hegemony ;)

Considering there's clear separatist factions in the Counts despite Barrayar being more than a bit of a centralized dictatorship, the unity may just be an illusion. The nervous jokes about ethnic revolt (from all three other language groups!) seem a bit too nervous.

[branchandroot]

*grins* Now there's some background-fic potential just waiting to happen.

[flourish]

You know, I've always assumed that since galactic recontact, English has been taught in schools. Perhaps that's why it's "Greekie hicks" - it's not so much that they speak Greek (although perhaps that's a stereotype now) as that they don't speak galactic English, which is taught in urban schools and is necessary to get ahead in the world.

Hmm... do we know anything about English vs. other languages on other worlds? Or is the universe running on the assumption that everyone is speaking a futuristic form of English as the trade-language, and mostly as the natural language too?

[aedifica]

Really? I've never assumed anyone in the series was speaking English. They've obviously got some sort of galactic language standard, but I don't remember ever seeing a name attached to it.

[teluekh.livejournal.com]

No, it's English. Explicitly so in Brothers in Arms at least. Beta Colony was colonized from America, so almost certainly English there (and throughout Nexus high culture) too.

[aedifica]

OK, I missed that! (And I just re-read BiA, too!)

[bibliofilen]

Where does it say this? I've read Brothers in Arms several times and don't remember this. Do you have a chapter and a quote?

[teluekh.livejournal.com]

It's when he's at the reception with the Lairoubans. He doesn't speak Lairouban or Arabic; she doesn't speak English, Russian, Greek, or French in their Barrayaran dialects or any other, and as such they can't understand each other.

Chapter 4, p.125 in TPB Miles Errant, other page numbers are anyone's guess.

IMHO, the ready availability of audio recordings as a form of cultural interchange will probably delay language drift in the future. English and American English are not diverging nearly as fast as they once were.

[bibliofilen]

Oh right. I guess I always imagined that they spoke some variant of Russian on Barrayar but I guess it could be English as well unless Bujold is just being neglectful in her punctuation and Miles got English from Beta. Anyway it seems like those are the main Barrayaran languages that survived from Earth. Since there is a Lairouban language I suppose that some colonies or planets have developed new languages as well. Is Betan its own language or just a variant of English, or possibly some other language?

Remember that it was just a thousand years ago that all of Scandinavia spoke the same language. It wasn't until we truly started to settle that languages really diversified. I can still easily speak Swedish with a Norwegian or Dane and be understood. And probably get the main gist out of a German text as well.

[flourish]

I hadn't really either - but since people above had, I was assuming I was missing a giant clue. I mean... whatever they're speaking, it's obviously radically different from what we speak today, because it's far in the future...

[(Anonymous)]

A minor nit: the Camp Permafrost scene you are describing is during the first section of The Vor Game, not The Warrior's Apprentice.