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

[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.

[teluekh.livejournal.com]

The Betans are American in origin and Cordelia and Aral share a language, so English seems a good assumption for Beta Colony.

Interesting thought on the Scandinavian languages. Barrayaran English and Betan English are probably further diverged than English accents are today. Makes Miles's accent switch more credible as a disguise, I guess.

Drift does happen, though - I know that when 19th century Norwegian families in the United States who've preserved their native language go back to Norway they sound painfully rural by modern standards. Partly because they immigrated from rural areas, but still. I'm about 1/4 Norwegian myself - my ancestors were crazy enough to farm near Tromsø.

[bibliofilen]

The Norwegian thing is probably also due the fact that Norway began to reinvent its language(s) after the union with Denmark ended and Sweden took over. I think the transformation continued well up til after WW2.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokm%C3%A5l_language#History

Excerpt on languages (non-spoilerly)

[bibliofilen]

I found this in The Vor Game:



"Language school," said Plause, still reading.

Plause spoke all four of Barrayar's native languages perfectly already. "As student or instructor?" Miles inquired.

"Student."

"Ah, ha. It'll be galactic languages, then. Intelligence will be wanting you, after. You're bound off-planet for sure," said Miles.

"Not necessarily," said Plause. "They could just sit me in a concrete box somewhere, programming translating computers till I go blind." But hope gleamed in his eyes.



So, you see, there are galactic languages as compared to native Barrayaran languages and translations are necessary. Perhaps Aral, being as high in the succession as he is and military, got a bit more in the way of language education than the average Barrayaran. Or he learned Betan from his mother. Surely Cordelia, being a survey commander as well as Betan, ought to speak several galactic languages.

Whatever explanation, I find it a lot more likely than a universe of separate planets where every planet speak inter-intelligible English. I just assume Bujold didn't want to bother with the details of it all as it might distract from the stories.

Re: Excerpt on languages (non-spoilerly)

[teluekh.livejournal.com]

Yes, there clearly are galactic languages, but equally the lingua franca of space travel in the -areas we see- seems to be English. Looking at countries with current or incipient space programs, this doesn't seem too unreasonable. In many cases English is already a de facto elite/technical lingua franca, as in parts of India and increasingly China.

Looking at current international cultural exchange in things like...Eurovision, English is a bit more prominent than one might expect too. ;)

Escobar has what looks like Spanish as an official/local language, but English as another language the people we see speak to Betans and Barrayarans.

Miles -doesn't- speak galactic languages, so I think it can be assumed that people are talking to him in a language he understands unless he's specifically mentioned as having a translation earbug. There's circumstances where he clearly -doesn't- have any extra gear, such as Dagoola!

Re: Excerpt on languages (non-spoilerly)

[bibliofilen]

But the lingua franca in Europe has changed several times the last 1000 years. First it was Latin, then it was German for most of Europe until French took over somewhere 15-1600 and today it is English. Besides we can't even be certain they speak English on Beta - considering they were multicultural from America they could just as well speak Spanish, or more likely a new language with characteristics from both languages.

Miles spent a year or so on Beta as a teen. I'd expect him to have learnt the most common galactic lingua franca then if not earlier. That he doesn't speak every language doesn't mean Cordelia neglected that part of his upbringing.

Now I am not saying the new intergalactic lingua franca is NOT descended from English, I am just saying that the whole thing is likely a lot more complex than that.