Ned Ludd wrote:
> Netrunner wrote:
>> Standing in the dark, rainy shadows of a city alleyway, I spied the
>> Replicant Eberhard Schefold covertly transmitting a message to
>> renegade friends in alt.fan.blade-runner. Tracking...
>>
>>> Nicklas Ingels wrote:
>>>
>>>> Wow, In the "Blade Runner" thread of the forum at minhembio.com
>>>> someone has notice that sometime "When they fly around in the
>>>> beginning, a voice from the flight controll tower speaks Swedish"
>>>>
>>>> It's then repeated in German & Japanese (they say/think)
>>> I could transcribe and translate the German bits. I've never
>>> bothered before because it's obvious technical gobbledygook and
>>> sloppily done. I've said this before, but the multi-language
controllers
>>> don't make
>>> much sense to me. In a system like this, you'd need one unambiguous
>>> way of communicating, even if the city was polyglot. All the Police
>>> dispatchers talk English. Also, it's sort of counterfeiting the
>>> idea of Cityspeak as a language of its own, at least in the way the
>>> original voice-over describes it. It is not a "mixture" of
>>> languages. The languages stand next to each other, unchanged. The
>>> only instance where the concept of Cityspeak is actually realized
>>> is with Gaff's lines.
>>
>> Very insightful. It has certainly occurred to me before that
>> "Cityspeak" is actually not sustainable. It is akin to Esperanto.
>> Something made up and at the outset sounds rather cool, but
>> ultimately is complete bull****. (And I speak as a total Red Dwarf
>> fan here.) I absolutely agree that mixing distinct phrases from
>> different languages may sound cool on the surface,there is no way it
>> would really happen. The use of distinct phrases from ONE language
>> intermixed with English (as Firefly uses Chinese) is believable.
Multiple
>> languages just isn't.
>>
>> Netrunner
>> --
>> "Every American child should grow up knowing a second language,
>> preferably English."
>> - Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
>
> It seems to me that "Cityspeak" would not be made up. It would start
> with everyone speaking a dominant language, and then borrowing words
> from other languages where they are convenient "handles" and
> reasonably well understood.
>
> Carried to the extreme, at some point the "borrowed" stuff outweighs
> the original stuff from the original language.
>
> ... but it's not "designed" in any way, you simply have a class of
> citizens that no one really cares about, talking in a language that
> just sort of happens over some extended period of time.
>
> The logical beginnings of that were present in L.A. in the early
> 1980's, with little bits of spanish sneaking into "american" here and
> there.
Yes, to an extent Cityspeak is reminiscent of how langauges influence each
other in "real life", though apparently Cityspeak seems to go a bit
further.
Having Hungarian and German along with Japanese, Swedish and other
languages
would suggest that large communities of people of those nationalities are
present. That does seem a bit unlikely.
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