It a Sar’Teri
-EDIT- Comic for today will update tomorrow. 🚫🥄
Today's edition of the Secret Commentary is empty, because Dave failed to come up with something for it.
It a Sar’Teri
-EDIT- Comic for today will update tomorrow. 🚫🥄
My guess is because she was only 5 ( think?) when she was dropped off at the orphanage and thus didn’t have enough time to learn the entire Sarnothi lexicon. Poor bean <3
It could be a tribal/regional dialect of some sort. I know some languages have that.
Your statement could be entirely true, I mean, English alone. Even removing ‘slang’, go to Ireland, Australia, England, and United States of America and have a conversation and you’ll hear dramatically different languages.
I would like to spitball on an alternate possibility though.
Ter Ghant could be his name or just a recipe.
Seir Heya Ahren Jehnn could be a special food type without a human equivalent ala tacos. Something where she hadn’t heard of it as a child.
Behrent Ui Eel could be a special way of preparing Eel, ala General Tso’s Chicken.
Recipe was the wrong word. Fill-word. “I’m an old customer.” style thing.
The irritation of a comments system that doesn’t allow edits!
Makes sense. After all, Selkie didn’t know the name of Sarnothi bacon either (which I can’t remember at present).
As for English, it’s not only different countries. Neighboring counties in England often have distinct dialects. You can even go to two different places in London and hear quite different English dialects, both from London natives. IMO, the two main London dialects, RP and Cockney, are nearly as different as dialects can be and still be considered one language.
My SIL’s mother was a war bride, lived in London (I don’t remember where). She told me that you could get different dialects in different neighbourhoods, and it was almost to the point that different streets had distinct dialects.
Probably “Seir Heya Ahren Jehnn” will turn out to mean “diced human brains with butter sauce” or something.
Human no, primate? Maybe.
Both of these make a lot of sense. I have friend who’s trilingual, in Mandarin, English, and Spanish. She grew up speaking Mandarin at home and retains fluency, but there are words you generally don’t use in the environments she was exposed to Mandarin in. She needed one more class to be considered a “full time” student one semester, and on my suggestion, she took an Advanced Speaking Mandarin class. She learned a lot of new vocabulary; she benefited from already having the framework of the language, but was able to add to her knowledge of it a lot.
For Spanish, she did a yearlong study aboard program in Ecuador, so that’s her default Spanish-standard now. She always finds it interesting when she goes to other Spanish-speaking places and has to adjust for regional usage.
I’m certainly didn’t know the words for “Filet mignon” or “foie gras” when I was five so depending on what was ordered it makes perfect sense she wouldn’t know them. Also it’s possible like the others said it’s a dialect/ slang kind of thing.
What I really wanted to comment on was just how real that feels to me, the Sarnothi have really started to feel like a genuine demographic, a real culture.
I LOVE the use of the brackets to separate what she does and doesn’t understand!
Agreed! If only the things I don’t understand were all identified by brakets…
Like spelling apparently…
Well, I can believe it. When I studied to become a programmer, we got specific French vocabulary on computer-related things, and there was a whole lot of stuff in there I had never heard of before.
I’m betting Selkie is just encountering a lot of specific food and shopping related jargon here.
France has a powerful government agency trying to protect the French language from foreign influences. The language of computing is English, just because the USA got a head start on designing computers without the distractions of WWII bombing raids, and then had much more money for computers (and everything else) right after the war. That French agency doesn’t like that and keeps inventing French-derived words for computer jargon, then trying to persuade or force people to use them instead of the words everyone in the business already knows.
So if you are working on a contract to write software for a French company, you’re probably going to have to learn a bunch of those invented French words and use them in the code and documentation. It’s a good excuse for a large price increase…
…unless they’re Quebecois French. >:)
Actually, ironically, the main drive for those French-specific words apparently came from Québec. And I’m currently working for a French company who have decided to change their internal communication language to English because they’re going increasingly international.
I like that while one tribe has been established as “bad guys” there are ones that pop up in exile, showing that there is diversity in the tribe and not all agree with the things said and done.
There is also the whole “dialects” idea. I speak some Mandarin, but I definitely don’t speak Shanghainese, for example. This may be a more local dialect that Te Fahn’s family knows. Or slang that Selkie didn’t learn, etc.