C.J. Cherryh’s Chanur novels are all about language - a merchant ship full of catlike aliens picks up a human and they struggle to be able to understand him to figure out how he might be valuable (and protect and ally with him in the end). Additionally there are language issues with the other species in the “Compact” - the other oxygen breathers, the kif, mehendosat, and shto? I think?, they have workable translation computer things that mostly make it possible to communicate, but there are also two methane breathing species. The t’ka? speak in seven-word matrices, and nobody’s really sure if anybody at all can talk to the k’nnn. I may or may not have put too many or too few apostraphes in there, it’s been a while. Anyway, it’s all very well done.
So far this thread is all about language . . . what exactly does the OP mean by “time differences”?
I just thought of an exception to the general rule that learning a language is boring: C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet has a long section where Ransom is learning the language of the Hrossa on Mars, and makes it interesting.
They were travelling from the lower Volga to Sweden - basically, all of Russia, south to north. That’s at least a month’s travel.
Doc Sidhe by Aaron Allston ( a good book btw ) had a fellow by the name of Harris transported to the “fair world”. When he commented to the title character that the languages should be different, Doc Sidhe theorized that a magical translation effect had given him the language and that he only thought he was speaking English. Harris responded by quoting Shakespeare and asking if it rhymed, which it did, and said that random rhymes would never survive Doc’s magic translation. That rather shocked Doc, since not only did it prove that English and Low Cretanis were truly similar, but he recognised Shakespeare.
It turned out that the fair world and the grim world ( ours ) are linked; events on one tend to be mirrored on the other, to a greater or lesser degree. As well, they appear to have been one world once, or much more closely linked. This mirroring effect kept the languages from drifting too far apart, so Low Cretanis is just a different dialect of English, Burian of German, and so forth.
This is a really awesome idea. 
Many, many years ago when I was young and foolish, I read a Piers Anthony novel. I think it was called Virtual Mode or something like that. It dealt with language differences across different worlds pretty believably, by essentially having the two main characters incapable of communication when they first meet. They have to communicate through pantomime and drawing. Until, of course, the telepathic horse showed up. :smack: Luckily for me, that’s about all I remember from the book. I may have been a fourteen-year-old girl, but even I knew crap when I saw it.
I’ve been wanting a reason not to read Anthony that I didn’t have to read Anthony to acquire, and you’ve just given it to me. Thank you!
Well, that and it was yet another of the bazillion examples of him writing a book about older men and teenaged girls falling madly, madly in love.
On the subject of time differences between worlds, and since Narnia has been mentioned, I thought I’d bring up one thing that WASN’T mentioned in ‘the lion the witch and the wardrobe’ (which I’m on my second audible listen-through of at the present time.)
There’s much made in the narnia books about the time disparity as seen from ‘our world’, and the time gaps between the books being erratically much longer than the elapsed time in England. However - there are three different trips into the wardrobe in LWW, and no clear indication of whether the elapsed time in narnia between them was just a few days each (as it was in the professor’s house I believe,) or longer, on the order of months or even a few years.
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Lucy goes through alone, meets Tumnus, visits with him - he confesses that he’s under orders to surrender her to the witch, but can’t go through with it, and sends her back through ‘war drobe to Spare Oom’
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Edmund follows Lucy in, meets the witch. finds Lucy on her way out, and she says that she’s had another lovely visit with Tumnus.
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All four kids go in, Tumnus’ cave has been raided by the witch’s wolves, the robin leads them to Mister Beaver. etc…
Has anyone else ever wondered about how much narnian time takes place between these events? Just curious.
The classic short story, “Traveler’s Rest” by David I. Masson, postulated a world where the rate of time was different depending on where you were (much like Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity, except with time instead of gravity).
If I remember correctly, the girl in that story was a self-injuring fourteen year old with an incredibly disturbing backstory and the the guy was…what? In his thirties with multiple ex-wives and mistresses? *
So sad. I was really impressed that he made communicating so difficult in the beginning, since it was something I’d never come across in a book before and it really impressed me at the time. After I realized how pervy the whole thing was–and that stupid telepathic horse showed up–I was happy enough to deal with books that had everyone speaking the same language, thankyouverymuch.
- And I seem to recall something about diapers being appropriate adult clothing in the guy’s world, too.
Dammit, I’m looking for reasons not to read his books, Zsofia!
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Darmok” dealt very interestingly with a language barrier between the Federation and an alien race that spoke in terms of metaphors and historical allusion. Quite well done.
I read a great science fiction story once, long ago, about an alien humanoid society in which everyone wore masks, communicated by singing and using small instruments, and followed a rigorous caste system. A human diplomat has to work very hard in a very short time, when a criminal fugitive arrives from Earth, to learn the aliens’ means of communication and get help in catching the bad guy.
Stargate is even worse. Almost every new culture or aliens they encounter speaks English, yet use an entirely different written language. The producers poked fun at this in an episode (one of the ones intended to be a series finale) when the team is stranded in ancient Egypt and Daniel actually has to teach the natives English.
And then of course there are those aliens that communicate through farting and tap-dancing…
Capt. Janeway once offended an alien race by putting her hands on her hips, which was an extremely insulting gesture in their culture. Ah, the hazards of interstellar diplomacy…
That story was “The Moon Moth” by Jack Vance. It appeared in Galaxy in 1961.
I admit that I had to Google for the title & publication date. But I remembered the story because I read it–back in 1961. Yes, it’s a good one.
After he wrote that paragraph for me, he thought about it some, and sat down and wrote a whole story starting from that one paragraph (about 4000 words). He changed the names of the planet and ship, and did a lot of polish on it. It’s quite entertaining.
Basically, the Admiral is sent to the planet to figure out why treaty negotiations aren’t going so well. The point is that he can’t speak their language, so he sits and watches. Because he’s not paying attention to the words, he notices a non-verbal component of the language. This is what the negotiators have missed all along, and once they add the corresponding non-verbal part, the treaty is signed in a matter of hours, and the Admiral gets to go home.
I did it in less than 100 words, he needed 40 times that amount to tell the same story. Who’s the better writer, huh? LOL!
Olive
Trust me, it’s more “gross and skeevy” than “hawt schoolgirls”.