Did [Seanchan natives before Luthair] speak the same language?
The people there did not. But the people there…this is like an acquisition. This is sort of like what the Han did: when the Han conquered China, there were many languages in China, as there still are. Because Mandarin is one language and Cantonese is another. They use the same ideograms, because the Han said: “You may speak any language you wish to use, but you will use our alphabet, our ideograms.” And it is as if the French said poisson , you say whatever you say for “fish”, but all of you spelled it F-I-S-H, in English letters. The French spelled it F-I-S-H, in English letters and said poisson and that’s what they wrote when they said poisson . And that’s what you wrote: you would say whatever the Hungarian word is for “fish” but if you wrote it, you would write F-I-S-H in the English letters. And with the Consolidation, culturally the people of that conquering army had been much more absorbed than they were. Culturally they have little left of the culture that they brought with them. But their language was imposed: they imposed the language they brought with them. I’ve thought about it a little bit and I think there was, because of that history, probably more languages than one. The languages would have had more time to drift and more incentive to split apart than they did on the [Randland] continent, as I postulated its history, but those languages were wiped out.
That’s what happened in India, by the way.
Yes. Those languages [on the Seanchan continent] were wiped out and the language that remains is essentially the language that was spoken by Arthur Hawkwing. But, because, as I say, of the things that happened after Hawkwing’s death: the shifting around of populations, mixing and blending of populations from different parts of the continent, and a thousand years of growth, and no time for that language to change a great deal. Also the one thing that has survived, which helped, I think: printing presses were one for the first things rediscovered, you might say, after the Breaking. People began printing books very shortly after the Breaking—I mean very shortly—as soon as people were setting up cities, there were people who had book presses going, and it’s an interesting thing: I can read Shakespeare and understand 98, 99 percent of the words and language. If you went back the same length of time between me and Shakespeare to behind him, he could not have understood what those people were saying, he could not have read what they wrote. Because the English language had changed in pronunciation, in the way the spelling was, in the way the letters were written, everything.
What happened simultaneously then: it wasn’t as I’ve heard postulated that Shakespeare was so beautiful and so wonderful that he froze the English language. What happened was: the printing press came into common use and suddenly the language stopped changing as rapidly. It still changed, but you would take me back to Elizabethan times and I would have a hard time understanding the accents, but eventually I would work into understanding what would sound to me like strangely accented English, but pretty recognizably English for most, at least for London and the south of England. So we’ve got printing presses, and so in relatively short periods of time, the language is largely unchanged, not completely but largely, in each thousand year segment. Although over the three thousand year segment it has diverged from the Old Tongue, which you must learn to be an educated man, to what people speak now, and most people do not speak the Old Tongue and can not understand the Old Tongue. A thousand years back, you’ve got Arthur Hawkwing, and that’s the language that the Seanchan speak. And these people can understand it, they only think “You’ve got a funny accent, you speak too fast, and you speak too slow, and it’s all slurred.”
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.