Tag Archives: language

What did they speak in Bronze Age Crete?

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I received wonderful news: both In the Shadow of the Bull and On the Horns of Death have been picked up by a publisher in Greece and translated. So excited!

This got me thinking about the language in Ancient Crete. What did they speak? Greek? It is hard to know since we, of course, have no examples of the spoken language. We do have sample of what there was of the written language, however.

There are several examples of ancient writings but the only one that has been deciphered is Linear B. That was finally deciphered in 1952 and was used primarily for administrative texts. Tablets have been found in Knossos, Kydonia, Pylos, Thebes and Mycenae. When the Mycenaean civilization collapsed, this style of writing disappeared.

Linear A, which some believe was a precursor of Linear B, (others posit they were used simultaneously), Cypro-Minoan and Cretan hieroglyphics remain undeciphered.

Linear B is believed to be a early form of Greek. Knowing how English spoken in the age of Chaucer sounded, I would guess a Greek speaker now would not be able to understand this early form.

The pitfalls of language (for a Historical fiction writer)

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Usually, when I write about language, I write about idioms. There is nothing like a dated idiom to drop into your story and stop the action. And idioms are tricky. Some, even some we use all the time, are ancient. I think of ‘strike while the iron is hot’ which, although phrased different according to the century, has been around for hundreds of years.

But some idioms enjoy a brief spurt of popularity and are never heard from again. When was the last time you heard ‘Like the bees knees’? And of course, new idioms are always being created.

In this post, though, I am going to discuss a few words. They can be even trickier than the idioms. We use our familiar language frequently without thought, as I was reminded recently. And believe me, if you add an anachronism to your novel, someone is sure to know.

So the first word is clue. That has to be new, right? Probably created during the thirties, with Agatha Christie. No, my friends. Clue is very old, from Middle English, where it was spelled clew and meant ball of thread. The modern spelling is from the mid-1620s. Gradually, the meaning changed to it points the way.

Well, what about okay? Now, there is a word that has spread across the globe. If you watch foreign language movies, the word okay comes up regularly. I was told many years ago that it originated in an American Indian language – Choctaw to be exact – because missionaries signed letters Okeh. Okay, it turns out, was an editorial joke, created in 1839. It was popularized by Martin Van Buren.

Finally, hello. Who could question hello? Well, this word is a newbie. It may be an alteration of hallo from the High German, It was used for the first documented time in 1834. Thomas Alva Edison is credited with its use as a telephone greeting.

Even our common language lays traps for the unwary writer!

Our English language – new and old idioms

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English as a language has been around for centuries. We still enjoy Shakespeare’s plays and they’re from the mid-1500s. So it should be easy to write about 1796; we’re all speaking the same language, right?

Well, yes and no. English is a living language and as such keeps changing. Think about all the new terms that have arrived on the heels of the computer revolution. And there are changes in speech patterns too. My mother frequently decried the increasing informality of conversation and the use of nouns as verbs. Just think of ‘texting’ from text. Or “I must netflix that movie.”

Medical terms like ‘mastitis’, an inflammation in the breast, wasn’t used until the mid 1800’s.  And Rex, as a name for a dog. wasn’t used before about 1820. A writer, therefore, has to be careful not to add too many anachronisms to the manuscript. Sometimes, thought, it is necessary just for the sake of clarity.

What I think is surprising is the longevity of some of the idioms we still use. ‘Strike while the iron is hot’ is one common expression. No, it doesn’t mean your mother is going to whip out the iron. It is a blacksmithing expression. Iron was shaped while it was hot and pliable by pounding upon it. If you wanted to create something like a sword from an iron rod, it would need to be heated and pounded, over and over.

How about ‘let sleeping dogs lie’ ? This one is very old. It’s been traced back to Chaucer, although the sentence structure was different and of course the spelling to a modern eye is crazy: sleepyng at least is quickly apparent. By the late eighteen hundreds both spelling and structure were the same as they are now. That’s why we can still easily read a writer like Dickens. Another old term is ‘cracker’, a derogatory term used for southern whites by the British by the 1760’s. What is the origin? Still working on that.

Then there is ‘spinning in his grave?” So evocative. But it is relatively new. The first use I can find is ‘turn in his grave’, by Thackeray in 1848.

The term ‘ne’er do well’ just turned up in a lyric by the band Incubus. It is of course a contraction of ‘never do well’. According to a blog post from the UK, Ne’er has been used in that shortened form since the 13th century, notably in the North of England and in Scotland. ‘Ne’er do well’ itself originated in Scotland and an early citation of it in print is found in the Scottish poet and playwright Allan Ramsay’s A collection of Scots proverbs, 1737.

How about mind your Ps and Qs, one of my mother’s favorite expressions. No one seems to know the origin of this one so I will list a few possibilities:

1. Mind your pints and quarts. This is suggested as deriving from the practice of chalking up a tally of drinks in English pubs (on the slate). Publicans had to make sure to mark up the quart drinks as distinct from the pint drinks.

2. Advice to printers’ apprentices to avoid confusing the backward-facing metal type lowercase Ps and Qs, or the same advice to children who were learning to write.

3. Mind your pea (jacket) and queue (wig). Pea jackets were short rough woollen overcoats, commonly worn by sailors in the 18th century. Perruques were full wigs worn by fashionable gentlemen. It is difficult to imagine the need for an expression to warn people to avoid confusing them.

4. Mind your pieds (feet) and queues (wigs). This is suggested to have been an instruction given by French dancing masters to their charges. It seems doubtful this began as a French expression.

5.  Another version of the ‘advice to children’ origin has it that ‘Ps and Qs’ derives from ‘mind your pleases and thank-yous”. OK, this sounds somewhat plausible.

So no one really knows where this one comes from but it is old enough to have been used in 1795.

Other terms I’m still working on: ‘she rules the roost.” That sounds agricultural and therefore old. How about ‘tar with the same brush.” That sounds like it comes fromt he days of tarring and feathering but I don’t know for sure. Another one I am curious about is ‘heads will roll’. From the days of the French Revolution perhaps. Stay tuned and when I find the origins I will report.