Ask Another Laurel - How Not To Be Noticed - Part 1

Ask Another Laurel - How Not To Be Noticed.

Part One: English, my friend, do you speak it.

by Caleb Reynolds

The following was written for the AEthelmearc Gazette

How far back in time could you go and not be identified as an outsider?

Probably not very far. Aside from the question of if we could talk to people and be understood, cultures of most of the world, throughout history, have been hyper focused on belonging. If you aren't from our village, or our town, or our kingdom, then you are an outsider and not to be trusted or accepted. Read up on the propaganda Henry VII used to make Catherine of Aragon acceptable to the English populace; it took years before she was fully accepted by the English people.

Being able to blend in was a requirement throughout human history. Knowing your place, and having neighbors who knew who you were and where you fit in, was essential to survival. Going all the way back to the Tale of Gilgamesh, we read of characters who ask strangers who they were and where they came from. In "The Odyssey" a common refrain is "Who are you and who are your people."  We have plenty of records from the middle ages of how travelers were treated and where they were allowed to go in a town or city. We have records of traveling peddlers and merchants being welcome in the town square by day, but had to be outside of the town gates by nightfall. Accepted when they had goods to sell, but not trusted after dark. 

Go back far enough and we find a legal system that was based on your place in your community. Your jury was composed of people who knew you personally. If you were accused of a crime, you called in your friends to stand as your jury, who would speak of your character and your innocence. If you had no local friends, if you were a stranger, the chances of someone standing to speak for you would be slim to none. We read of instances where a crime was blamed on a stranger, an outsider, who was convicted because no one was there to speak on their behalf. During the Norman occupation, a violent crime against a Norman had to have someone who was convicted and punished for that crime, otherwise the punishment would be meted out against the people who were near the place of the crime. The logic being that they must have seen who did the deed and they must be withholding evidence. The records that have survived show that, often, random people were held to blame; either people of the area whom no one liked, people who had a bad reputation anyways, or strangers. If someone had to be punished, it might as well be someone who wasn't one of us.

Half of the witch trials in England were against men and women who lived outside of the community. The shepherd whom the town rarely saw; the old woman who had no family and lived out in the woods alone with her cats. The charcoal burners who lived in the forest, always watching their fires. The dye makers who lived way, way, way over there because of the stench of making dyes. To be alone in the middle ages could be dangerous. Exile was a punishment: We don't want you, go find some other people who will take you in. If you were wealthy and interesting, you might find a new home. If not, you better hope that wherever you go, there are people from your homeland who might be kind to you. Look at how our country treated the Irish and the Italians. Look at how Paris treated Russian exiles. Look how England treated people from India and the newly created Pakistan. Un-welcomed by the general public, but finding homes next to fellow countrymen who were also forced to find a new home. Look at the mass migration of human beings today and the general protest of "no more foreigners in OUR country."

But the question here is could we fit in in an alien time and place? Could we walk the streets of Rome, or London, or Mainz without notice? Could we blend in enough so that we can find the answers to the mysteries of the past? Let us assume that you had access to a time machine that would put you at any desired time and place in Earth's history. You can bring whatever gear you could carry and return at anytime, but, you don't have a TARDIS to translate for you. Or one of Star Trek's universal translators. Or a holographic Al to feed you information from a supercomputer. Just our own current technology. You can have a team of helpers to prepare clothing and accessories, but you have to go alone. Exactly how far back could you go and still interact with people and not be run out of town?

Language changes. Sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly. Colloquialisms and slang can change very quickly. Watch a movie from the 1930s or '40s and try to follow the slang used. Words like cockamamie and gobsmacked are still used today, but if you go to a diner and the waitress asks you if you want some dog's soup, would you say yes? If someone invites you to a jook, would you go? Would you walk into a blind pig? Go back a another hundred years and would you be able to fit in with the mudsill? Would they think that you were a Philadelphia lawyer? Could you be someone's huckleberry? 

Did you watch the Ken Burns' Civil War documentary? Did you notice how the cadence of the letters that they read sounded so foreign to our modern ear? Read through the Sherlock Holmes stories in the format that they were originally printed. The English that was spoken (and written) at the time of Doyle is different enough from our English that we would sound out of place if we were to visit his time. Let me give you an example, and yes, it involves pretzels, 'cause of course it does. This is part of the oldest recipe for pretzels that I know of, from 1881: "throw them into a cauldron of strong hot lye made from wood-ashes; as soon as they rise to the surface, throw them on fine salt; immediately after put in the oven and bake" Look at the sentence structure: "throw them on fine salt" not "throw fine salt on them". This might seem to be trivial but if you speak differently, people will know that you ain't from 'round these parts.

My example was from 150 years ago, which in terms of the SCA was just the other day. Do you think that we would be able to talk with William Shakespeare, if we could go visit him? Shakespeare didn't speak like he wrote. No one actually spoke in iambic pentameter. Normal people don't talk in rhyme regardless of what '80s cartoons taught us. Shakespeare is the bane of English high school students because it is almost modern English, but different enough that it might have been French in places. The sentence structure, of his time, is strange, many words have different meanings or are no longer part of modern English, and what pronoun to use is more complicated than today. Which is correct: "you" or "thee"? "Your" or "thine"? Using the wrong word could be seen as insulting to the listener, or make you appear to be foolish or putting on airs. 

That's just English. Let's say you want to go back in time to France, or Italy, or Germany, or Spain. Those languages have also changed over the centuries, and to add to the complication, those languages have gendered nouns. Are you certain that the genders haven't changed? Today, German bridges are girls (die Brücke) and Italian bridges are boys (il ponte). Was this always the case? I honestly don't know, but that is something that you would have to learn before you take your trip. And speaking of French, Victor Hugo's "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame" is the bane of high schoolers in France. The book was only written in 1831 but the changes to the French language are as significant as the changes to English from Shakespeare's time to ours. France has an official government agency tasked with reigning in changes to modern French and to stop the influx of new words from other languages. 

Of all of the European languages, Icelandic and Basque have the least amount of drift over the last 1000 years. English, the most. There isn't much data about Welsh, Cornish, Scots or Irish Gaelic because the English tried for a few centuries to destroy those languages completely. (Strangely enough, in the most North-Eastern corner of England, there is an out of the way place that still speaks a version of the Old English dialect used in Northumbria before the Norman Conquest: The late historian Terry Jones did a documentary where he visited that place with a professor of Old English to act as a translator with the local farmers.) Hebrew and Arabic have also had little change in last thousand years. A former co-worker of mine, who is a devoted Muslim from Pakistan, once told me that the 7th Century Arabic of the Quran is very similar to modern Arabic, although, he said, no one really speaks Arabic in the same fashion in day to day life. His description reminded me of the English of the King James' Bible compared to modern English. Very readable, but not how we speak today: very old fashioned. I have no clue about Persian, Indian, Chinese, or other Asian languages; someone who knows more than I do about those parts of the world would be better suited to research that.

 Then we have to acknowledge that there really is no one English language. Or German. Or Italian. Or most any language, for that matter. Medieval French can be broken up into Picard, Limousin, Gascon, Langues d'oïl, Occitan, and other dialects. What version of French you speak would tell the listener where you came from and even give hints as to your political leanings. Patois and Québécois are North American-French dialects and if you try to speak either one of them in Paris, the locals will know that you ain't from 'round here. German also had a lot of regional dialects: Hochdeutsch, Plattdeutch, Bayerisch, Sächsisch, Swabian, just to name a few. And don't even let a Sicilian and an Italian talk about who's great grandparents spoke Italian "properly." Thanksgiving get togethers turn into a dinner and a show over how to say "lasagna". (Don't even ask why there are peas in the lasagna. That's a different fight.)  

The Castilian Spanish that I learned in high school allowed me to go to Mexico and get around, but it wasn't the same language as what the locals were speaking. It probably won't help me any better in Catalan Spain, if I were to visit. Since our goal is to visit the past and not be noticed, speaking the wrong dialect, or with the wrong accent, will mark you out as an outsider. Why would someone answer weird questions from the weird stranger with the weird accent? Must be up to something. Somewhere in my house I have a book on cold war spy craft. There was a chapter on the difficulties of teaching someone how to sound the right way, which is why spy agencies prefer to recruit locals. The book told of a British spy working in Moscow, in the 1950s, who explained away his horrendously bad Russian accent by saying that he grew up in Siberia and deliberately played up the rural aspect of coming from the back waters of the USSR. He got away with it for a couple of years until a KGB agent, who was actually from Siberia, heard him and wanted to know what language he was speaking. The British spy's story fell apart and he was arrested.

Regional accents would also give us away; we really don't know what the accent of a particular town or city was 500 years ago. There are no audio recordings and I don't know of any written descriptions of accents outside of works of fiction, and we can take those with a big pinch of salt. Our accent would tip off not only that we are foreign, but what class of society we belong to. If we sound like we grew up on a farm, people will know that we aren't the Lord or Lady that we claim to be, and vis a versa. If we are trying to pass ourselves off as a commoner, in town looking for work, and we sound like an Oxford educated BBC news announcer, people will notice.

So, our best bet to not give ourselves away with what we say is to say nothing at all. We could try to get by using nothing more than hand gestures (and, perhaps, with a wax tablet if we found someone who could read what we wrote). We couldn't use ALS to communicate: while there was a kind of sign language used by monks to get around the whole no talking during meals rule, it mostly concerned food and doesn't translate well into interactive conversation. I would have to say that trying to communicate with someone from 15th century Europe using ALS would attract far more attention than speaking "bad" French with a strange accent. We could try to get by dressed as a monk and miming that you have taken a vow of silence, but outside of Victorian novels' plot points, I don't think that monks traveled outside of the monastery still under the vow of silence. They would have had to communicate with people to ask for directions, conduct business, or beg for alms. But, pretending to be a monk who was traveling from one monastery to another would be a good cover story. The habit and cowl would identify you as a monk, someone who was both part and apart from everyday life, and if you didn't speak the local lingo well, then you could always use the Conehead ploy. A nun's habit would also work, although I don't how often a single nun went traveling long distances by herself. I will leave the research of the migration patterns of medieval nuns to other curious minded people.

Perhaps you could learn Latin; that was a universal language for learned people, right? You will be able to communicate with other learned people, right? Right? I've been reading about how even Latin had dialects. Is 'V' pronounced "vee" or "wee"? Is it "vivat" or "wiwat"? "Veni vidi vici" or "Weni Widi Wici"? Would you pronounce the "C" in Caesar as "see" or as "kai". Both are correct, in the middle ages. During Rome's imperial days, it would have been pronounced "kai-sar" by the elites and those that wrote the poetry. Language historians believe that the lower classes might have said "see-sar" in the same way that the lower classes of London drop the "h" from many words. Caesaria is now called Kayseri, in Turkey. Kaiser is the German derivation of Caesar. In French, and then English, the "kai" sound migrated to a "see". Spanish kept the "kai" of the "C" but pronounced the "S" and "R" sounds differently. Italian turned the "C" into a "jay" sound over the centuries. The pronunciation of Caesar could be an article all on its own. You probably won't be able to communicate with the average person, but you might be able to get into a university library and ask for a book. 

Idioms would also be an issue for us. Not only would most of our modern day idioms make no sense to someone from the Middle Ages, (just think of explaining "swipe left" to someone who lived before cell phones were invented) but their idioms might have no meaning to us. If it's 300 years before china reaches Europe, then a bull in a china shop would make no sense. And trying to change the idiom (a bull in the pottery shed) might earn you a dirty look and a "Why didn't you just say clumsy?" "Shaka when the walls fell" only makes sense if you've seen one episode of one TV show. "To the word and to the letter" makes sense to us, or should. As does "Once an abbot", but what does "To drink like a Pope" really mean? Without the cultural context we only have a 50/50 chance of figuring it out: drink a lot or alcohol, or no alcohol? It depends on which Pope we're talking about, because the phrase is attributed to several Popes, some who abstained from sin and others who acted in most un-Pope like fashions, and using that phrase in an insulting manner might get you arrested for heresy. 

Many books have been written about how language has changed over the centuries, so I won't spend any more time on it, in this article. I was planning on a single article covering language, clothing, and mannerisms, but I decided to split it into three separate articles so that readers won't be overwhelmed by my rambling. Part two will cover what to wear and part three will cover how to act.