:3
One of my favourite painters, Evsey Moiseenko, often provides excellent Russian boot reference, like here in The Soil:
Buy the books!
Read the sequel!
-
:3
One of my favourite painters, Evsey Moiseenko, often provides excellent Russian boot reference, like here in The Soil:
Sexy boots!!!…
Okay, unnecessary comment, but since the anti-spam word was “trotsky”…
Until now, I never thought about it – what language are all those people supposed to speak among themselves? As they live in England, it’s probably English for Willie and her Dad, but has English become the lingua franca of all those worlds? I’m asking, because this “you” – “you” confusion is working only in a language like English that doesn’t distinguish singular and plural for the 2nd person.
Hans, that’s a very good question, and a bit of a plot hole! Heh.
Most of them speak English with each other. It just so happens (that is the plot hole) that the language of Ban La-Ilanam, Aeron and Eva’s world’s correspondent of China, is extremely similar to the English of Willie’s and Shannon’s worlds. My author-avatar made a lame-ass attempt at not explaining that in chapter 5. :o)
On the Eagle Ray, they speak English, because that’s Shannon’s preferred language. Samona knows all kinds of languages, so she doesn’t mind (and she wouldn’t expect anyone else to speak her mother’s tongue Finnish, anyway …). So does Seraphine, I guess. Aeron knows a number of languages, too, having worked on different ships with captains and crews of many different nationalities. Ban La-Ilanam is kind of dominant worldwide culturally and politically, so that’s one of the languages he knows quite well. Eva has lived for many years in Ban La-Ilanam, so of course she speaks the language, too.
Of course, Aeron and Eva speak Russian with each other, but I write it out in English when the reader is supposed to understand what they are saying.
And Willie and her dad speak Czech with each other. That’s why his “English” is grammatically correct in the scenes up until now – his actual English is pretty bad, which is another reason why he can’t find a job. Maybe I should have made more of an effort at conveying that they really speak Czech …
I probably didn’t care about these things at all originally, and coming from a language-wise very complicated background myself, in my escapist fantasies I wanted to draw up a world where language was never a problem. :3
Also, the comic was originally written in Swedish, so different languages mattered less then. Now that I’ve switched over to writing it in English, it’s more important for things to make sense (as much as possible, anyway).
And yes, of course this scene only works in English (and maybe a few languages that I don’t know that might have a similar pronoun/adressing confusion), so for the translations I’ll have to come up with something else … :o)
Thanks for answering my question!