Jerry Friedman writes:
I wonder whether you and the Hatters would be interested in the Danish film Fremmed (Stranger in English), which came out recently. It takes place during the introduction of agriculture to Denmark. The native hunter-gatherers are shown speaking a Siberian language with some additions from Mayan, because reasons, and the foreign farmers are shown speaking a language based on Hattic words and grammar.
This came up at alt.usage.english, with the following quotations:
“There was a guy I knew; he has a PhD in Proto-Indo-European languages. But even those are 2,000 years older than those in our story. We asked him: ‘Can you come up with new ones?’ Tobias [Søborg] took an old Siberian tribal language and merged it with ancient Mayan. Then he did the same thing again, this time using dialects from the area around Turkey. We had a dictionary and a set of grammatical rules. Poor actors. They had to learn so much more than just their lines,” he recalled. “Later, Tobias was also on set, helping with the pronunciations. I think that might have been the single hardest part of making the whole thing work, but we were in it together. It was so amazing to watch it finally come to life.”
Also, from a Danish newspaper:
Tobias Mosbæk Søborg er ph.d. og postdoc ved Københavns Universitet og forsker i gamle indoeuropæiske sprog. Han har til filmen konstrueret to vidt forskellige sprog til henholdsvis jægerfolket og bondefolket, for at filmens dialog kunne fremstå mere autentisk. Til bondefolkets sprog har han især brugt ord og grammatik fra det ældste kendte oldtidssprog fra det nuværende Tyrkiet, hattisk, netop fordi bondekulturen stammer herfra.
“Der er de seneste 10 år sket en revolution i forståelsen af oldtidens kulturmøder. Genetisk og arkæologisk har det været muligt at føre bevis for det, sprogforskere har sagt i 200 år, nemlig at befolkningsgrupper afløste hinanden gennem indvandring,” siger Tobias Mosbæk Søborg.
Google Translate says:
‘Tobias Mosbæk Søborg is a PhD and postdoc at the University of Copenhagen and a researcher in ancient Indo-European languages. For the film, he has constructed two vastly different languages for the hunter-gatherer and the peasantry, respectively, so that the film’s dialogue would appear more authentic. For the peasantry’s language, he has used words and grammar from the oldest known ancient language from present-day Turkey, Hattic, precisely because the peasant culture originates from here.
‘”The past 10 years have seen a revolution in the understanding of ancient cultural encounters. Genetically and archaeologically, it has been possible to provide evidence for what linguists have been saying for 200 years, namely that population groups replaced each other through immigration,” says Tobias Mosbæk Søborg.’
“Peasantry” or “farming people”, I wonder.
More at Mads Hedegaard Had to Invent New Languages for Stone Age Epic ‘Stranger’: ‘This Is Where It All Started’. Thanks, Jerry!
In my email I forgot to thank Bertel Lund Hansen for mentioning the movie and quoting the Danish newspaper at a.u.e. Thanks, Bertel!
Google Translate… Generally speaking, the various AI chatbots like chatgpt, Claude, DeepSeek et al. are now significantly better at machine translation than the older neural network translators like Google Translate and DeepL. This is what chaptgpt produces if you tell it to “Translate the following into English” and then you enter that text:
Tobias Mosbæk Søborg holds a Ph.D. and is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen, specializing in ancient Indo-European languages. For the film, he constructed two vastly different languages for the hunter people and the farming people, respectively, to make the film’s dialogue appear more authentic. For the language of the farming people, he primarily used words and grammar from the oldest known ancient language of present-day Turkey, Hattic, precisely because the farming culture originates from this region.
“In the past 10 years, there has been a revolution in the understanding of ancient cultural encounters. Genetic and archaeological evidence has now been able to prove what linguists have been saying for 200 years—namely, that populations replaced one another through migration,” says Tobias Mosbæk Søborg.
I would modify only a few things there—for example, I would change “originates from this region” into “originates from that region”, and “says Tobias” into “said Tobias” (two minor errors that are very typical for translations into English from both German and Danish, and probably from other German-adjacent languages too). In my experience, journalistic texts like this are one of the text types that the chatbots do best at, no doubt because of the vast amount of multilingual source material available online, such as press releases.
Yes, interviews are often presented in German as happening right now.
@Nat Schockley: Thanks. I agree that the ChatGPT translation is better, though if the original really means “hunter-gatherer”, I think “hunter” is a step in the wrong direction. I’d change other things too, such as getting rid of the “respectively” and the “precisely”, which don’t contribute anything to the English version.
I might leave the “says”, though.
If I’d been doing the interview, I’d have asked Søborg a follow-up question: When he says the farming culture originates from what’s now Turkey, does he mean farming culture in general, or the farming culture that came to Denmark, or what?
I read through the Danish quote and started on the English thinking “Huh, did Hat make an editing error?” before noticing that the first one was in Danish.
I won’t judge on the merit of the translations, but I’ll pretend to have a Danish Sprachgefühl and say that the clause Han har til filmen konstrueret to vidt forskellige sprog til henholdsvis jægerfolket og bondefolket, is just as stilted in Danish. The reason is that it’s trying to use henholdsvis as a distributive rather than an ordering (I-want-to-say) conjunction. Without much change in register, I’ll suggest Han har til filmen konstrueret to vidt forskellige sprog, det ene til jægerfolket og det andet til bondefolket,
The one that spread to Europe and the western Mediterranean – but yes, that should have been made clear in the interview.
The filmmakers could have mined this blog for a modern corpus of Hattic.
@Jerry: Nice to see Bertel’s name. It’s been a long time!
@David Marjanović: “interviews are often presented in German as happening right now.”
The convention in English journalism, or at least British English journalism, is usually, at least on titles I have worked for, that news stories are presented as taking place in the past, so that person X “said” blahblah, while feature stories, opinion pieces and so on are presented as taking place currently, so that person X “says” blahblah. Whether this is the convention followed in German journalism, I’m afraid I don’t know …
Any interview you are reading did actually take place in the past. Then again, it’s funny that standard English has two presents, but neither one of them is much used for reporting speech.
The language(s) constructed for Fremmed have even been on the morning radio news here, and the posters at the bus stops actually mention Tobias Søborg. I’ll try and see it this weekend.
Hear the languages in the trailer (2 minutes; subtitles in Danish).
I should have said that it was the fact that there were constructed languages in the movie that they talked about on the radio. I didn’t actually hear them before I found the trailer.
Having read the other remarks, yes, it’s normal in Danish journalistic prose for speech acts to be reported in the present, with siger or udtaler. Jægerfolket and bondefolket are literally “the hunter people” and “the farmer people;” they used to be referred to as jæger- og samler-folk and (ældre) bondestenalderfolk in a slightly more academic register. (And even earlier, ethnologists would refer to samlere og lavere jægere, even for now-living cultures like the San. Højere jægere were those hunting big game [cooperatively] or having a material culture derived from hunting, like the Inuit).
(I think “peasantry” presupposes at least some early type of feudalism. The Danish word “bondefolk” is probably coloured by 1000 years of concentration of land ownership, but not in a (Pre-)Paleolithic context).
Per contra Trond, my Sprachgefühl has no objections to henholdsvis as used here. His revision is equally cromulent, though. The same sentence is marked as non-colloquial by the fronting of til filmen, and maybe by the use of vidt. If I was at pains to sound up to date, I’d probably write something like
.
@Trond: Thanks. If I understand your suggested rewrite, that’s the way I’d have done it in English: “two very different languages, one for the hunting and gathering people and one for the farming people.”
And you know where to find Bertel and others if you want.
@David M.: Thanks for the clarification. I know almost nothing about the history of agriculture.
@Jerry: Yes. But apparently, Danish is now using henholdsvis in a way that I, as a middle-aged, educated Norwegian, read as a hit-and-miss at register and would suggest to change.
And you know where to find Bertel and others if you want.
Fair enough. Though I never was a regular of a.u.e., I just ended up there when someone cross-posted from sci.lang or dk.kultur.sprog.
I left Usenet without deliberate intent. I had a disc crash on my private computer and a change of software policy at my job computer. Finding a good workaround took time for unrelated reasons, and eventually I had lost the habit – or (in hindsight) the patience with watching good people fighting for stupid reasons.
@Lars: Thanks. If I’d read the Danish carefully, I’d have seen that it looked a lot like “hunter people” with no mention of gathering.