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In a fantasy book I’m writing, I have a character who’s around 500 years older then the rest of my characters. She still looks young…her position is interesting, but basically she’s been living alone for that whole time, though she occasionally (as in, every year or few years) leaves the woods to buy things at a village. Anyway, in my story she meets some of my characters and I’m trying to figure out how she should talk. After 500 years, the language is bound to have changed some. I’ve tried to give her a more formal way of talking, but several of my friends have said I should make her speech more antiquated. I don’t want her talking in ‘thees’ and ‘thous’, but I do want to give her some sort of old-fashion speech pattern or accept. Does anyone have any ideas?
INTJ - Inhumane. No-feelings. Terrible. Judgment and doom on everyone.
I expect if she had been living alone for 500 years she would have started to talk to herself all the time. Maybe she would have completely created a separate entity of herself in her mind that she could talk to as if it were another person (kind of like Gollum). She might also start to think of inanimate objects as things she can talk to. Maybe she might even start to develop a second voice in her brain for these things so that it would seem more like she was actually talking to somebody who could talk back.
Since she was practically a hermit she would not have had her speech homogenized into a common form. She would have started to speak in her own way. For instance, she might have stopped calling trees trees and instead called them roof bushes. Her speech would be in the same language but her teams would be very different. Likewise, she wouldn’t stick to any one era of speech but would probably blend them to her liking in a completely random manner. She would be very formal and use slang and use everyday language.
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Hey… Daeus is starting to use LotR references… must be a good sign… 😉
Good topic, Hope. Daeus got a lot of it, but one thing I would mention is that a quick, very effective way to make someone’s speech sound old fashioned is to play with the sentence structure. Reverse it. It’ll still make sense, but it’ll have a very distinct flavor. For instance:
I will be back in a second.
Back in a second I will be.
You are quite a silly person.
Quite a silly person you are.
Yikes… that sounds like Yoda. 😛
Talking to herself in first and second person…that doesn’t take 500 years. I do that already. 🙂 But I like the idea about her making up names for other things or mixing formal and informal speech. That could be funny. 😉
As for reversing speech…well, she can’t sound like Yoda. But I have her talk mix up wording a bit awkwardly sometimes because she’s not used to having to explain things to real people who don’t know what she’s talking about. 🙂
INTJ - Inhumane. No-feelings. Terrible. Judgment and doom on everyone.
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