Dialog in distant times and places

How should one write dialog for people whose language patterns are not known? It will be read by people whose preconceptions have been shaped by other writers, whose conventions you may despise. Do you kowtow and camp it up, or do you allow your characters' true nature to speak out?

I am encountering this issue off and on as I pick up new critters. My novel is set in the late Ice Age, ca. 20,000 years ago. Obviously, there is no record of the way people talked then, any more than there would be a way to determine how beings on other planets speak to one another.

There are too many books and movies in which characters talk like a cross between a stereotypical professor and a moron. The B-movie conventions have poisoned a lot of thinking. I recently encountered a wannabe writer who said that he took great pains to eliminate all contractions from his stone-age characters' speech. What a waste of time -- he should have been learning how to write a believable scene, in my opinion.

The people of my story are not ape-like sub-humans; they lived at a time when human culture was evolving at an increasing rate. We have artifacts from that time that show exquisite craftsmanship. The minds that created them were equal to any in this time. They must have communicated clearly and in depth. "Primitive" people today use very complex language to express their thoughts and feelings. So why should anyone assume that they talked like children then, simply because they didn't have books and plastic packages? Since I don't have any way of knowing what the structure of their language is like, I simply treat them as normal people and have them speak naturally.

Of course I avoid obviously modern words and concepts, but I refuse to put unnatural, euphemistic Tribal-Speak blather in their mouths. My characters are an earthy bunch. Though they adjust their mannerisms to social circumstances, they don't mince words or use stilted phrases in everyday speech. They wouldn't know an inch from an ounce, but they call a shithead a shithead.

LOL -- yeah, and the misery of avoiding Auelisms! Actually, I don't like a lot of the dialog in Shelters of Stone, Zolena explains things too much like an anthropologist (or anthro-apologist).

I'm not so much asking a question as rhetorically venting My stone-age peeps have full freedom. There are little problems with personal perceptions of "modernism" sometimes. *sigh*

Jon George said:

If you've never read it, The Inheritors by William Golding shows how it should be done. The croos-over from Neandethal POv to stone-age Homo Sapien POv is breath-taking.

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Never read that. How it "shouild" be done? Hmmm. I have my own ideas on that anyway. I have done a lot of reading in anthropology over the (never mind how many) years, so I do know a bit.

ishtar'sgate said:

...think about renaming a few everyday items with words that feel like they belong in the past. Instead of house or cave they might use a different word. Or instead of river or stream they might call it something else. This helps reinforce the idea that the reader is not in the present but in the past.

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I have been thinking. This is a crucial pivot-point -- which things to name how. "House" is out of the question anyway, it is not a common item of the time. Dwellings that are built out of bone, stone, antlers, the odd bit of wood, mammoth hides, and sod are not houses. But renaming truly commonplace things like rivers would create the problem I want to avoid -- stiltedness, and the appearance of a pretense at bad literal translation. I use The People's own words (so to speak lol) for a very few things, like magical power -- "vizanu". They also refer to a few things in their own way, such as particularly awesome natural phenomena.

Mostly it is shown as point of view, ways of thought. For instance, things are caused by the actions of spirits, not by electricity or chemical reactions. A person who is limited mentally because of a head injury would not be thought of as brain damaged, but his disability would be explained as a loss of part of his spirit. So it is not a substitution of words but of concepts that makes the difference.

James81 said:

This is where being a writer is all about also being a reader.

Read books that were written in other languages and translated to English. Like the Bible is a good example for the way people spoke even a couple thousand years ago.

There are other historical texts out there that can get you a better feel for writing in the past.

My guess would be to get into THAT kind of feel and then use your imagination to translate it further back.

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This is where being a writer is all about being a linguistic and literary historian. In truth, texts such as the Bible are extremely poor guides to the spoken language of their time. Writing language as it is spoken is a very recent idea. Using ancient texts as a guide can lead to some of the worst sort of Fake-Speak. I find it much more helpful to study living languages than dead texts. It can be useful to some extent, to pick up ideas for idiomatic quirks, but I wouldn't advise leaning on the style.

Phaeal -- @ Og!

Ishtar'sgate -- You have it. Of course there are no known words, but sayings such as "Hold onto your spear" and "Don't get your beard in the fire" caution against impatience. A character thinks, when asked a disturbing question, "What was she hunting on that trail?"

GirlySwot -- TY for link. That thread is so right on, why didn't I find it before? (A. Because I didn't hang out in Historical -- LOL)

Tsk-tsk, "elephants" is too modern

I could go for a good barbecued mammoth rib