Can someone explain to me the High Speech?

[Crimson Door]

I know i'm probally gonna get bashed for this but can someone explain to me the high speech from the dark tower books.

I mean like what is it supposed to sound like, why is roland etc able to tell if something is high speech if it's written.

I can understand almost everything in the dark tower books besides this high speech business.

p.s wiki didn't help much.

[JackTheRipper]

I think typed, it's just capital letters, or letters that look like they're capitalized

[JohnDalglish]

Hi,

No, but I think Robin Furth's excellent Concordance may help a little.

Long days and pleasant nights

[Aarny]

High Speech is just the language the character Roland knows how to speak. I think all people from Gilead knows how to speak it..

[Nero]

I kind of took the High Speech to be a form of English (maybe the King's English?).

My only basis for this is that during the course of the journey, Roland & Co. come across signs of "old" depicting areas and equipment that we are all familiar with, and it was specifically mentioned at times that these signs were written in a form of the High Speech. The excerpts of those signs were written out of the book's main font and size, but still maintained the English language. Stephen King's books do not shy away from changing languages or symbols when necessary. Plus, due to the geographic location where the book seems to take place (America), these signs would be in places that naturally spoke English. I'm thinking that as the world moved on, maybe a form of Spanglish or Spanish or something else took over and de-evolved from there.

I'm figuring that as the world moved on, so did such fancy titles and labels as different languages so it became either common speak or High Speech... Maybe not everyone was 100% fluent in it or could command it as properly as someone who was raiseds peaking it. Just like everyone knows English but not everyone can speak the proper King's English.

Plus, Jake/Susannah/Eddie took to the High Speech rather easily.

Anyways, just speculating here.

[Moderator]

Isn’t “the King’s English” actually French? Seriously, I seem to remember reading or hearing that somewhere some time ago.

High Speech would be a more formal way of speaking used by aristocracy and/or higher social status rather than the everyday version of language used by common folken.

[JohnDalglish]

Isn’t “the King’s English” actually French? Seriously, I seem to remember reading or hearing that somewhere some time ago.

High Speech would be a more formal way of speaking used by aristocracy and/or higher social status rather than the everyday version of language used by common folken.

Hi,

Yes indeed, for centuries after the Norman Invasion in 1066 so-called 'English' kings etc spoke French as the Court's language, something referred to in Braveheart when William Wallace lapses into fluent French.

That's why we use the French phrase 'lingua franca' to describe a universal language.

Long days and pleasant nights

[Matticus]

That is correct. It is just the formal way of speaking.

Kind of the difference between a hard southern slang and the way an English professor would talk. Language is basically the same.

I just finished "Pillers of the Earth" by Ken Follett (very good) and people in the 12th century could tell if you were "high born" simply by the way you talked. Could basically boil down to education.

[Crimson Door]

Thanks for clearing that up for me guys i was actually starting to think that the high speech was something familiar to the voice the bene gesserits use in Dune.

[Nero]

Isn’t “the King’s English” actually French? Seriously, I seem to remember reading or hearing that somewhere some time ago.

High Speech would be a more formal way of speaking used by aristocracy and/or higher social status rather than the everyday version of language used by common folken.

goes to show how much I know :(

I thought King's English was kind of the formal noble British sort of thing... I guess I was on the right track but with the wrong street name :D

[Prince of Darkness]

Hi,

High-Speech was taught to The Gunslingers and noblemen to distinguish them from the lower classes and uneducated men. If you know anything about the Victorian Age, try to think of Low-Speech as "Cockney" and High-Speech as "Standard Speech."

Long days and pleasant nights

[BlackThorn]

Thanks for clearing that up for me guys i was actually starting to think that the high speech was something familiar to the voice the bene gesserits use in Dune.

I think this is actually a lot of the case...

Eddie states he doubted he'd even understand The High Speech in his land, but in Roland's world, he understood it perfectly.

The Low Speech, or common, can be bastardized in any number of ways. The High Speech must be immune to that somehow, and I always assumed it was more than just english and some other version of english.