[Process, Writing]
[writing|process] Language, language, and the temptations of etymology
I am struggling (again) with linguistic issues in writing.
A simple example: “OK” (or “okay”) is a distinct Americanism. So my characters in Green and the subsequent books never use the term, as the setting is a secondary world without America or a close analog of America. On the other hand, I am willing to use the term in the Mainspring books, because America exists there, albeit in a rather different form.
But what about words that are explicitly tied to other cultural aspects of our world? I’m not talking about deep etymology here, but obvious stuff. The specific example on my mind this morning is the term “Trojan points” to refer to the L4 and L5 points in a two-body system. They figure into the steampunk lost colony religious novella I’m mulling (and currently researching), but if you have a world with no Odyssey and no Iliad, and likewise no direct linguistic or cultural connection to the present, the word “Trojan” is a null. For that matter, the same problem pertains to “Lagrange”, which is the “L” in “L4″ and “L5″.
In a broader sense, this applies to any term derived from a personal or place name, of course — “Machiavellian”, for example, or “volt”, and likely many other words besides.
I go back and forth on this all the time. On the one hand, I write in English. Regardless of the conceit of language within the story, my readers are reading in the same language, or a translation thereof. “Volt” is a normal English word, regardless of whether you’ve ever heard of Alessandro Volta. Likewise “Trojan.” So if I work out some circumlocution, I’m only confusing the readers. Besides which, any circumlocution I attempt is quite possibly to have similar etymological issues of its own.
We don’t see the buried etymologies so well, unless we’re philologists. I suppose the problem exists at all levels.
How do you handle this as a writer? Do you even notice this as a reader? Or is this one of my private tics?
Posted: 5:15 am Wed March 10 2010 |
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Aimee
March 10th, 2010 at 8:24 amI’d have to say that one of the best examples of dealing with this issue is Anathem by Neal Stephenson. He’s got an extremely rich history he’s created that somewhat parallels our own, and does a fascinating job of explaining what things mean before he uses them. The forward explains that while he will define terms where they advance the story (and lord does it add color; I sometimes find myself using some of these terms in my thoughts), he doesn’t bother with terms that aren’t important, like coming up with a term for a carrot-like vegetable that would require explanation just to get past part of a scene where people are cooking.
So – I sort of follow the same idea in my own writing. Because it makes the part of my brain that loves linguistics very happy.
Jaws
March 10th, 2010 at 9:56 amThen, too, there’s the interplay between dominant subcultures and language: the (probable, or at least tantilizingly possible) ancestry of “OK” from pidgin-Dutch allt klaart in the slave trade, as heard by nonnative speakers of either language; literal translations of greetings, such as a hypothetical para-Chinese fantasy novel in which every conversation begins with the character who is closer to his/her home asking “Have you had rice today?”; and so on.
Don’t get me started on intracultural linguistic shifts; consider what “judg[e]ment day” means to a group of Terminator fans, to a group of evangelical fundamentalist christians, and to a group of lawyers… especially when it is spoken quickly and not found on the ‘net or in a newspaper article. Actually, do get me started on that, as I have to smack an ignorant examiner at the PTO upside the head about who owns certain aspects of titles — the publisher or the anthology editor…
And I’m ESL myself to boot (here’s the national anthem of my principal ancestors).
Cora
March 10th, 2010 at 5:13 pmUhm, “Ein Prosit” has never been an official national anthem or even state anthem anywhere. Not that I wouldn’t prefer it to the staid dullness that is the “Deutschlandlied”.
Jaws
March 10th, 2010 at 8:22 pmYou’ve obviously never been to Oktoberfest.
Cora
March 11th, 2010 at 5:00 pmGuilty as charged. I vastly prefer Bremer Freimarkt. All the beer, but a broader range of food and carousels. And sensible clothing.
Stephen Watkins
March 10th, 2010 at 12:19 pmI definitely think about this, as an amateur philologist. What I do is consider the degree to which a certain word wears its etymology on its sleeve. As you say, a Trojan point wears it pretty obviously, as does LaGrange point.
I also consider my estimate of a reader’s likely familiarity with a word – how general or jargonny is the word? Sci Fi readers may be very familiar with LaGrange points, but the term is pretty techinical and jargonny. The more jargonny the word, the more likely I would be to recreate the term within the context of the world I’m creating. I would think it would be reasonably easy to generate new terms that sci-fi readers could quickly recognize as meaning LaGrange point, but be free of the obvious etymology.
For instance, a phrase like “Equilibrium Point” gets the concept of a LaGrange point across pretty succinctly, and doesn’t suffer from wearing its etymology too openly on its sleeve (and the imaginary “language” of the story-world would likely have a translation for something like “equilibrium”). A similar exercise could be done for the subset of L-points that constitute Trojans.
I would contrast this with a word like “volt” where we might have been told, at one point, that the word was named after some guy named Alessandro Volta, but the word is so engrained into the language that we never consider that history. Machiavellian, on the other hand, is a little more on the border. I’d stray on the side of caution and avoid it’s use in my own work.
These are just to use your examples, of course.
Meran
March 10th, 2010 at 12:27 pmI’m not a writer, but voracious reader and amateur philologist I am.
Yes, when I read something incongruent with a language, my reading rythym stutters and stops.
So the answer is Yes, I notice. Do other readers? I believe most do not. Hech some if them don’t even remember character names; they read only for plot. However, I don’t think your writing is aimed for them.
Meran
Cora
March 10th, 2010 at 5:45 pmAs an accidental linguist, I would definitely notice both your examples. And considering that SF fans are usually pretty well educated, I’d expect that “Trojan” used in a world without the Iliad would definitely jar with many of them. As for Volt, you’ll get the same issue with pretty much every unit of measurement, i.e. you can’t use Watt, Ohm, Ampere, Fahrenheit, Celsius, Kelvin, Pascal, Roentgen and Meters either. Units of measurement are difficult in general.
I also tend to notice inappropriate Americanisms, modern Freudian infused psychotherapy jargon (which is actually one of the biggest problems, since it’s so ubiquitous we no longer notice it, even though it’s been around for barely more than a century), words like “Machiavellian”, “mesmerize”, etc… showing up in contexts where they don’t belong. I once gave up on a highly regarded fantasy novel because the excessive use of the word “motherfucker”, a term I associate largely with modern America (in my country, that particular curse only appeared via US rappers in the like), in a secondary world setting overloaded my anachronism detectors.
When writing in a secondary world setting in no way linked to Earth, I avoid all terms and phrases derived from Christianity, Judaism, Greco-Roman mythology and any other earthly belief system, which makes cursing difficult. Certain political terms like Marxism, Communism, Socialism, Liberalism, Fascism and anything derived from them are also out (makes discussing anything political difficult), plus the usual array of things like “mesmerize”, “earthquake”, “geology”…
For SF set in a world populated by humans who have some connection to Earth, I leave the religiously derived curses in. Considering how long many of those have been in existence, that we have forgotten the origin of several, I think it’s a safe bet to assume they’ll survive, even if the religions they referred to have died out. Use of contemporary slang depends upon the setting and characters.
For historical and alternate history fiction, I avoid explicit modernisms. It’s usually possible to find a historically accurate replacement that still won’t confuse the reader.
Sometimes, however, you just have to suck it up. For example, I once used “Kleenex” in an SF piece set several hundred years into the future, because there was no alternative and no one would use “disposable tissue” in dialog. Besides, this was a world populated by humans who have a capitalist economy plus a concept of branding, so it’s not inconceivable that the Kleenex brandname would have survived several hundred years. I briefly considered using the German equivalent, another brandname-derived eponym, since their product is IMO much better than Kleenex anyway. But it would have confused international readers, so Kleenex it was.
Stephen Watkins
March 10th, 2010 at 5:59 pmSee, I personally disagree with leaving out words like “mesmerize” and “earthquake” or certain units of measure (though there are those I would agree in leaving out) in a secondary world. I’d imagine that 4/5ths of readers have no idea who Mesmer is (although in that case I suppose there’s a useable alternative, i.e. hypnosis, at least as far as the general understanding of what mesmerism is). And calling a terrible earthquake a “ground shaking” or something like that is more likely to drop a reader out of the realism of the novel than using earthquake (besides which, earthquake has been part of the English language since the 1300s). Earthquake in particular is such a word that, frankly, makes no sense to replace; it’s common English and, for English readers, replacing it would be jarring.
Certain measurement and jargonny science words would depened, largely, on the level of technology of the secondary world. A secondary world with relatively low technology might not have volts and ohms and the like. If they were just discovering electricity for the first time, it would be easy to start naming those measures after secondary-world figures. And when defining the terms you don’t have to resort to “as you know, John” because, well, John _doesn’t_ know.
On the other hand, it might seem silly to throw out miles and feet in a world like that (or, in a higher tech secondary world, throwing out meters and kilometers) because coming up with alternative names and units of measure are both a PITA for the writer and a non-starter for the reader.
Cora
March 11th, 2010 at 5:09 pm“Mesmerize” bothers me simply because there is a perfectly acceptable synonym available in “hypnotize”. Now “hypnotize” has its own issues due to the Greek origin, but at least those issues are less blatant than the ones with “mesmerize”.
The one time the “earthquake” issue came up in my own writing, I simply went with “quake”. Gets rid of the pesky “earth-” prefix and still gets the meaning across.
As for volt, ohm, ampere, etc…, these issues never came up when fantasy was largely confined to pre-modern settings. But with the growing popularity of Steampunk, including secondary world Steampunk, it’s an issue that’s certain to crop up and probably already has for some writer somewhere.
Stephen Watkins
March 12th, 2010 at 6:19 amYou’re right about secondary world steampunk; what helps in that context is that in a steampunk world, electricity is still a pretty new thing. So, if you feel the need to invent new terms for common measures in electricity that we use today, it might still be possible to define them in the context of the story without resorting to “as you know, bob”.
I say that without ever having done it, though.
Miles
March 15th, 2010 at 7:55 pmI have to say I think it’s a little silly to worry too much about this. The fact is, every single word in the English language (and all languages, of course) has a history to it that wouldn’t exist in an alternate world. A word as simple as “thing” comes from a word for a meeting of Anglo-Saxon chieftans — is it not OK to use “thing” if your world never had any Anglo-Saxons, let alone meetings of their chieftans?
(In response to Jaws, the probable etymology of OK is from the “funny misspellings” fad in America in the mid 19th century as an abbreviation of “Oll Korrect,” though it does have a tie to Dutch in that it was also applied to Martin Van Buren, a.k.a. Old Kinderhook.)
Anyway, the case for not using words that don’t fit with your alternate world historically falls apart unless you’re willing to invent a new, non-English language. Your best bet is to be practical and just avoid things that are obviously jarring, but not things like “things.”