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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/1Rk94v2:
misbehavingmaiar:
sebastian-bond:
but-the-library-of-alexandria:
the thing about writing fantasy stories is that language is so based on history that it can be hard to decide how far suspension of disbelief can carry you word-choice wise - what do you call a french braid in a world with no france? can a queen ann neckline be described if there was no queen ann? where do you draw the line? can you use the word platonic if plato never existed? can you name a character chris in a land without christianity? can you even say ‘bungalow’ in a world where there was no indian language for the word to originate from? is there a single word in any language that doesn’t have a story behind it? to be accurate a fantasy story would be written in a fantasy language but who has the time for that
Tolkien had the time apparently
LIsten. Linguistics Georg, who invented over 10,000 conlangs each day, is an outlier and should not have been counted.
oh my gosh I struggle with this a lot.
The line is, I think, picking a point between Worldbuilding and Just Boring The Shit Out Of Everybody.
I tend personally to enjoy the worldbuildy kind of shit that I hang out way over toward the Just Boring The Shit Out Of Everybody, but uh, in the first novel I ever tried to post on the Internet, in the opening scene I had the heroine, fleeing a Viking raid, refer to the raiders as “psychopaths” so uh, yeah. Actually the line’s not super hard to find if you hunt around a little.
misbehavingmaiar:
sebastian-bond:
but-the-library-of-alexandria:
the thing about writing fantasy stories is that language is so based on history that it can be hard to decide how far suspension of disbelief can carry you word-choice wise - what do you call a french braid in a world with no france? can a queen ann neckline be described if there was no queen ann? where do you draw the line? can you use the word platonic if plato never existed? can you name a character chris in a land without christianity? can you even say ‘bungalow’ in a world where there was no indian language for the word to originate from? is there a single word in any language that doesn’t have a story behind it? to be accurate a fantasy story would be written in a fantasy language but who has the time for that
Tolkien had the time apparently
LIsten. Linguistics Georg, who invented over 10,000 conlangs each day, is an outlier and should not have been counted.
oh my gosh I struggle with this a lot.
The line is, I think, picking a point between Worldbuilding and Just Boring The Shit Out Of Everybody.
I tend personally to enjoy the worldbuildy kind of shit that I hang out way over toward the Just Boring The Shit Out Of Everybody, but uh, in the first novel I ever tried to post on the Internet, in the opening scene I had the heroine, fleeing a Viking raid, refer to the raiders as “psychopaths” so uh, yeah. Actually the line’s not super hard to find if you hunt around a little.
