Modern words in fantasy novels

[FionaW]

now I'm not trying to write like Tolkein, but every so often I use a word and think 'hang on - that actually means something that isn't within the world of my novel'.

A good example is 'automatic'. I feel fairly confident using it in narrative, but had to find an alternative when I found I had a character that said the word. As far as I know, automatic has only ever been a word that refers to machinery.

I trip over this sort of thing fairly often. (I also don't have tomatoes or potatoes or quite a few other foods in the story as it's in a fairly definite northern european setting, and they are New World imports.) Modern phrases can be a problem, too. Was I the only one who was yanked out of the narrative when Legolas said 'Game Over' in LOTR2? I think you have to be reasonable - books where the writing is too archaic put readers off, but put too many modern colloquialisms in a fantasy novel and it turns into a sad, postmodern soup.

Opinions?

 

[Susan Boulton]

It depends on the context and the use of the word.

To take your example;

1.started, operated, or regulated by a process or mechanism without human intervention

2. beginning when specific conditions are fulfilled, without the need for a decision or action

3.done without conscious thought as the result of habit or custom

4.done without intention, especially as the result of a physical reflex.

Don't dismiss words because they are modern, or foods because you are using a certain civilisation as a basis for your world. Unless you say you are in "our world", then you are the creator what you say goes. Just be consistent with use.

 

[Dimentio]

I don't usually have that problem. Mostly because my book is occuring in a fantasy world with modern technology.

 

[HareBrain]

I think it was the book "Mother Tongue" by Bill Bryson that made me realise how many everyday words, which would seem to have been applicable right down the ages, are of relatively modern coinage. But I agree, you can get far too hung up on it - the only way to avoid linguistic inconsistencies in fantasy is to construct all the languages from scratch. "Game over" would annoy me though, because anyone of my vintage would associate it strongly with video arcades - it hasn't been around long enough yet to have gained independence from its origins (though maybe for a younger reader/viewer it would).

 

[Xelebes]

The archaic version of automatic, I think, is automaton.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Automoton is a noun, automatic is an adjective -- so they really aren't the same thing.

In my own writing I try to avoid words that express ideas, concepts, or attitudes that are out of step with the world view of my viewpoint characters. It's not a matter of copying the medieval period, or any other period, exactly (so don't worry about those tomatoes and potatoes if the story doesn't take place in our own world), but I think you need to give consideration to how the culture your characters live in must necessarily influence their thought patterns (because if people didn't think in those ways that particular culture would not exist). And once you know how they think, you choose language that reflects that. This means there will be modern words that reflect ideas, attitudes, a degree of technical knowledge, etc. that may jar with the kind of world you have created and you will probably want to avoid them, but most words will be neutral enough that you can use them without a second thought. Sometimes, though, there will be a thought you want to express for which there is no exact modern equivalent, and you may have to go with an older word to get your full meaning across.

In the case of "automatic", I think which word (or words) you might use instead would depend on whether you are describing the action or qualities of a device, or an action (or reaction) by one of your characters.

Oh, and if this is something that is on your mind a lot just lately, you might enjoy reading or participating in this thread:

http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/50858-eloquent-exotic-esoteric-please-provide-definitions.html

 

[Xelebes]

Automoton is a noun, automatic is an adjective -- so they really aren't the same thing.

Automaton is also an older word that would have been known to those learned in Greek mythology. Thus, you could make a word a derivative of it and still sound passable.

i.e.

Automatonic
Automatonish
Automatish

 

[Karn Maeshalanadae]

now I'm not trying to write like Tolkein, but every so often I use a word and think 'hang on - that actually means something that isn't within the world of my novel'.

A good example is 'automatic'. I feel fairly confident using it in narrative, but had to find an alternative when I found I had a character that said the word. As far as I know, automatic has only ever been a word that refers to machinery.

I trip over this sort of thing fairly often. (I also don't have tomatoes or potatoes or quite a few other foods in the story as it's in a fairly definite northern european setting, and they are New World imports.) Modern phrases can be a problem, too. Was I the only one who was yanked out of the narrative when Legolas said 'Game Over' in LOTR2? I think you have to be reasonable - books where the writing is too archaic put readers off, but put too many modern colloquialisms in a fantasy novel and it turns into a sad, postmodern soup.

Opinions?

Too many modern words in fantasy? There's ways around that. First off, though almost nobody has seen my most recent pieces, what's been seen has had a few, um, criticisms over terms.

Simply put, Morcalia-my own fantasy world-is actually a fairly complex mixture of time periods, with magic and common weaponry of medieval/feudal time periods, but with certain technological allowments of the future-and modern terms.

Simply put, my world is part of the Andromeda galaxy-never mind on whether or not that galaxy has a life-supporting solar system. The world in question has magically operated air and space ships, able to not only fold time and space like a gravity warp drive, but also able to slice open the fabric of time-space itself to pass through timeless dimensions in order to get through millions of lightyears in an instant. Therefore, modern Earth has been well visited, even trade routes set up, and advances in everything, from speech to ideas, are traded along with goods and alliances.

Enough put.

 

[Ursa major]

According to my OED, Automatical 2. =automatic, dates back (in print, that is) to 1586, with the spelling being automaticall, and the phrase, automaticall instruments.

 

[The Judge]

Automaton is also an older word that would have been known to those learned in Greek mythology. Thus, you could make a word a derivative of it and still sound passable.
i.e.
Automatonic
Automatonish
Automatish

I think the problem then would be that these are not words that have any meaning now - so would also jolt the reader. Coining words is all well and good if you have invented something for your world like an animal or a fruit, or a machine or a social grouping, but to use a made up word unnecessarily to describe an object or a concept that exists in our present world will only serve to confuse people.

I think the answer to the language problem must be to immerse yourself in the nearest Earth equivalent to your own world - to read as much about its customs, ideas, prejudices, clothes etc etc as you can, and as much of its literature as you can. If, for instance, you know the way that disease was actually treated in 14th century England, you are less likely to think of using the word vaccine.

A good dictionary that gives the origin of a word is also useful, because then you can see whether the word itself might in fact be older than you think - though of course the first time a word appears in print might be some time after it has been used orally, or conversely some time before it achieves widespread use.

J

 

[Nik]

I've been fairly lucky with wording in my 'Fantasy' stories because I grew up reading eg 'Kipling' and 'Sherlock Holmes', so was familiar with archaic usage. And, there are work-arounds...

From 'Cat Call', a Mereland tale...

Melinda's eyes came to the long, slim, complex tube slung across Fred's back. Though Magics dared not mix with Machinery, she sensed a distant kinship between that and the Dark Count's Sword. "Gentle Sir ? What is this 'Nock' ?"

"I bear but a Lance," Fred replied, gently. "The 'Nock' was a grim War-Saw, that shook itself to swiftly rasp through armour, flesh or rock. Smaller such were called buzz-blade or solid-state chain-saw."

Such Hi-Tek Arcana puzzled all but Kit, who added, "Which close mimics the fabled Vorpal Blades, except their wicked wit..."

;-)

When I needed to concoct a passable Victorian pastiche, I found a web-site with a heap of copyright-expired Gothic & Horror tales. Browsing those hair-raisers let me soak up some atmosphere and lift some coy phrases...

Yeah, yeah, at school I read Wyndam, Clarke, Asimov and, um, W.E. Johns when I should have been studying Bronte & Co...

 

[Peter Graham]

now I'm not trying to write like Tolkein, but every so often I use a word and think 'hang on - that actually means something that isn't within the world of my novel'.

I don't think that this is always a problem. By definition, you are going to have to write significant parts of your novel in 21st century English (or 21st Century French, Italian or whatever) and so on the basis that you are looking to communicate with your reader, you need to use words they can understand. Not much point writing your novel about 13th Century Canterbury in authentic Chaucerian Middle English, only to find that you have limited your readership to a handful of fusty professors with alarmingly bushy eyebrows who smell of pipe tobacco and mothballs. And even less point in writing your trilogy about the destruction of the Great Ring and the ending of the Third Age in Elvish.....

Much also depends on your choice of narrative voice. Your characters may live in a high fantasy medieval world, but the narrator may well not. You allude to this in your post and I agree that there is no problem with an omniscient narrator telling us that Sir Peter's reaction to something was "automatic", even though that might not be a word that the narrator should be putting in Sir Peter's mouth.

It is going to be more difficult if you are writing in the first person (or perhaps in third person limited). As you are expressing only what the character sees, feels and thinks, you have to ensure that word use is at least consistent and sounds authentic, otherwise suspension of disbelief goes kaput.

But I think a bigger problem than word choice is the way in which some dialogue is written in order to make the speaker seem "authentic" within the historical context of the writing. Word order and accent/dialect are used to generate the desired effect, but often with truly dreadful consequences. For example, too many peasant characters are forced to speak in a sort of cod-West Country voice, usually with a few words of Northern English, Scots or Irish dialect thrown in for good measure. They also have to forget everything they knew about speaking clearly.

So, "Hello, Sir Peter. It is a lovely day today and all the children are playing in the village duckpond" becomes:-

"Aaar, greetins' to 'ee, Sor Peter. A lovely day it be, to be sure. Oi tell 'ee that aaaalll the lads and lassies be playion' in tharrr duckpond. Oo-arrrr, mun be."

There have been numerous threads about dialect use and, all too often, posters come out with "don't use dialect unless you can speak it well and certainly don't use my dialect". I've said something similar myself in the past, but it is a bit unfair.

I think that dear old Emily Bronte gets it about right. When she renders a Yorkshire accent, she does it with a fairly light touch - enough so that the reader knows that the character has an accent, but not so much that it descends into farce and upsets real Yorkshire people (who, by the way, are renowned throughout Britain for their easy-going attitude when it comes to matters involving their own county).

I trip over this sort of thing fairly often. (I also don't have tomatoes or potatoes or quite a few other foods in the story as it's in a fairly definite northern european setting, and they are New World imports.

I think you can get away with potatoes and tomaotes. Perhpas not if you are writing a historical novel set in "real" medieval northern Europe, but in a fantasy world? Does not one S. Gamgee offer Gollum fish and chips? If you can allow for goblins and dragons, a few tubers in the ground are hardly going to upset the applecart.

Was I the only one who was yanked out of the narrative when Legolas said 'Game Over' in LOTR2?

I was out at the end of the first film, when Aragorn said in excited tones "let's go hunt some Orc!" For a split second, I thought Legolas and Gimli would be obliged to start whooping like demented bonobos.

Regards,

Peter

 

[Granfalloon]

I was just recently re-reading ("Foundation and Earth") - Issac Asimov, and he used phrases that were very current British in a rather obvious sense. His Universe was set well into the future (somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 years from now) and the main character (Golan Travese) constantly referred to his associate (Genoff Pellarat) as "Old Man" or "Old Chap" which to my knowledge were chiefly British terms, and propably more common in the 1970's when Mr. Azimov wrote the book.

 

[Toby Frost]

I think Peter’s post is spot on. There is a need in fantasy to strike a balance between the fake archaic (which is actually quite hard to write – “sir”, “sirrah” and “sire” are not interchangeable, for instance) and “Dude, where’s my steed”. My own policy is to avoid obvious Americanisms (characters slapping hands in greeting or celebration, say) and technical jargon that is post-the imitated period or refers directly to the real world ("virus" instead of "disease", "Machiavellian" instead of "scheming"). This is where the Fellowship of the Ring quote comes in – “Let’s hunt some orc” is obviously a reference to “Let’s kick some ass/arse” and as such is out of place. The use of the singular in “orc” is the big problem: the plural would be fine. A man of Tolkein’s day would have taken this phrase to mean “Let’s hunt a randomly selected orc”.

A certainly amount of Anglicisation can help, because it helps convey the idea that the world is set in pre-American times (especially if your audience is American). But this is best done sparingly: “This is bloody good beer” sounds fine, but “I say old boy, this is bloody good beer” sounds like an old duffer. I’d be wary of using antiquated words for the sake of it – if you start replacing perfectly good modern words with old ones, it just gets hard to understand.

But really, leave out the ooh-ah peasants. They usually sound dreadful, and the mixture of accents is daft. I think a lot of bad dialogue in fantasy stems from the notion that all fantasy worlds are “a bit like England in, you know, the old days”. This approach is fine if you want to create something that looks like Warcraft, but if you’re looking for depth and originality, careful thought is required.

 

[Toby Frost]

Double post. Sorry about that!

 

[HareBrain]

I think that dear old Emily Bronte gets it about right. When she renders a Yorkshire accent, she does it with a fairly light touch

You are joking. Joseph?!

 

[Wiglaf]

Try without thought, instinctively, unthinkingly, reflexively...
Buy a thesaurus and a dictionary. Cheap ones should do. Ursa's OED is nice but, you'd have to use the library's unless you are rich and can afford a set(it has multiple volumes). In fact, if I knew Ursa had that kind of money, I would of asked if he could bear to give me some long ago.

 

[Ursa major]

In fact, if I knew Ursa had that kind of money, I would of asked if he could bear to give me some long ago.

If only....

The big OED is (or used to be) 24 volumes.


Mine, though, is one of those photographically-reduced ones: four pages to a page, with very thin paper and a magnifying glass (which I used not to need ).

It was the last of a three volume edition (A-O; P-Z plus supplement; new supplement) and was sold just as a new two volume work came out**. (It means I have to look in three places to check a word; if I'd paid more and/or waited, there was but a single supplement.)

Because my edition was the equivalent of last-year's-model of a car, it was cheaper; and it was associated with a book club, so it was cheaper still )).


Isn't the OED available online now? (There may or may not be a fee; I'm not sure.)



** - It's the 1971 edition "reprinted in 1987 as a three-volume set", to quote the book itself.

 

[Wiglaf]

If only....

The big OED is (or used to be) 24 volumes.


Mine, though, is one of those photographically-reduced ones: four pages to a page, with very thin paper and a magnifying glass (which I used not to need).

It was the last of a three volume edition (A-O; P-Z plus supplement; new supplement) and was sold just as a new two volume work came out**. (It means I have to look in three places to check a word; if I'd paid more and/or waited, there was but a single supplement.)

Because mine edition was the equivalent of last-year's-model of a car, it was cheaper; and it was associated with a book club, so it was cheaper still.



** - It's the 1971 edition "reprinted in 1987 as a three-volume set", to quote the book itself.

I suppose that I could get a job.
You still got to like the way I worked in the word "bear" though.

 

[Ursa major]

At least you didn't ask me to send you bearer bonds in order to get you out of the (financial) woods.

(So I can't really carp! )


Back to the topic:

It's a balancing act: helping to create atmosphere without stalling the narrative or forcing the reader to their (possibly nowhere near comprehensive enough) dictionary; making the story flow without skating only on its surface; capturing the sense of idiomatic speech without making the dialogue risible.


(Idiomatic language is always difficult: even here on the Chrons, we use words that are not universally understood amongst the members. It's possibly at its worst when we all think we know what we all mean, but don't: "tabling motions", "momentarily" and the like are only two of the more obvious** cases.)

It's a hard life being a writer, sometimes....



** - but are they both obvious to you?