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Are you guys tired of listening to me complain about books yet?
Too bad. *g* Because I'm reading "Off Armageddon Reef" by David Weber, and thus far, I have this to say.
Dear Mr. Weber,
If you plan to write about languages changing over time, for the sake of your readers' sanity, read a book on linguistics first. Or look it up on Wikipedia. Or ANYTHING.
Sincerely,
Me.
So we have this colony world that was settled about a thousand years ago by (to simplify the plot greatly) a fundamentalist religious cult -- I mean, clearly it's more complicated, but that's the nutshell version. And what Weber's done is attempted to show that a great deal of time has passed by throwing random y's and h's into common English names. So ALL the characters have eyebleed-inducing names like Dynnys and Myllyr and Wyllym and Haarahld and (I think this is my personal favorite so far for its sheer gratuitousness) Ahdymsyn. (Well, Zherald Ahdymsyn if you want to be precise. God, I can't even type that.)
Adding to the amusement, names of places and deities and historical people (like, say, the Archangel Langhorne, one of the founders of the colony and the cult) have apparently survived with perfectly static pronunciation right down to the present day.
Maybe the early days of the colony saw a tragic shortage of vowels, and they had to make do with Y's. Poor people.
Dear Mr. Weber,
If you plan to write about languages changing over time, for the sake of your readers' sanity, read a book on linguistics first. Or look it up on Wikipedia. Or ANYTHING.
Sincerely,
Me.
So we have this colony world that was settled about a thousand years ago by (to simplify the plot greatly) a fundamentalist religious cult -- I mean, clearly it's more complicated, but that's the nutshell version. And what Weber's done is attempted to show that a great deal of time has passed by throwing random y's and h's into common English names. So ALL the characters have eyebleed-inducing names like Dynnys and Myllyr and Wyllym and Haarahld and (I think this is my personal favorite so far for its sheer gratuitousness) Ahdymsyn. (Well, Zherald Ahdymsyn if you want to be precise. God, I can't even type that.)
Adding to the amusement, names of places and deities and historical people (like, say, the Archangel Langhorne, one of the founders of the colony and the cult) have apparently survived with perfectly static pronunciation right down to the present day.
Maybe the early days of the colony saw a tragic shortage of vowels, and they had to make do with Y's. Poor people.
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I just discovered that there's both a continent named Howard and a character named ... Hauwerd. WHYYYYYYYYYY
I dohn't knohw hauhw muhch of thys Y'm gohing to byy able to tayke.
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WHERE ARE THE DRAGONS?
*taps foot impatiently*
Worlds with too many y's always have an over-abundance of dragons. This is second only to the law of gravity.
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This reminded me of something I read a long time ago, something an author said, begging other authors to stop butchering the English language and just call a horse a horse instead of a Hho'r'es... or something.
It also reminds me of when people try to write Carson's accent (which, yes, I've been guilty of, but I've since learned my lesson and stopped).
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And yeah, it's really a fine line that is easily crossed. I can understand an author wanting the reader to "hear" what they hear in their head, but the more nonstandard your spelling gets, the more it's just going to annoy the reader and make it difficult to read the text. (And in the case of dialects and accents, you also run the risk of seriously annoying or offending people who speak that way themselves, especially if it's badly done. The old X-Men comics -- as much as I loved them and still do -- are a smorgasbord of terribly rendered accents, from Deep South to Cajun to German to Russian; I'll give them props for trying, but STILL.)
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It's frustrating because there's a lot of possibility for really interesting world-building in this world, and some intriguing sci-fi concepts, but it's being totally blown on the writer's inability to actually handle believable culture change over time.
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I just went on Amazon to check the reviews and apparently it gets even worse later on. One of the reviewers snarks about it for several paragraphs, and from the list of names it's even more abundantly obvious that Weber knows zilch about linguistics -- his pronunciation shifts are totally random (sometimes "s" becomes vocalized, sometimes it doesn't; vowels shift in random and sometimes mutually nonsensical directions; unstressed syllables occasionally pick up new vowel sounds for no apparent reason). And okay, yeah, I do have an amateur interest in linguistics, but even leaving aside the fact that the science is blindingly wrong (and call me crazy, but I expect SCIENCE from SCIENCE FICTION), the weirdly spelled names are a giant stumbling block that any reasonable editor should have shot down.
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I have a mental image of Weber reflecting that it's such a cliche to make names science-fictional by adding gra'tu'it'ous ap'ostr'oph'es everywhere -- what, he wonders, would be an original and exciting approach to portraying linguistic differences? Thyn, yn yhdea strhykes hym ...
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Ah, but alas, if only Ahnold was in this book! It would be so much more entertaining! Not exactly better, but entertaining at least. (I've kind of given up after about 150 pages. It's just not getting any better, and while there are all of these potentially awesome concepts, like the android protagonist with a human woman's personality template in a male body, the author is not actually exploring any of the ideas that he's raised. And I am so spoiled by reading authors who address cultural diversity in at least a half-assed fashion that I am deeply annoyed that despite passing references in the first couple of chapters to a certain amount of diversity in the colony's founders, it seems to have lapsed into total Euro-World after 900 years.)
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