Are you guys tired of listening to me complain about books yet?

[sholio]

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.

Comments

[ratcreature]

Wow that is worse even than the random alien apostrophe.

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

oh god, I know! I want to like the book, but running into a name like "Ahrnahld" is like slamming into a brick wall -- it startles me right out of the scene. And there's enough implausibility in the rest of the world-building that my disbelief just is not staying suspended at all. It's frustrating because there are some really interesting ideas in this book -- it's about an Earth colony losing its technology and then rediscovering it -- but it's being totally wrecked by the author's shoddy research on how cultures actually change over time.