Re: Conlangs in History

On Sat, 19 Aug 2000, Nik Taylor wrote:

> Anne McCaffery in her Pern novels has a sort of English dialect, with a
> few differences in terms, like "Turn" for "year", "healer" for "doctor",
> etc.  But, I've always felt that it was unnecessary.  Most of the
Sf/f rule-of-thumb I've heard is: if it functions pretty much like a
sheep, call it a sheep.  She may have done it to give Pern a different
"feel."  "Healer" for doctor seems standard in fantasy novels, and it's
true that a lot of Pern reads like semi-feudal fantasy despite the
semi-science underpinnings.  Generally if there's a significant
difference (usually cultural) you can be justified in creating your own
term, as long as you don't spam the reader.

I thought C.J. Cherryh did this beautifully in her Faded Sun novels, and
then I read on some website that she'd used Tuareg, which was terribly
disappointing because I'd hoped for the mri to be, well, alien.

> used for a certain parasitic organism, and apparently even after 2500
> years, the homophony between "thread" and "Thread" remained.  My
> linguistic mind revolted at that - surely since Thread is such a huge
> threat, they'd use another word for "thread", perhaps "string" or
> something.  And the worst was when they rediscovered the AIVAS
> (Artificial Intelligence Voice Activated System), a sophisticated,
> self-maintaining computer complex left by their ancestors, AIVAS merely
> had to adjust for a shift in pronunciation, and learn the few new terms.
>
> Oh, well, I guess that's better than pretending that absolutely no
> change had occurred.
I first read _Dragonflight_ and _Dragonquest_ in 4th grade, before I had
any notion that linguistics existed, so this never bothered me.  :-(  It
does now, though; even I wondered at AIVAS.

The seeming lack of language change in the Foundation trilogy really
bothered me when I first read it a month ago <ducking>, but there were so
many other things I loved about it that I forgave Asimov.

YHL