Linguistics in Name of the Wind
Dec. 9th, 2011 12:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackI'm used to fantasy stories either (a) having everyone speaking English, with maybe a couple of made-up words thrown in or (b) going to some effort to make up fictional languages. Is that a fair characterisation or is that just a stereotype?
Tolkien obviously went to considerable effort to invent realistic languages with realistic connections and transcriptions, with the fiction that Westron was translated into English, and other languages were partially translated into languages that had a similar relationship to English as they supposedly did to Westron (?). A couple of times he mentions the translations of specific words, eg. Merry and Pippin's names, which were supposedly translated into names with similar connotations to their original names, but I can't help but feel that explanation was a bit tacked on (since obviously not all languages HAVE names with the same connotations, although I don't know if that's right).
Rothfuss seems to embrace this half-and-half method in Name of the Wind. The example that stood out to me was about a "loden-stone": "Technically it's a Trebon-Stone as it's never been near Loden". Even though (as far as I know) in our world lodestones aren't called after a place at all. This is the sort of thing that fantasy writers often do very badly when they're making up linguistics, so my first reaction was to twitch when I saw it. But somehow Rothfuss seems to paint a vivid and persuasive (to a non-linguist) history of language, even if what he's implicitly doing is giving a fictional history of English, completely at variance to the actual one. I can't decide if this is excellent or ridiculous...
Tolkien obviously went to considerable effort to invent realistic languages with realistic connections and transcriptions, with the fiction that Westron was translated into English, and other languages were partially translated into languages that had a similar relationship to English as they supposedly did to Westron (?). A couple of times he mentions the translations of specific words, eg. Merry and Pippin's names, which were supposedly translated into names with similar connotations to their original names, but I can't help but feel that explanation was a bit tacked on (since obviously not all languages HAVE names with the same connotations, although I don't know if that's right).
Rothfuss seems to embrace this half-and-half method in Name of the Wind. The example that stood out to me was about a "loden-stone": "Technically it's a Trebon-Stone as it's never been near Loden". Even though (as far as I know) in our world lodestones aren't called after a place at all. This is the sort of thing that fantasy writers often do very badly when they're making up linguistics, so my first reaction was to twitch when I saw it. But somehow Rothfuss seems to paint a vivid and persuasive (to a non-linguist) history of language, even if what he's implicitly doing is giving a fictional history of English, completely at variance to the actual one. I can't decide if this is excellent or ridiculous...
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Date: 2011-12-09 03:37 am (UTC)