Pedantry

[desperance]

Writing fantasy, particularly if it is overtly historical in its origins, gives access to whole new hitherto-undreamed-of realms of pedantry. We can fuss for ever over details of costume, use of weaponry, so on and so forth; but we get to fuss over the language too, particular issues of vocabulary. I've written before about how long I struggled for a legitimate alternative to 'crusade', in a world that was absolutely and obviously based on the Crusades but where the Christianity-substitute religion did not derive its primary symbol from a cross; now I've just hit a problem that's even more basic. I wrote that someone spelled out a problem - and then I checked, and went back, and deleted the phrase. Thing is, this is the Taiwan fantasy I've been talking about forever; these people are effectively Chinese. Their written language is character-based. Which means, of course, that they do not spell things out, even metaphorically. In which Chaz deletes 'spell' from the book's vocabulary, and seeks an alternative. Clarify, perhaps? They're Chinese, they make a lot of soups, they've got to clarify their stocks...

Comments

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Trouble is, of course, as soon as you start thinking this way, you get obsessive about it. Chinese art is based on brush-and-ink, rather than pencil; do they sketch, in the same way that we do? (Almost certainly, yes, but I don't know for sure...) Do they trace? (Oh, surely, they had paper centuries before we do and some of it transparently fine - but again, I don't know...)

So what you do, of course, is deconstruct the line and rebuild it another way, to avoid the issue. Or, in this case, just cut it altogether and let the dialogue stand by itself.

[deadcities-icon.livejournal.com]

I might have been teasing you, Chaz.

Might have been.