teabooksandsweets:

misbehavingmaiar:

sebastian-bond:

but-the-library-of-alexandria:

the thing about writing fantasy stories is that language is so based on history that it can be hard to decide how far suspension of disbelief can carry you word-choice wise – what do you call a french braid in a world with no france? can a queen ann neckline be described if there was no queen ann? where do you draw the line? can you use the word platonic if plato never existed? can you name a character chris in a land without christianity? can you even say ‘bungalow’ in a world where there was no indian language for the word to originate from? is there a single word in any language that doesn’t have a story behind it? to be accurate a fantasy story would be written in a fantasy language but who has the time for that

Tolkien had the time apparently

LIsten. Linguistics Georg, who invented over 10,000 conlangs each day, is an outlier and should not have been counted. 

But you know, techincally it works. For once, in a fantasy world, basically everyone is speaking their fantasy language and we read a translation in English or whatever language that book is written in/translated to. So, whatever they call that particular hairstyle, it’s simply translated as french braid to us. Same for all the other stuff – some people are friends, we call it platonic in translation, etc. and they have their own terms we just never know. And as for names, you know, there are names that are spelt and pronounced exactly the same in different languages, and those names have nothing to do with each other. So technically, yes, there can be a guy called Chris in a land without Christianity. The only things we cannot fully keep are basically holidays but that’s more world building than language, anyhow. Otherwise, it’s simply translation.