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Because I should be working on complicated and difficult homework assignments, naturally I am debating minor issues of how to present things the vast majority of theoretical readers would never notice in my fluffy fantasy novel.
Specifically, dialect.
See, if I'm sticking to anything even vaguely plausible when it comes to language*, the sort of governmental structure and species overlap and the like that I have going on in this setting shouldn't have big zones of Clearly Defined Languages. There should probably be one reasonably dominant/trade language in this area--my characters aren't traveling huge distances--but they should be passing through some distinctly different language areas in terms of dialect, even setting aside class/species/cultural divisions affecting that. Lots of slightly different variations from one city to the next, and eventually mutually intelligible but noticeably Distinct ways of speaking as these characters travel.
But...sheesh. This is all vaguely assumed translation convention, anyway. So I don't want to go with "and then they swapped to speaking Dialect X!" because that's way to clean a division between speech patterns, but at the same time, trying to represent these things in the English is going to be...tricky, at best. Any given dialect needs to be internally consistent, and distinct enough to bother coming up with and representing, but not so different from "standard" English as I'm writing it as to be annoying to the reader. (Mark Twain I am not, and I am not going to go write Yoda, either.) But if I start cribbing from existing dialects of English, then I'll 1) risk screwing those up and sounding even more wrong, since I'm not familiar with them, and 2) be bringing in a whole lot of assumptions about Class and Correctness and etc. with whichever one I choose.
So probably I'm going to cheat, and just let everyone speak approximately the same language, with occasional mentions of changing accents. Or I'll give some linguistic quirks to specific groups as they're encountered, and simplify enormously from the actual linguistic variation you'd get within a group that size. But. Y'know. Argh. There is a vast gulf between what I know it ought to be, and what I'm actually capable of writing.**
And probably I shouldn't be thinking about this at all right now, because Homework, but I'm sufficiently swamped by academics that my brain is helpfully suggesting how to continue every novel project I'm even vaguely theoretically supposedly still working on. (Thanks, brain!) Oh well. Maybe some of that will linger until I have time to actually write things that are not about dead and/or fictional Greeks.
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* Which is not a given. I am not kidding about the Fluffy part of Fluffy Fantasy, here.
** Also represented by such a known gulf: every action scene I write. Sigh. One of these days I'll learn enough about political plotting to write a book where I can just avoid any damn action scenes. At least when I was writing Czenik, his main reaction to violence was to politely excuse himself out the nearest exit.
Specifically, dialect.
See, if I'm sticking to anything even vaguely plausible when it comes to language*, the sort of governmental structure and species overlap and the like that I have going on in this setting shouldn't have big zones of Clearly Defined Languages. There should probably be one reasonably dominant/trade language in this area--my characters aren't traveling huge distances--but they should be passing through some distinctly different language areas in terms of dialect, even setting aside class/species/cultural divisions affecting that. Lots of slightly different variations from one city to the next, and eventually mutually intelligible but noticeably Distinct ways of speaking as these characters travel.
But...sheesh. This is all vaguely assumed translation convention, anyway. So I don't want to go with "and then they swapped to speaking Dialect X!" because that's way to clean a division between speech patterns, but at the same time, trying to represent these things in the English is going to be...tricky, at best. Any given dialect needs to be internally consistent, and distinct enough to bother coming up with and representing, but not so different from "standard" English as I'm writing it as to be annoying to the reader. (Mark Twain I am not, and I am not going to go write Yoda, either.) But if I start cribbing from existing dialects of English, then I'll 1) risk screwing those up and sounding even more wrong, since I'm not familiar with them, and 2) be bringing in a whole lot of assumptions about Class and Correctness and etc. with whichever one I choose.
So probably I'm going to cheat, and just let everyone speak approximately the same language, with occasional mentions of changing accents. Or I'll give some linguistic quirks to specific groups as they're encountered, and simplify enormously from the actual linguistic variation you'd get within a group that size. But. Y'know. Argh. There is a vast gulf between what I know it ought to be, and what I'm actually capable of writing.**
And probably I shouldn't be thinking about this at all right now, because Homework, but I'm sufficiently swamped by academics that my brain is helpfully suggesting how to continue every novel project I'm even vaguely theoretically supposedly still working on. (Thanks, brain!) Oh well. Maybe some of that will linger until I have time to actually write things that are not about dead and/or fictional Greeks.
---
* Which is not a given. I am not kidding about the Fluffy part of Fluffy Fantasy, here.
** Also represented by such a known gulf: every action scene I write. Sigh. One of these days I'll learn enough about political plotting to write a book where I can just avoid any damn action scenes. At least when I was writing Czenik, his main reaction to violence was to politely excuse himself out the nearest exit.