Conlang Random Thread

[Salmoneus]

I think he could maybe write a more interesting analysis if he concentrated less on inflating his self-esteem through the mockery of others,

Yeah, it's really bad when people try to inflate their own self-esteem through the mockery of others. That shouldn't be done. Ever. And it's absolutely impossible to write an interesting analysis that way.




(In case you don't understand what I'm getting at, mocking others in a way that might be uncharitably interpreted as designed to inflate one's own self-esteem is basically the default writing mode for educated Britons, or at least the ones I've read so far, and attacking that writing mode on a fundamental level is a quite silly thing to do if you're an educated Briton who writes a lot yourself.)

I get that you don't like me, but you can leave the nationalist generalisations out of it.

And no, I don't think it's very useful to criticise a genre, and its most popular and influential author, from a starting point of derision and disinterest. Sure, if you begin by assuming it's ridiculous to write what's no more than a world of "enchanted costume jewellery", then you're going to find Tolkien silly. But if you come to ANY genre, and ANY author, from the starting point of a sneer, then you're going to find ways to be disappointed with what you find!

More that just being disrespectful, it shows a total lack of understanding - a lack of interest in understanding - what Tolkien was doing, why he was doing it, and why so many readers have responded so strongly to it. Just for a start, I don't see any mention of Tolkien's Catholicism here!

[Raphael]

I get that you don't like me, but you can leave the nationalist generalisations out of it.

Oh, don't get me wrong - I like the snarky witty British writing style. It's certainly preferable to the stilted self-important deliberately boring tripe produced by most German writers. But if you routinely write a lot in that style yourself, and you do, it doesn't really make sense to get suddenly all offended when someone else uses that style.

Or, to put it a bit differently, if, earlier this year, a big fan of Theresa May had shown up in the British Politics Guide thread and ranted about how your mockery of her was "idiotic" and therefore wrong and you obviously didn't understand the first thing about Brexit, most people on this Board would have rolled their eyes about that person's silly namecalling. But now, you see a piece written in a very similar style criticizing a work of literature that you happen to like, and suddenly you think that shouting "idiotic!" constitutes a valid and convincing point. And the fact that you out of all people simply did that, instead of writing a lengthy in-depth refutation of Rye's points, leaves me with the strong impression that you simply don't have any convincing counterarguments.

[Raphael]

And no, I don't think it's very useful to criticise a genre, and its most popular and influential author, from a starting point of derision and disinterest.

I don't see how anyone disinterested in Tolkien could have written that piece. I'm relatively uninterested in Tolkien, and I certainly couldn't have written it.

Sure, if you begin by assuming it's ridiculous to write what's no more than a world of "enchanted costume jewellery", then you're going to find Tolkien silly.

I simply don't see where you get the idea that the point of that piece is "Tolkien is silly". He's pointing out some implausibilities, nothing more and nothing less.

More that just being disrespectful, it shows a total lack of understanding - a lack of interest in understanding - what Tolkien was doing, why he was doing it, and why so many readers have responded so strongly to it. Just for a start, I don't see any mention of Tolkien's Catholicism here!

If the piece was meant to be a thorough scholarly treatment of Tolkien, his works, his place in literature, his place in cultural history, and so on, those would be serious problems. But it isn't. It's a series of specific criticisms of specific aspects of Tolkien's worldbuilding.

[Salmoneus]

I don't get the rancor... so far as I can see, Rye is mostly saying that if Tolkien's lore is true, then neither the elves nor their languages should look like things that developed from a long process of evolution.

Well, see my responses to all the other "this is the one true way to conworld" posts we get here. Rye's presenting his own aesthetic preferences as though they were somehow the dictates of reason, rather than being entirely subjective preferences with no more a priori basis than those that he's attacking. Look at that word there - "should". He is indeed telling us that the elves and their languages shouldn't look like this - but that's nonsense. That's a moral-aesthetic judgement! The most he can rationally reach is "they more probably would look like this" - but, a) who ever said they wouldn't, Tolkien never claimed to set out to describe the 'most probable' world, and why 'should' he have? - and b) even taken on its own merits, the claim is baseless. As a result, it reads more like one guy's rather naive attack on religious faith than an actual argument about conworlding.

For instance, there's no good reason why elven bodies should have the design failures that biological evolution saddled us with, and there's no good reason why a semidivine language creator should end up with a language that looks like a typical human language.

But this argument makes no sense, because clearly there ARE good reasons! Here's five...

1. Tolkien wanted it that way. Tolkien is the author, so his tastes absolutely are a great reason why things would be that way. Again, Tolkien never claimed to be setting out to describe the 'most realistic' world (indeed, that ambition makes no sense in fantasy anyway - the most realistic world is always the real one...), so failing to do so is hardly a failure. Given a range of coherent, plausible worlds, why shouldn't an author pick the one they find most interesting?

2. Tolkien was writing stories for people to read. Making his elves more familiar makes it easier for us to understand and empathise with them.

3. From Tolkien's point of view, it's easy to tell what an omnipotent creator would want their sapient species to be like: just look at the only other sapient species that an omnipotent creator has created. God, from Tolkien's point of view, made man in his own image, so it should hardly be surprising if he also made elves in his own image. After all, even the Valar take on humanoid forms. Suggesting that God would make elves fundamentally different from humans seems rather presumptuous about God's sense of taste - how does Justin Rye have a direct line to God? Of course, God could have made elves very different indeed, but given that, without any input from the needs of evolution, God already chose to make one species look like this, it's hardly ridiculous to suggest that he might do so with another. And on that last point, Rye gets the order of causation wrong: humans and other species aren't the way they are because evolution made them that way - evolution is the way it is in order to make humans the way God wanted them made. From the Catholic point of view, at least, and it hardly makes sense to critique an author without at least considering his own objectives in the process. Tolkien wanted to praise and adulate God. Suggesting that species would not be as they are without evolution demanding that they be that way - that is, suggesting that evolution's requirements are prior to, and outweigh, the desires of God, would not meet Tolkien's objective. Similarly, all human languages were devised by God, so it's hardly surprising that Tolkien's ideas for other languages devised by God would look rather like the God-devised languages he studied himself. What other blueprint is there for what God likes and doesn't like in his languages?

4. Tolkien explicitly is not writing an alternative world, a replacement for our world, or even a distant planet - he's writing about the history of our own world. In his world, humans today are descendents of the humans who interacted with elves. In that world, God designed humans and elves to live together and learn from one another, and so it should hardly be surprising if He decided to design them so that they would immediately recognise one another as kindred! And in particular, regarding the languages, in Tolkien's world, all languages today - English, Finnish, Welsh, etc - are descended from the languages that humans devised for themselves (or had devised for them) after learning the languages of the elves, and then further modified by prolonged contact with the languages of the elves. So of course those languages must resemble human languages! In particular, because the languages on Europe were in contact with elvish languages for longest, it's the languages of Europe that most resemble those Elvish languages - in Tolkien's world, Quenya wasn't modeled on Finnish, nor Sindarin on Welsh, but rather Finnish and Welsh, no doubt through many rounds of substrate influence on the languages of invading groups, have simply best preserved echoes of that primordial Elvish influence on human language. Rye's attack only makes sense if he begins by denying the world-internal justification for the way things are in Tolkien's story, which is obviously a wrongheaded way to go about analysing something. He's ignoring the justifications and then claiming that there aren't any.

5. It makes no sense to talk about what an unfathomable, inscrutable intelligence would or would not do. By definition, we can't understand it. Rye thinks that if God existed, every language would end each sentence with a checksum, but the assumption that God would think like a computer scientist is just as arbitrary as the assumption that God would think like a philologist who loved Welsh (and remember, to the Catholic there are already examples of what God would do if, with omnipotent power, He chose to create ideal languages for His anthropomorphic worshippers - they're called human languages). He thinks that God would have each child 'hatch' knowing the only language they'd ever need, so there would be no need for language change - but that's just as arbitrary a theory of God as Tolkien's theory that God loves languages and language change and intentionally made it so that people would constantly be changing their languages (and again, for the Catholic it's clear that God's a big fan of there being lots of languages rather than just one, because there's lots of languages rather than just one. And if God's not a fan of it (i.e. language change is evil) then it must be a necessary evil, presumably as the result of free will, because otherwise it wouldn't exist.)

And it's also fine to shake things up and imagine how we might do something differently.

Of course - I don't conworld like Tolkien myself. But my issue is when somebody moves from "can" to "should", and from "could" to "would". In particular, given that Tolkien is, almost everyone would I think agree, a more succesful conlanger and conworlder than Justin Rye (certainly commercially and probably aesthetically), it seems counterintuitive for him to adopt such a disparaging tone in criticising him.

[Salmoneus]

Or, to put it a bit differently, if, earlier this year, a big fan of Theresa May had shown up in the British Politics Guide thread and ranted about how your mockery of her was "idiotic" and therefore wrong and you obviously didn't understand the first thing about Brexit, most people on this Board would have rolled their eyes about that person's silly namecalling.

First, I don't think I was mocking Theresa May. She was obviously in a very difficult situation. Second, in particular, I don't think I was dismissive of May the way Rye is of fantasy - I'm sorry if I ever gave the impression that I did not think May was dealing with a serious problem. Third, I didn't just call Rye idiotic, I said that a particular argument of his was idiotic, which it was.

But more broadly: I think there are different expectations of someone writing a brief, sarcastic post on a forum among acquaintances, and publishing a very long and supposedly educational tract. I have attempted - and again, I'm sorry to have so evidently and completely failed, given your reading of me - to distinguish between posts explaining a political issue, and posts merely expressing frustration or surprise at current affairs. And indeed, if I were writing a serious essay explaining how British politics worked, for a general audience to learn from, then I probably would attempt to adopt a more neutral tone. Understanding things requires a degree of intellectual openness, a willingness to see things from their point of view, and I have attempted to be fair and charitable in understanding, and helping others understand, what's been going on. Obviously, I've failed, and maybe I should stop. But certainly, if I'd written an article treating May and politics with the dismissive attitude with which Rye treats Tolkien and fantasy, then I would certainly hope someone would call me out on it.

But now, you see a piece written in a very similar style criticizing a work of literature that you happen to like, and suddenly you think that shouting "idiotic!" constitutes a valid and convincing point. And the fact that you out of all people simply did that, instead of writing a lengthy in-depth refutation of Rye's points, leaves me with the strong impression that you simply don't have any convincing counterarguments.

I'm sorry, I'm obviously remiss in my duties to entertain and inform you. It's a fucking long essay, and believe it or not I do have things to do other than dance for you on command. There are a lot of sentences in that essay, and at least half of them are obviously wrong, so going through line-by-line would take rather a long time (not to mention, he never actually makes clear what his 'points' are...). What's more, we've dealt with very similar screeds, with very similar views, on this board repeatedly in the recent past, so I really didn't think it was necessary to address every issue explicitly yet again. But I suppose I'm going to have to...

[Salmoneus]

I can't go through line-by-line, life is too short. So I'll just pick out a few representative points.

"If I take an epic fantasy world seriously enough to permit this sort of analysis, I'm liable to find it full of languages significantly stranger than I feel competent to deal with – weirder than famously exotic natural human tongues, weirder than the most artificial of philosophical language‐design schemes, and even weirder than imaginary languages concocted specifically to be alien"

He uses a rather weaselly term here to avoid committing to a definite point - what the hell is "liable" even meant to be accomplishing here? Given that fantasy worlds are fiction, he's clearly not liable to find these things in them. He appears to mean that, if authors take fantasy seriously, we should find these things in their works. Which is a view he seems to reinforce throughout the tract, but with little justification.

He also, putting this intro together with his appendix, in which he suggests as alternatives to Tolkienian languages a serious of coarse and half-baked stereotypes of bad fantasy, and dismisses any desire to go beyond these as "inappropriate", appears to be implying that we should not take fantasy seriously. Which, as a fantasy fan, I take issue with.

The Elvish languages... make little sense in the context he put them in - Arda contains elements that are "quite inappropriate" for the Elvish languages to exist there.

I'm just quoting this so that we're clear that Rye's not just saying "Tolkien could have done something different", but more specifically "Tolkien should have done something different" - that there's somethign "inappropriate" about what he did.

Some of the unrealistic features of the languages of Middle‐earth are standard ... characters from regions that have been separated by hundreds of miles of wilderness for thousands of years still speak a common tongue (known conveniently enough as the Common Tongue). Things would be more workable if we could tell ourselves that the hobbits were switching back and forth between chatting to one another in their native “Vulgar Westron” (comparable to mediaeval Italian) and speaking to everyone else in a learned “Classical Westron” (comparable to Latin), but somehow I doubt Sam Gamgee got Latin lessons – it's already enough of a stretch that he's literate.

- the Common Tongue (one of several descriptions for the language, and one I don't find remotely unrealistic, btw, however 'convenient' it may be) is spoken along the northwest coast of the Great Sea, in the lands controlled by the local superpower, Gondor, and to a lesser extent in some parts of the territory of Gondor's sister-kingdom, Arnor. It's also widely spoken as a second language in some areas influenced by Gondor, particularly for trading purposes.

- Some form of the Common Tongue has been spoken for around 2,500 years. This is a long time, but not impossibly long. We don't really know how much the language has changed over that time, other than that connections to related languages are still noticeable for the observant.

- For the first 1,500 years of that time, Gondor and Arnor formed effectively a contiguous cultural sphere, albeit without a shared government. We can assume that the Common Tongue evolved pretty much as one across this area for most of that time, notwithstanding the possibility of some rural areas developing divergent dialects that we don't see. For the following 1000 years, Gondor remained intact, while outlying areas (like the Shire) were kept to some extent linguistically linked by extensive economic and cultural influence.

- It seems desparately parochial to mock the idea of the hobbits being multilingual - you don't need 'Latin lessons' to know a lingua franca, and indeed much of the world manages this without any difficulty. Nor does there seems to be anything implausible in an early modern man being somewhat literate (cf the literacy rate in mediaeval scotland...). Literacy was actually surprisingly widespread throughout the middle ages, let alone the early modern period.

- Is it 'unrealistic' for people across hundreds of miles of China to have been speaking Chinese for thousands of years?


The reason the continent has long been dominated by a tiny number of related language families appears to be that it was inundated in the mid to late Neolithic by waves of expansionist agrarian cultures. Before that, Europe probably had a more typical linguistic landscape with a multitude of tribal tongues that were members of many separate families (or “isolates” unrelated to all their neighbours), almost all of which went on to be lost without trace. Middle‐earth pretends to be set somewhere in that prehistory, but it doesn't pretend very hard!

We've talked about this fallacy before. In fact, these 'crazy quilt' areas packed with isolates - california, the caucasus, new guinea - seem no more universal than their contrary. In the specific case of Europe, it's unlikely a crazy quilt was ever present, since before the early bronze age invasions there were the neolithic invasions (in which 50-95% of the population was replaced by a single population of farmers migrating from the middle east), and before the neolithic invasions were a series of mass expansions across Europe as the tundra thawed, which would have resulted in similar large, expansive language families.

Regarding the conworld, obviously we know middle-earth was never real. But it's never specified when it was set, or what parts of real history it replaces, so it's not very fruitful to complain about it not fitting in!

Thus for example in France as late as 1790 a survey classified only about a tenth of the population as fluent francophones! This situation changed after the development of centralised states with nationwide media and universal education, allowing the speech of the elite to be imposed as the sole officially accepted standard – giving us the modern status quo where each country is ideally expected to have a language of its own that stops neatly at the border.

However, we know there was a relatively high degree of conformity in the Latin (and later Greek) spoken across the Roman (/Byzantine) Empire, for hundreds if not thousands of years.

The Halfling dialect of the Common Tongue also illustrates another linguistic stereotype that's widespread in the realms of fantasy: the hayseeds from the Shire are shown as “carelessly” speaking a “worn‐down” vernacular while the nobility of the great city of Minas Tirith preserve the traditional pure form of the language. That certainly matches how those aristocrats would prefer to imagine it; but in real life it's more likely to be the rural backwaters that preserve outmoded traits (such as a distinction between “you” and “thee” or between “witch” and “which”) while the prestigious accent of the metropolis mutates much faster, as the upper echelons of society continually adopt fashionable ways of speaking that differentiate them from outsiders and social climbers.

And indeed, Tolkien specifies that Hobbitish contained many archaisms that the Westron of Gondor had lost. It's true is lost its distinction in 2nd person forms, but that's more a sociological feature than a purely linguistic one. Tolkien does also talk about the sophistication of Gondorian speech relative to that of the shire, but we shouldn't take that simply to mean archaism - it's likely he's talking about things like register differences, syntactic playfulness, precise vocabulary and so forth - the sort of things you might indeed find in the court speech of a literate urban population.

Either way, why would he [Cirdan] ever have stopped speaking his native tongue the way he first learned it?

Because he wanted to. Or contrariwise: why not? It's also, it's worth pointing out, a common mistake to think that our speech remains constant and that change occurs only in the process of learning - in fact, studies of people like the Queen (who have been recorded speaking over the course of their lives) shows that people are absolutely able to gradually change their speech as they age. And Cirdan's, what, 11,000 years old? A bit of change might indeed be expected over that time period!

If he had said that [θ] in particular words became something interesting‐sounding like, say, a voiceless linguolabial lateral fricative [ɬ̼] [rather than [s]), that would be more plausible as a decorative variation

This is the sort of thing I can't but call 'wrongheaded'. It conflates Rye's personal taste - what he happens to consider aesthetically 'interesting-sounding' - with what is 'plausible'. If we're treating elves as aliens, there's no reason to assume they find /T/ > /ɬ̼/ more interesting than /T/ to /s/ - the former is only more 'interesting' to linguists because it would be unusual compared to natural evolution of languages. But there's no reason to think Cirdan and his mates have set out to be interesting to human linguists.

Indeed, this would be quite out of keeping with the elven aesthetics otherwise established. The fact that what they like happens to be sound changes that look natural is, aesthetically, a feature, not a bug.

Nor does this even have to rely on a coincidence of aesthetics: human soundchanges, Rye says, are motivated by "corner-cutting" rather than "prettyfication", but this is only a subjective difference. The majority of soundchanges are motivated: they increase articulatory ease by leveling sharp differences between adjacent segments and simplifying complex or difficult sounds, while still retaining adequate redundancy. The lenition of intervocalic voiceless stops to voiced ones, for instance, is the smoothing of the sudden change between a voiceless stop and a voiced vowel. Languages in general, as it were (and of course with local exceptions) tend to 'flow' into what we might call a minimal-tension-form - a form that occurs naturally through the minimisation of anomolies. But of course, in physics, minimal tension forms are also notable for being beautiful. How pretty a curve is seen to be is largely predictable mathematically, from the physics of water droplets and the like. Certain patterns in nature, humans instinctively find appealing. Why would it not also be the case with elves? It should hardly be a surprise that elves consciously bring about similar changes, and for similar reasons, as occur in human languages - elves are responding to the same pressures humans are, they just do so consciously and deliberatively. In the same way, an architect can draw out a catenary curve, and it's not a coincidence that it's the same shape a chain naturally takes - even though the chain takes it unconsciously and an architect consciously. It's not a coincidence that writers of constitutions find themselves repeating principles often found to have evolved naturally over time in human societies - organisations keep having to face the same pressures, whether they evolve to meet them through blind survival of the fittest or through conscious preparation, and hence tend to evolve similar responses.

In effect, to simplify massively, humans, as Rye says, break the rules of their languages through "corner-cutting", which then becomes standardised because young people find the "slangy" new practices "fashionable". And elves do exactly the same. It's just that it takes a lot longer for a cut corner to come into Elvish fashion, and often the process of doing so involves more conscious deliberation, and perhaps even discussion. But since the basic pressures - cutting corners and wanting to look cool - apply equally to elves as to humans, there's no reason to expect fundamentally different sound changes in elven languages.


------------


OK Raphael, that's enough for now. I'll come back and do more at another time, but I have other things I need to do now.

[Raphael]

Thank you, that's very informative! And I'm sorry if I gave the impression that I thought you were somehow obliged to write a lengthy detailed dissection - it's just that, with your usual posting habits being what they are, it seemed a bit out of character for you to, at first, just glibly dismiss such a detailed essay in such a short comment.

[zompist]

But this argument makes no sense, because clearly there ARE good reasons! Here's five...

1. Tolkien wanted it that way.
2. Tolkien was writing stories for people to read. Making his elves more familiar makes it easier for us to understand and empathise with them.

Agreed-- in fact these are exactly the reasons I provided.

I'll note, however, that these are metanarrative reasons. They don't mean that Tolkien's way is more plausible or scientific; they are just genre conventions to the effect that such plausibility is not to be sought. #2 need not hold in a different setting, e.g. science fiction.

The whole point of Rye's essay is to ignore #2 and examine Tolkien from a viewpoint of scientific plausibility. It's not that he's unaware of #1 and #2; it's that they're irrelevant to that sort of critique. And it's OK to sometimes look directly at genre conventions and critique them, rather than accept them in order to read the book. (I think you're mistaken that Rye hates fantasy-- look at his other pages, he's a total SFF nerd. But he likes to make self-consciously pedantic analyses of genre.)

3. From Tolkien's point of view, it's easy to tell what an omnipotent creator would want their sapient species to be like: just look at the only other sapient species that an omnipotent creator has created. God, from Tolkien's point of view, made man in his own image, so it should hardly be surprising if he also made elves in his own image. After all, even the Valar take on humanoid forms.

This is the best of your points, but I'm sure you know what a can of worms it is. Rye's critique is essentially an attack on creationism. How a theist responds to this, and how a non-theist responds to the responses, has been a bit contentious for the last century and a half.

Outside of conworlding, "God likes it that way" is not viewed as a robust defense these days. Yes, God could have made the world in 7 days with fossils and caves that look as if they developed over a hundred million years. But this "defense" of God detracts from his character; it's God as Slartibartfast, who makes fjords because he thinks they look pretty.

Likewise, "God's creation is obviously perfect" is also not viewed as a strong hypothesis. You can throw in "Satan messed it up" as a partial amelioration. A monotheist may be stuck with this, relating to our world. But Tolkien is conworlding, and you can't just say it's Catholic doctrine that makes the elves the way they are, or prohibits them being different from humans. (Dwarves differ from both!)

Now, Catholicism actually does accept evolution in the real world. His (Anglican) friend C.S. Lewis makes this explicit. How this applies to Middle Earth, if at all, is far murkier. On the one hand, it's supposed to be our world; on the other, it's a fanciful cosmology that departs dramatically from both geological history and Catholic doctrine. From a Catholic point of view, Middle Earth could well be considered rather heretical...

4. [...] In particular, because the languages on Europe were in contact with elvish languages for longest, it's the languages of Europe that most resemble those Elvish languages [...]

Wow, this is a greater attack on Tolkien than anything Rye says. "I like the sound of Quenya" is authorial prerogative; "the languages of Europe are the most Godly" is dazzlingly racist. There are areas where Tolkien is carelessly racist and classist, as a not-very-progressive man of his time, but if you asked him if Welsh was closer to the mind of God than Chinese, I really think he'd disagree.

5. It makes no sense to talk about what an unfathomable, inscrutable intelligence would or would not do.

No, that's unworthy of you or of Catholicism. God is supposed to be just, good, and rational; we are also, in your own account, made in his image, so he is not completely alien to us. As Benedict said, "Credo quia absurdum (I believe because it is absurd) is not a formula that interprets the Catholic faith."

As a defense of Tolkien, this is also rather insulting! That Eru made Middle Earth in inscrutable ways unfathomable to man is not, I think, a tribute to what Tolkien was doing in the Ainulindale.

(A theist can fall back on "it's ineffable" to justify things in the real world to themselves. It's less convincing to outsiders! But applied to conworlding, it's surely a bit offensive? If you really think that "some things, humans cannot understand", how can you take those very things as your models for subcreation? You just said you didn't understand them! Catholic doctrine does not in any way recommend that one imitate those actions of God that seem (to us uninformed mortals) as capricious or amoral.)

[malloc]

Rye actually echoes some of the reasons why fantasy has never really resonated with me. For some reason, my pedantic side always gets stuck on how magic can coexist with otherwise ordinary physics, the evolutionary biology of magical animals, and so forth. Now granted, I realize that is rather silly of me and probably reflects my autistic and neurotic tendencies more than anything.

[akam chinjir]

Is it 'unrealistic' for people across hundreds of miles of China to have been speaking Chinese for thousands of years?

I was going to say this is wildly unrealistic, but I don't know how restrictive that "hundreds of miles" is supposed to be.

But the real reason to mention this is that the variant of Mandarin that's promoted across China is actually called Common Speech (that's what putonghua means), something I used to think was a dumb cliché.

[Moose-tache]

I will say that the basic argument that in-depth realism can paradoxically draw more attention to how unrealistic the world is can be true sometimes. I always roll my eyes when fantasy authors try to go into detail about how diet and agriculture work in their pseudo-Medieval Europoid fantasy world. They're always very careful to exclude crops like maize and tomatoes and yuzu fruit. But there's really no reason why the kingdom of Gorpforth would have wheat and not maize, or maize and not wheat. They could have "drak seed," which is explained in the appendices as a plant in the poaceae family superficially similar to foxtail millet, but that doesn't flow as well as just having your characters refer to whatever they eat as "grain" or "corn." And of course any discussion of plant biology wil make me wonder why there are humans at all in this world.

If you ask me to suspend my disbelief I will, and not focus too much on the smoke and mirrors. But if you tell me to stop and examine the smoke in fine detail it makes it harder to believe. Sometimes. This is one area where Tolkien was actually really good, because (to keep the metaphor going) his passion and talent for smoke effects is amazing. Comedy writers like Pratchett can also get away with this more easily. But someone like Martin? No. Every time I read a passage about the realistic banking practices of Braavos I'm just reminded of how little sense the whole world makes. I remember an interview in which he explained that his dragons were "scientifically accurate" because they had two legs and wings instead of four legs and wings. Gag.

[Raphael]

I always roll my eyes when fantasy authors try to go into detail about how diet and agriculture work in their pseudo-Medieval Europoid fantasy world. They're always very careful to exclude crops like maize and tomatoes and yuzu fruit. But there's really no reason why the kingdom of Gorpforth would have wheat and not maize, or maize and not wheat.

Completely agree on that point.

[Pabappa]

Hmm. Well, it certainly is fun to *write* about little details like that, for me at least. Most of my writing seems to fit the description of what you guys are saying .... and writing about, e.g. fluctuations in the weather has led me to open up whole new chapters of history. e.g. the famine of 1823 in Nama caused Nama to invade its much weaker ally, Paba, and Nama kept such control over Paba that Paba never attempted any kind of retaliation and became from that point on merely a protectorate of Nama. Also, although it's a lot of work and I haven't actually done it properly, .... planet Teppala has a very dynamic climate, so sea level is rapidly rising and falling from time to time, and this also leads to migrations and wars. Probably few, if any, other people here have actual climate data mapped out to the point of being able to give the average temperature in a given month of a given year for each major city on the planet. And I dont either because it would be a huge hassle but Ive got a few data points here and there. It helps for me to think, as i write, that eg. the climate of Paba was much colder in the year 4127 when their uneducated leaders decided to shut down farming and rely entirely on fishing to get their food, whereas in the "current" year, 8773, such a decision would make little sense.

[Xwtek]

the famine of 1823 in Nama caused Nama to invade its much weaker ally, Paba

What? Is it the other way around? For example, Java invaded Bali in 1284 because Samalas eruption in 1257 depopulates Bali. (Java is affected to lesser extent, but still)

[Pabappa]

At the time, Nama was by far the world's strongest military power, but they were almost entirely a land-based empire, with only a tiny seacoast. When famine came, they invaded their southern ally, Paba, whose food supply came largely from the ocean and was thus unaffected by the cold spells. Paba was defenseless and never got its revenge because Nama completely swallowed them up.

Not everything my people do makes sense, but I think this episode played out just about how it would have on Earth. I picked one of the most Earth-like scenarios to mention there because I think it shows how I *can* be realistic and how writing about things like that can lead the way to new ideas for things that might happen later on.

[Moose-tache]

Hmm. Well, it certainly is fun to *write* about little details like that, for me at least.

I think how well this works just depends on how well it's presented. If it's clear that your world is just a backdrop to showcase your love of squirrel biology, then an insanely deep dive into squirrel biology won't be too jarring. But if you're throwing in random soliloquies about squirrel it just makes me wonder why there are squirrels on a planet that has a different palaeohistory than Earth. Verisimilitude is never a good reason to add realistic details for me, because I'm already ready to believe the unreal if you have a good story to tell.

The worst affront is "almost real" naming conventions. If you name your main character Dwedward or Flessica or Jerone, I am using your book as kindling.

[Xwtek]

At the time, Nama was by far the world's strongest military power, but they were almost entirely a land-based empire, with only a tiny seacoast. When famine came, they invaded their southern ally, Paba, whose food supply came largely from the ocean and was thus unaffected by the cold spells.

Why didn't Nama defeat Paba earlier?

[Xwtek]

My language has extensive ablaut. Sometimes, it can even become "triconsonantal". However, the triconsonantal system is rare, and it's mostly ablaut with some metathesis.
The problem is that when loaning a verb from another language. Unlike Semitic, the ablaut is unproductive, due to variety of the ablaut and the fact that the word that looks related by ablaut is actually not at all. (It's possible that /kat/ and /ket/ is from different root, but /tak/ and /tek/ is a different form from the same root). On the other hand, I can't just make verb closed class because of how the syntax works. (My language has no ditransitive verb, for starter). My idea is to derive the noun into verb by a suffix and make the ablaut just affect the derivational suffix. Other native verbs can still do ablaut on the entire root. Is this realistic?

[bradrn]

My language has extensive ablaut. Sometimes, it can even become "triconsonantal". However, the triconsonantal system is rare, and it's mostly ablaut with some metathesis.
The problem is that when loaning a verb from another language. Unlike Semitic, the ablaut is unproductive, due to variety of the ablaut and the fact that the word that looks related by ablaut is actually not at all. (It's possible that /kat/ and /ket/ is from different root, but /tak/ and /tek/ is a different form from the same root).

So, if I’m understanding correctly: you have a verbal system which is very irregular, but which contains much ablaut with some metathesis. However, as in English, the ablaut process is unproductive; that is, it applies only to some verbs. (I presume that there are several other processes which can be used to conjugate verbs in addition to ablaut.) Can I confirm that this is correct?

[Xwtek]

So, if I’m understanding correctly: you have a verbal system which is very irregular, but which contains much ablaut with some metathesis. However, as in English, the ablaut process is unproductive; that is, it applies only to some verbs. (I presume that there are several other processes which can be used to conjugate verbs in addition to ablaut.) Can I confirm that this is correct?

Yes.

More: show

Historically, it's not metathesis, but a syncope affecting different vowels. But synchronically, yes, it's metathesis together with ablaut