Zompist Bboard Again

zompist wrote: Today's sf readers are far more sophisticated than a hundred years ago... I recently read one of Aliette de Bodard's books, which unapologetically uses Vietnamese names for every character, with all the correct diacritics. Let people wonder how it's pronounced, it won't hurt them.

Glenn wrote: ↑Sun Jan 26, 2025 8:29 pmIn trying to verify this online, I found that another “corrected” version some people have used is “Abd Al-Hazred,” which was translated as “slave of the ban/slave of the banned”.

Glenn wrote:The same essay provided “explanations” for the names of several of Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones (Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath, etc.); since the Necronomicon was supposedly written in Arabic and later translated into Greek, then Latin, and then English, most of these are interpreted as the garbled results of actual words in Arabic, or sometimes, e.g., Latin or Ancient Egyptian.

Glenn wrote: ↑Sun Jan 26, 2025 8:47 pm Going back to the start of the thread for a moment:

zompist wrote: Today's sf readers are far more sophisticated than a hundred years ago... I recently read one of Aliette de Bodard's books, which unapologetically uses Vietnamese names for every character, with all the correct diacritics. Let people wonder how it's pronounced, it won't hurt them.

I agree that this is something that seems to be changing in modern SFF writing; in addition to Aliette de Bodard’s works (which I have read a few of), I have seen a few other writers making use of more unusual and less Englishy phonologies and names, including the use of diacritics, which in the past were vanishingly rare in most English-language works.

bradrn wrote: ↑Mon Jan 27, 2025 7:06 pmNot to be ignored are developments in typesetting. Vernor Vinge had a story of wanting to use ⟨p̃ ṽ⟩ (I think they were) in some names, and being rejected because the magazine at the time had no way of typesetting those letters. So they ended up being changed to ⟨% #⟩ or something like that, which looked awful. I believe he was only once able to use the letters he wanted, and that required typesetting the entire story himself.

malloc wrote: ↑Mon Jan 27, 2025 8:03 pm

bradrn wrote: ↑Mon Jan 27, 2025 7:06 pmNot to be ignored are developments in typesetting. Vernor Vinge had a story of wanting to use ⟨p̃ ṽ⟩ (I think they were) in some names, and being rejected because the magazine at the time had no way of typesetting those letters. So they ended up being changed to ⟨% #⟩ or something like that, which looked awful. I believe he was only once able to use the letters he wanted, and that required typesetting the entire story himself.

How were those letters pronounced or did he never specify?

foxcatdog wrote: ↑Tue Jan 28, 2025 2:52 am Ironic since nasal fricatives are possible and nasal stops are just nasals.

Vernor Vinge wrote: An aside: I’ve always had a weakness for unpronounceable names and oddball orthographies. The names in this story were a problem from the beginning. I had just taken a descriptive linguistics course, and I was enthusiastic: my aliens can close their noses—true nasal stops and fricatives were possible for them! In the version John W. Campbell bought around 1967, I represented a voiceless nasal stop by the letter “p” with tilde and a voiced nasal fricative by the letter “v” with tilde. John told me he didn’t think it would get past the typesetters. He was right. And even now, such oddball symbols can be hard to print. One editor, Jim Baen, kindly offered to accept photoready copy from me—so that I could set the type exactly as it should be. In this printing, I have chosen to represent the voiceless nasal stop as “%” and the voiced nasal fricative as “#”.

Vernor Vinge wrote: An aside: I’ve always had a weakness for unpronounceable names and oddball orthographies. The names in this story were a problem from the beginning. I had just taken a descriptive linguistics course, and I was enthusiastic: my aliens can close their noses—true nasal stops and fricatives were possible for them! In the version John W. Campbell bought around 1967, I represented a voiceless nasal stop by the letter “p” with tilde and a voiced nasal fricative by the letter “v” with tilde.

zompist wrote: ↑Tue Jan 28, 2025 3:24 am What I expect he means is that his aliens have an articulator in the nose-- e.g. they can narrow or close the nostrils. For humans nasality just adds resonance-- it's not like a lot of air goes through the nose. So maybe they can close off oral airflow and direct all air through the nose (then impede or stop that).

Gareth3 wrote: ↑Thu Jan 30, 2025 4:13 pm I've noticed more recent SF stories tend to make alien languages untranscribable noises that humans can't even parse into phonemes without computer assistance, much less write down in a human alphabet. So all the proper nouns are just borrowings or translations from English.