Fantasy books and renaming
Oct. 19th, 2007 09:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethBasic semiotics: meaning of signs is arbitrary, and established through difference. House is not castle is not shed, but we all know what the words point at because they're part of a set. And pig is part of a different set entirely and if someone lived in a house we'd nod and if they lived in a pig we'd back away slowly and blink a lot.
So: Fantasy books. And that thing where coffee is never actually coffee, it's always kvai or something. For a start, it's a perfect illustration of that arbitrary sign thing. They just mash the keyboard a bit and hey, new sign! And then they use the word throughout the book, and establish that it means something a bit different than x and more like y and quite a lot like that drink with the roast beans. And of course beans is the same word even when coffee isn't so we get the basic idea. And all the properties of coffee like it perking you up in the morning and happening in a bunch of varieties and being wildly overpriced are all now associated with kvai. Successful transfer of associations, connotations, so two words now have all the same, but with the added extra on kvai of being 'slightly weird made up word, aren't we cool to have learned it'. Which is the basic point of coffee menus, far as I can see. Add some connotations of Far Away into the mix.
Okay, so far so good.
But the more words are transferred in this way, the more of a mess it becomes. Instead of getting a simple coffee-kvai equivalence, we have to figure out if what we call coffee is kvai, qfe, or indeed coffee. And, and this is the irritating bit, they never get around to telling us the difference.
So, the book I was reading last night. They've renamed each and every individual animal species. Categories are still there, like insect or rodent, but either misused or misunderstood by particular characters, like 'poisonous eight legged insect'. It's not an insect with eight legs. Except, and here's the tricky bit, in this world it could be. For instance, in one of the series I read, there's a species we learn is a bit like a cow except for having six legs. And that whole world gradually turns out to be like that, a bit like but different. And it's not for random color, it's a Clue. Because this world is not that world. There's Standard Fantasy Medeval Land, and it's on one planet, and there's Standard Fantasy Oriental Land, and it is on another. And we can figure this out by details like the six legged cow, which isn't called a cow. So they have all these animals and they've named them to be almost-coffee and so on, because they're finding equivalence in a whole new system. See? Language is a Clue.
So I'm more than half way through this new book and not only can I not find any Clue in these renamings, I can't find any equivalence either. Because they haven't just renamed rats. Or if they have you can't figure it out, because we don't get a handy description of rats. They've renamed a whole bunch of rodents, so you know there's two characters with different rodent names because they tell you, but you don't know which rodents they are. It could be rat and mouse, but it could also be squirrel and hamster. Since the names are almost all you have to go on, and since the characters seem to be using animal names specifically for their connotations, you'd think it would be important to explain precisely what those connotations are. But no, for this is fantasyland, and you have to get more than halfway through the book to find out that people aren't calling Cery a rodent on general principle, his name is in fact a species called Ceryni. And he was getting help from a rodent called Ravi, but now he's working for an eight legged poisonous insect called Faren, but they're actually both regular humans with names vaguely like Ripper, ie a bit of a pose. Probably. So if you knew the local connotations of Ravi you could find out something about Ravi's personality in that he chooses to call himself a Ravi. But is he a rat or a hamster? You don't know.
It's very annoying.
Further there's a lot of slang invented just for this book. And I thought it was clever to start with, because there's two main points of view from two different classes (becoming a bunch more characters later on), so the slum dwellers get their own slang and the high born get to use standard English. Differentiate through word use, make the uppers not understand the lowers, all kinds of good stuff there. Right? Only... as soon as one of the high born has the slang explained to him, everyone is using it. Instead of having to translate for his peers, they're going around calling people the same names. Okay, possibly only once so far, but you see the problem? Now what's the point of the words? To add local color?
Fantasy books do this all the bloody time. Especially with names. I mean, what's the point of writing Dannyl and Sonea? Sonea is illiterate, so she wouldn't spell her name any particular way anyways. Dannyl is literate and probably would, but since it's the wrong spelling in standard English it just looks a bit odd. And again there's the connotation problem. Does the writer want 'all the connotations of Daniel plus being a bit odd' or do they want a whole seperate name? Well if we meet a Daniel we'll have more of an idea, but as it is we're just tripping up on the (mis)spellings and then ignoring them.
And finally there's the race thing. In a fantasy world setting, when everything starts off from theoretical tabula rasa, why does it end up with dark skinned foreigners again? And when describing someone as pale, do they mean white skinned or just unhealthy looking for a tan people? And how are we supposed to know? Well they stop and give us a potted history of a foreign country to go with a physical description every time we meet someone. And, basically, *facepalm* to that. I don't know where the plot is going, quite possibly to said foreign countries eventually, but it's just kind of annoying doing it that way. And again, they've all got names that are new and different, so we attempt to use the same principles of difference and equivalence to establish the new meanings. So we can either figure which historical society they sound like, and import all those connotations, or we can ignore history entirely and start fresh. And if we had dark skinned fur wearing polar barbarians in dragon boats, maybe that would work... though really we're going to call them melanistic fantasy vikings anyway. But we don't, we get dark skinned people who lock up all their women, and... why? We're dealing with words on a page here, not illustrations, so the words are all we really need to go on. Why not just ignore skin as a signifier here and go with pinning it all on a name? Ignoring the icky and potentially racist, or at least the most obvious level thereof. But no, in this whole new world, we get sketchy descriptions that translate to kinda like existing human races. Blah.
If you're going to mess up the whole sign system, please to be doing so in ways that add value, not just copy inequality-isms. Otherwise it looks like book full of typo.
So: Fantasy books. And that thing where coffee is never actually coffee, it's always kvai or something. For a start, it's a perfect illustration of that arbitrary sign thing. They just mash the keyboard a bit and hey, new sign! And then they use the word throughout the book, and establish that it means something a bit different than x and more like y and quite a lot like that drink with the roast beans. And of course beans is the same word even when coffee isn't so we get the basic idea. And all the properties of coffee like it perking you up in the morning and happening in a bunch of varieties and being wildly overpriced are all now associated with kvai. Successful transfer of associations, connotations, so two words now have all the same, but with the added extra on kvai of being 'slightly weird made up word, aren't we cool to have learned it'. Which is the basic point of coffee menus, far as I can see. Add some connotations of Far Away into the mix.
Okay, so far so good.
But the more words are transferred in this way, the more of a mess it becomes. Instead of getting a simple coffee-kvai equivalence, we have to figure out if what we call coffee is kvai, qfe, or indeed coffee. And, and this is the irritating bit, they never get around to telling us the difference.
So, the book I was reading last night. They've renamed each and every individual animal species. Categories are still there, like insect or rodent, but either misused or misunderstood by particular characters, like 'poisonous eight legged insect'. It's not an insect with eight legs. Except, and here's the tricky bit, in this world it could be. For instance, in one of the series I read, there's a species we learn is a bit like a cow except for having six legs. And that whole world gradually turns out to be like that, a bit like but different. And it's not for random color, it's a Clue. Because this world is not that world. There's Standard Fantasy Medeval Land, and it's on one planet, and there's Standard Fantasy Oriental Land, and it is on another. And we can figure this out by details like the six legged cow, which isn't called a cow. So they have all these animals and they've named them to be almost-coffee and so on, because they're finding equivalence in a whole new system. See? Language is a Clue.
So I'm more than half way through this new book and not only can I not find any Clue in these renamings, I can't find any equivalence either. Because they haven't just renamed rats. Or if they have you can't figure it out, because we don't get a handy description of rats. They've renamed a whole bunch of rodents, so you know there's two characters with different rodent names because they tell you, but you don't know which rodents they are. It could be rat and mouse, but it could also be squirrel and hamster. Since the names are almost all you have to go on, and since the characters seem to be using animal names specifically for their connotations, you'd think it would be important to explain precisely what those connotations are. But no, for this is fantasyland, and you have to get more than halfway through the book to find out that people aren't calling Cery a rodent on general principle, his name is in fact a species called Ceryni. And he was getting help from a rodent called Ravi, but now he's working for an eight legged poisonous insect called Faren, but they're actually both regular humans with names vaguely like Ripper, ie a bit of a pose. Probably. So if you knew the local connotations of Ravi you could find out something about Ravi's personality in that he chooses to call himself a Ravi. But is he a rat or a hamster? You don't know.
It's very annoying.
Further there's a lot of slang invented just for this book. And I thought it was clever to start with, because there's two main points of view from two different classes (becoming a bunch more characters later on), so the slum dwellers get their own slang and the high born get to use standard English. Differentiate through word use, make the uppers not understand the lowers, all kinds of good stuff there. Right? Only... as soon as one of the high born has the slang explained to him, everyone is using it. Instead of having to translate for his peers, they're going around calling people the same names. Okay, possibly only once so far, but you see the problem? Now what's the point of the words? To add local color?
Fantasy books do this all the bloody time. Especially with names. I mean, what's the point of writing Dannyl and Sonea? Sonea is illiterate, so she wouldn't spell her name any particular way anyways. Dannyl is literate and probably would, but since it's the wrong spelling in standard English it just looks a bit odd. And again there's the connotation problem. Does the writer want 'all the connotations of Daniel plus being a bit odd' or do they want a whole seperate name? Well if we meet a Daniel we'll have more of an idea, but as it is we're just tripping up on the (mis)spellings and then ignoring them.
And finally there's the race thing. In a fantasy world setting, when everything starts off from theoretical tabula rasa, why does it end up with dark skinned foreigners again? And when describing someone as pale, do they mean white skinned or just unhealthy looking for a tan people? And how are we supposed to know? Well they stop and give us a potted history of a foreign country to go with a physical description every time we meet someone. And, basically, *facepalm* to that. I don't know where the plot is going, quite possibly to said foreign countries eventually, but it's just kind of annoying doing it that way. And again, they've all got names that are new and different, so we attempt to use the same principles of difference and equivalence to establish the new meanings. So we can either figure which historical society they sound like, and import all those connotations, or we can ignore history entirely and start fresh. And if we had dark skinned fur wearing polar barbarians in dragon boats, maybe that would work... though really we're going to call them melanistic fantasy vikings anyway. But we don't, we get dark skinned people who lock up all their women, and... why? We're dealing with words on a page here, not illustrations, so the words are all we really need to go on. Why not just ignore skin as a signifier here and go with pinning it all on a name? Ignoring the icky and potentially racist, or at least the most obvious level thereof. But no, in this whole new world, we get sketchy descriptions that translate to kinda like existing human races. Blah.
If you're going to mess up the whole sign system, please to be doing so in ways that add value, not just copy inequality-isms. Otherwise it looks like book full of typo.