telophase | (no subject)

Forgot to mention a pet peeve of mine from the book I reviewed earlier today: taking a word from the English language, using it in your fantasy world in basically the same fashion that it's used in English, and then misspelling it so that we all know that it's a fantasy world. Dude. This only works if you're doing an alternate Earth and assuming the spelling changed in slightly different ways than it did in our world. Because these words have historic and linguistic weight to them that I can't just dismiss.

The word in question happens to be "thane," spelled as "theyn" in the book, and is used to mark a sort of lord/official. Whyyyyy? Just make up a new word! Or use the real one!

In other news, discovered an interesting thing about the bathroom light switches. There are two doors into the bathroom, and they each have a light switch. I found just now that if you manage to flip one of them not quite all the way, the light turns off, but because it's not *completely* off, the other light switch can't turn the light on. Gave me quite a start until I figured out what happened. :D

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"Theyn" troubles me less than "aelven" because the former has a perfectly good justification. ;) In older English, it's spelled "thegn," and g/y is attested all over the modern language as a spelling alternation for the sound that Middle English usually spells with a yogh (ȝ).

Or maybe this is basically what you meant, and we differ on how much we care about belatedly standardized spelling? (The word's spelling was fixed long after it'd become archaic.)

If her book was full of other words taken from Old English and spelled with archaic spellings, it wouldn't be a problem. But the author wasn't playing with language that way.

*nods*

Ugh! That's a peeve of mine too. Theyn, schmeyn!

I know! If a theyn was, say, a small rodent in the book: no problem. But it's used to refer to the barons/whatever that answer to Princess Sparkle's father (she's not actually a princess until she marries that guy; her dad's a sort of duke/earl type person), which drives me nuts!

Especially when they could have spelled it thegn and been both exotic and correct!

Yeah, that ticks me off too! More people need to emulate Gene Wolfe: spend some time with a good, complete dictionary, and you can come up with actual English words that have a great fantasy feel.

It's like fangirl Japanese/German/etc, except you're doing it to your own language why would you do that.

In a charitable mood, I'll assume the author stuck it in as a placeholder and then forgot to change it before the book was published.

Oh, I know what you mean about lazy fantasy authors, but thane-theyn-thegn may not qualify as that sort of sin -- there are several different ways to transliterate "þegn" into modern English, and I've seen all of the above spellings in various places.

Oh, just count it as a sin. It's among the LEAST of the language sins in the book.

I think that would make sense if it weren't that "thane" is the most commonly-accepted spelling (double-checked in the OED right now), and there are no other words taken from Old English and transliterated into other forms in the book as far as I can tell.

ETA: Also, as Megan points out, it's not like it's the sort of book where the author is an obvious language geek, delighting in playing with it. :D

Edited 2009-06-10 13:28 (UTC)

Because these words have historic and linguistic weight to them that I can't just dismiss.

This.

I have a hard enough time accepting regular English in a fantasy world.