Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America

Posts Tagged ‘world building’

How semantics can help you! Part 3

Friday, November 20th, 2009

by Juliette Wade

I thought I’d discuss that ubiquitous genre activity – the one that always drives my spell-checker insane – making up words. Thereafter, I’ll give a little thought to the idea of redefining existing words.

I’m guessing that after my last post you can imagine how making up words contributes to an effect of foreignness. Whenever you replace an English word with a foreign one, you lose every connotation and context associated with that English word. The feeling provided by the newly created word will depend on the evocativeness of its pronunciation. This may come from an association with Earth languages that it resembles (which will give the new word some of the contextual association with the language in question), or from general principles of onomatopoeia (such as the association of voiced sounds/o/u with large or loud things, and voiceless sounds/a/i with small or quiet things). Any further associations will have to be deliberately provided by the writer.

I’ve often heard it said that “if it’s a rabbit, call it a rabbit.” I tend to agree with this. After all, why put your reader to the trouble of divesting a word of all its associations if the people in your story use a word with precisely the same associations?

Another created word context is that of words coined from combinations of other words (or parts thereof). This most often occurs in science fiction, when you’ll find people using comlinks and any number of other more exotic things. These words retain and combine associations, provided that the parts of the word are recognized and can be successfully extrapolated.

If you’re using a created word, think through what associations you want it to have. It’s not hard to show a reader through demonstration what the denotation of the word is. By all means, do so – but don’t stop there. For your word to take on life and feel real in the world of the story, it will help if it comes with some of the other types of associations that our words commonly do. I’m thinking of emotional connotations. Here’s an example.

Let’s say you have a word, Korinye, which means a particular type of police officer. In order to define it for the reader, you put one of these on a street corner (or chasing the protagonist, etc.) , point him or her out and say “watch out for the Korinye.” But that alone doesn’t tell you how the Korinye group is regarded in society, whether for example they’re a secret police for a fascist government or whether they’re just a friendly policeman on the beat (who nevertheless won’t be on your side if you steal from the shops). As you go through the story, think about whose point of view you’re in, and how that person regards Korinye in different contexts. Their view of Korinye can even change over the story. Or you can have alternate points of view to show that some people consider the Korinye to be upholders of the law, while others consider them to be ruthless brigands who pillage in the name of the law. Don’t just let your word sit; let it expand just a little each time you use it.

In general I’d suggest that you keep the most subtlety, the most extensive building and explanation only for words that are key to your main conflict. This may be a bias of mine, but why make people put a lot of effort into a word that will give them little reward? Of course, this does assume that you want the reader to feel like an “insider” with the word(s) in question. If you have a human going to an alien planet and feeling lost because all the words are different, then keeping to the human viewpoint will probably mean not explaining any of the alien words.

You can also turn this around. What if you’re in the alien viewpoint? It may surprise you, but my first suggestion for an alien viewpoint is this: Minimize the number of created words.

Part of putting your reader in an alien’s head means making him or her feel comfortable there. So have the alien give not very much thought to things he/she doesn’t feel are important. Names of animals, for example, can be tossed in with just a couple words of context, and even used as metaphors for other things, like “he was mad as a cornered ughara.” Give much more attention to those concepts that will allow readers to understand the alien’s motives. These concepts don’t even need to have made-up names.

Yes, I am suggesting that you can redefine English words rather than putting in created ones every time. Sure, your alien may have an idiosyncratic sense of honor, but you don’t have to call it “zinni” or anything else. Instead, use strategically designed context and explanations to designate the associations that you want, and pluck away the ones you don’t. In my forthcoming Analog story, Cold Words, the aliens have a very distinct set of social judgments associated with the words Warm and Cold (but not Hot). Since these are integral to the plot, I spend some time building them up contextually. The other word I change in that story is “friend.” This one works slightly differently because it is a concept that the aliens do not have. I have to treat it carefully because as you might imagine, this does not mean they don’t have close relationships. In order to change it, I have my character give some conscious thought to what it means and how it fits into the relationships he is familiar with.

I love this stuff – in particular the relation between words and social meaning, which will lead us into our next topics, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. This will be the final post on semantics unless any of my readers have specific questions. If you do, please feel free to comment and ask.

–

How morphology can help you! is reprinted by permission of the author.

Juliette Wade is an author of science fiction and fantasy who loves language and its cultural consequences. Her fiction appears in Analog and other short fiction magazines. She has degrees in Linguistics, Anthropology and Japanese.

Tags: Juliette Wade, semantics, world building
Posted in SFWA Blog, Writing Technique | 1 Comment »

How semantics can help you! Part 2

Saturday, November 14th, 2009

by Juliette Wade

Neural networks are really amazing things. In my last post I talked about how a word brings up all of its meanings simultaneously; today I’m going to talk about how that’s not all it brings up.

I’m talking about connotations and allusion.

Along with all of its meanings, the mention of a word can bring up all the contexts in which we’ve encountered it. With exceedingly common words, there may not be a particular context that stands out, and the word may have a more generic feeling. With less common words, we may really notice how they evoke the context in which they were created (Quidditch, anyone?) or in which they were used. Regardless, these contexts always tag along, and they influence the way we hear a word.

Has anyone ever tried to use the word “ejaculate” as a dialog tag? No? It used to be common enough, but I’m guessing you can see why we don’t use it so much that way any more. (Dialog tags are out of fashion anyway because they can be distracting.)

This reminds me of a discussion I had on the Analog forum about euphemisms. They tend to get “used up” and replaced by others quite quickly. Why? Because of the contexts in which they are used. If those contexts are considered dirty or low, then the quality of the context will be evoked in the speaker or writer’s mind with every occurrence of the word, and eventually the word will be sullied by its association with that context.

In my classes at the school of Education at UC Berkeley, occasionally the word “intertextuality” came up. It essentially means that a word will evoke in the reader’s mind all the texts in which they have seen it. “Monster” can bring up Frankenstein, or Monsters Inc. or any number of other things. This is one of the reasons that my friend Paul Carlson was able to put together his list of words that evoke particular genres (find it here).

When you’re writing, it might be daunting to remember that there are a million layers floating behind everything you say, particularly when you choose a word that doesn’t occur so frequently as to become semi-generic. Almost any word can become more than it is, much like the few critical words used in ancient Japanese poetry (I’m thinking primarily of tanka, not haiku).

Daunting, sure – but what an opportunity! This stuff can allows you to imbue a scene with a sense of foreboding or excitement. The other thing it can do is allow you to illuminate your point of view character. All of the judgments of value inherent in a particular word will reflect on the user of that word. We see this all the time in oral language when we judge people based on their use of cuss words or insulting words for others. In a piece of narrative writing, all those judgments will be associated with the point of view character. It’s one of the ways that point of view can extend into your writing far beyond the simple first and third person pronouns.

That’s it for today, but stay tuned for the next installment.

Juliette Wade is an author of science fiction and fantasy who loves language and its cultural consequences. Her fiction appears in Analog and other short fiction magazines. She has degrees in Linguistics, Anthropology and Japanese.

Tags: Juliette Wade, semantics, world building
Posted in SFWA Blog, Writing Technique | No Comments »

How semantics can help you! Part 1

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009

by Juliette Wade

Semantics is the study of meaning. I have a confession to make: I’ve always found the idea of semantics more exciting than the study itself. This is because academic classes on the subject involve a great deal of hard logic.

I’m not going to do that stuff here and I’m going to divide this one up. Today’s entry will concern a topic that I’m sure every writer can relate to:

Word Meaning: Choosing the Right Word

Choosing the right word is critical to getting our meaning across as writers. Here are a few initial things to think about:

1. Does this word have the meaning I’m looking for?
2. Does it supply that meaning unambiguously?
3. Does it have the proper positive, negative, mysterious, or other desired connotations?
4. Does it reflect on the attitude or identity of the point of view character?

I’m going to spend a little time on ambiguity, because linguistically speaking, even the denotation (meaning) of a word is never simple and singular.

Consider the word “dog.” When you hear it, what do you imagine? I get an instant image of something beagle-sized and brown, with floppy ears and a wet nose and a wagging tail. This is my meaning-prototype for the word “dog,” even though I know the word includes great Danes and shar peis and toy poodles and Snoopy.

A word’s meaning is like a pointillist painting – the prototype lies at the center of a scattering of points which are each possible meanings for the word. As long as the object has enough of the right features (but not necessarily always the same ones), it will be rapidly construed as a member of the set.

This brings me to the problem of ambiguity.

Very often when I critique – either editing myself or reading for others – I’ll come across words that don’t work well because of ambiguity. This is not because the writer has necessarily chosen the wrong word, but because the word they’ve picked has more than one possible meaning.

Meanings and words don’t have a precisely one-to-one relationship, much in the way that “dog” doesn’t always describe the same dog. When we hear a word, our brain brings up every known meaning for that word simultaneously. These generally occur in a hierarchical order of likelihood, but they are all present. Therefore, if the context provided does not narrow the choice sufficiently, the ambiguity can become distracting. Homonyms are a natural context for this, but so are words that appear in idiomatic expressions (they can be ambiguous between idiomatic and non-idiomatic meanings).

The example below shows a different type – a word whose part of speech is ambiguous:

“Joseph burst into the suspect’s apartment. Crashing and the tinkle of broken glass came from the back room.”

In this sequence, the word “crashing” is ambiguous between the following meanings:

crashing: NOUN a loud sound made when something breaks
crashing: VERB breaking something

Because we’ve got a verb context set up with Joseph’s sudden entry, it’s easy to misconstrue “crashing” and end up confused when it gets set up as a parallel with “the tinkle of broken glass.” So maybe we should consider replacing “crashing” or setting up a noun context by using an adjective like “horrible” to make it “horrible crashing.”

Stay tuned for my next semantics entries
1. connotations/ point of view
2. creating words and
3. altering the meaning of words.

–

How semantics can help you! Part 1 is reprinted by permission of the author.

Juliette Wade is an author of science fiction and fantasy who loves language and its cultural consequences. Her fiction appears in Analog and other short fiction magazines. She has degrees in Linguistics, Anthropology and Japanese.

Tags: Juliette Wade, world building
Posted in SFWA Blog, Writing Technique | No Comments »

How syntax can help you!

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

by Juliette Wade

This one’s funny, because it sounds like grammar, or maybe computer programming…

Syntax is the study of how sentences are put together. Part of this is word order. This is the one everyone fears because it often involves diagramming sentences. Actually, one of my most intense and wonderful classes was Syntax 1 at UC Santa Cruz. We put together a set of rules for how to create the sentences of English, based entirely on example sentences given to us by our teacher, Professor Sandy Chung (who totally rocks, by the way). Each time we thought we had it, she’d throw us another sentence that didn’t fit, and the rule set evolved.

So how is this useful for science fiction and fantasy writers?

First, consider Yoda. He doesn’t use typical English syntax. We know this. Yet we can still understand him. I always figured he was a native speaker of some other language and that affected how he could speak the common tongue – but my husband says he never thought of that, and he thought Yoda was just quirky.

Be that as it may, one of the things you can do by altering syntax is give a feeling of dialect, or of a foreign accent. The key here is to keep it all consistent. If it’s inconsistent it will feel quirky, and could be construed as an error.

So how do you keep it consistent? Track your subject/verb/object order, and track your phrase types.

In English we use SVO (subject-verb-object) word order: I hit him: I=S, hit=V, him=O.
In Japanese they use SOV (subject-object-verb) word order. boku ga kare o utta : boku=I (for boys)=S, kare=he=O, utta=hit=V

I don’t personally know any VSO languages (write in a comment if you do!) but I do know that Earth languages don’t actually have all the possible orderings of these elements. For alien languages, who knows? They might not even conceptualize subject and object and verb the way we do – in which case it might be tough to write out their language in the story!

Some languages have freer word order than English. Take for example Latin or Japanese. This is a place where phrase syntax (in the Japanese case) or morphology (in the Latin case) can allow you greater freedom.

In Japanese, the subject and object are marked by particles, special words that come directly after the nouns they apply to and tell you their role in the sentence. With your words marked like that, you can scramble the phrases up a bit and still get meaning out of it.

In Latin, morphology provides case suffixes. Case suffixes essentially play the same role as the Japanese particles, and by labeling the word’s role directly, allow more freedom for altering word order.

Play around with it. Yoda shows us that we can understand a lot of different ways of putting a sentence together, provided that we know enough to track each noun’s role in the action at hand. You might also want to run it by your friends to make sure it’s comprehensible!

At this point you may notice that I’ve been talking about altering English syntax within a story to imply the structure of another language. This is true. The same principles apply if you want to write sentences in a created language – but I’m guessing this is going to happen less often in the story than the use of English for implication. I have written a song in one of my created languages, but I don’t imagine it will do more than sit in an appendix, since putting the entire thing in the story as Tolkien did isn’t quite my style.

Now, go forth and have fun with syntax!

–

How syntax can help you! is reprinted by permission of the author.

Juliette Wade is an author of science fiction and fantasy who loves language and its cultural consequences. Her fiction appears in Analog and other short fiction magazines. She has degrees in Linguistics, Anthropology and Japanese.

Tags: Juliette Wade, syntax, world building
Posted in SFWA Blog, Writing Technique | 8 Comments »

How morphology can help you!

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

by Juliette Wade

Morphology is a fantasy and science fiction writer’s best friend.

Seriously. Why? Because everyone uses it, and I mean everyone, whether they know it or not. Every story that makes up a name for a group of people and then pluralizes it is using morphology. Every story that takes a nice-sounding made-up word and then adds on a suffix to make the name of a country or city is using it too.

Morphology is prefixes and suffixes (and infixes). It is the study of the tiny pieces of meaning that make up words. Each of these pieces is called a morpheme. Some morphemes are free, which means they can occur by themselves and still have meaning. Examples:

cat
do
blend

Yes, these are words. But not all words contain only a single morpheme. Most contain one or more bound morphemes, which are meaning units that can’t occur all on their own. Examples:

-s
re-
-er
-ness
anti-
-ville
-ia

So if we use these in combination we get words with one or morpheme, as follows:

cat+s=cats (2 morphemes)
good+ness=goodness (2 morphemes)
paint+er+s=painters (3 morphemes)
etc.

If you have a fantasy or science fiction language, I urge you to think through the morphemes you use. There are a ton of people out there who make plurals by adding -i, or who make names of countries by adding -ia. But you shouldn’t necessarily fall into the default pattern.

Think first about the feel you want your language to have. A choice like -i for plural is different from -s, which gives the word a slight foreign feel (because of its Latin roots), but it’s still very under the radar for readers. This can be a good thing. On the other hand, your language could potentially use any sound or combination of sounds in its repertoire to pluralize (or it might not pluralize at all!). Using an unusual pluralizing suffix might stand out at first, but if it’s supported by the surrounding text so that its meaning is unequivocal, it can make your language seem far more interesting. The same goes for -ia, which is if anything more standard than the pluralizing -i.

Remember also that your morphemes don’t have to have the same meanings as English words. In my work I don’t use plural morphemes, and I don’t use a morpheme that means “country,” but I do have one that means “place” and another that means “person.” Examples:

The capital city is named after a man named Pelisma, and the suffix -ra means “place.”
Pelisma + ra=Pelismara, the place of Pelisma.

The title of a city ruler is Alixi, which actually breaks down like this:
Alhi=one
-iks=most
-i=person
Alhi+iks+i=Alhiiksi, pronounced Alixi, or the firstmost person.

Morphology is a lot of fun, and when you create a system that makes sense, it shows in the story.

–

How morphology can help you! is reprinted by permission of the author.

Juliette Wade is an author of science fiction and fantasy who loves language and its cultural consequences. Her fiction appears in Analog and other short fiction magazines. She has degrees in Linguistics, Anthropology and Japanese.

Tags: Juliette Wade, linguistics, world building
Posted in SFWA Blog, Writing Technique | 1 Comment »

Research Tool: Random name generators and lists

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

Sometimes coming up with the right character name can be the hardest part.  Whether working in secondary worlds or the real world, we have some research tools to make picking that perfect name a little easier.

Behind the Name.com is searchable by nationality, first letter, gender, or meaning.  Make sure you check out their Surname area as well.

Surnames from Old English – Useful for historical fiction, but also because it translates the names, offering structure ideas for names in secondary worlds.

List of most common surnames – Exactly what it sounds like. This is handy if you want to strongly identify someone as being from a particular place or if you want to avoid the obvious choices.

Random Name Generator – The random name generator will create a list of male or female names from the U.S. Census. You can set the obscurity level you’d like the list to be.

Everchanging Book of Names – This shareware program creates names based on naming patterns, for instance if you wanted a name that sounds Icelandic, but isn’t a real name.  You can also create your own “chapters” and define the parameters for alien names.

Your Spam Box – Why not do something useful with all that spam?  Random combinations ranging from Raymondo Zuniga to Rosemary Hart are just waiting for you.

Tags: research, world building
Posted in Writing Technique | Comments Off

How articulatory phonetics can help you!

Saturday, August 22nd, 2009

Articulatory phonetics deals with how the human vocal tract creates sounds.

Knowing the principles of how the vocal tract works can help science fiction and fantasy writers to create languages that follow naturalistic patterns of pronunciation, thus making created languages that seem more natural.

One of the key assumptions in the following discussion is that we’re working with a species which, like humans, can perceive vibrations in the air (whether through ears and hearing or by other means like antennae). While this does restrict us somewhat, it still allows for a lot of possibilities.

Let me begin with a caveat before we begin our tour of the vocal tract. If you’ve never studied linguistics, this may appear complex – but it’s not as bad as it seems. Just because there are a lot of variables you can change about a language doesn’t mean you should go about trying to change them all. (more…)

Tags: Juliette Wade, linguistics, world building
Posted in SFWA Blog, Writing Technique | 2 Comments »

How linguistics can help you!

Saturday, August 22nd, 2009

This sequence of “How ____ can help you!” pieces concerns various areas of linguistics. These aren’t intended to be technical, or even introductory discussions of linguistics itself. They are short, practical pieces which relate linguistics topics to the use of created languages in science fiction and fantasy. Certainly they will be useful for people who are digging into creating an entire language that penetrates an science fiction or fantasy world. I hope they can also be helpful for those who are using minimal-penetration languages in science fiction and fantasy languages that consist mostly of names for people and places.

Here are some of the upcoming topics:

• Articulatory phonetics, a.k.a. how to match sounds to an alien physiology
• Morphology, a.k.a. how words are broken into smaller pieces of meaning
• Syntax, a.k.a. how sentences are put together
• Semantics, a.k.a. how meanings are structured
• Pragmatics, a.k.a. how language implies more than it “means”; how people define insincerity vs. politeness
• Sociolinguistics, a.k.a. how people use language for social purposes including drawing distinctions between social groups

–

How linguistics can help you! is reprinted by permission of the author.

Juliette Wade is an author of science fiction and fantasy who loves language and its cultural consequences.  Her fiction appears in Analog and other short fiction magazines.  She  has degrees in Linguistics, Anthropology and Japanese.

Tags: Juliette Wade, linguistics, world building
Posted in SFWA Blog, Writing Technique | Comments Off

Resource: Historical Food Timeline

Friday, August 14th, 2009

When writing historical fiction or fantasy, the question of food either seems daunting or is completely overlooked.  With the Historical Food Timeline, you can get an approximate idea of when a given food was introduced.  Though it does slant to Western Europe and America, it is still a good touchstone for getting a feel for if it is all right to give your character a yogurt.

At the same site, they have the Historic Food Prices and a survey of meal times. Don’t make the mistake in your fantasy of assuming that your local dining habits are universal.

Tags: resource, world building
Posted in Information Center, SFWA Blog, The Craft of Writing, Writing Technique | 3 Comments »

Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

By Patricia C. Wrede

The following list of questions is meant to aid authors of fantasy fiction who are seeking to create believable imaginary settings for their stories. While many of these questions may be helpful or crucial to certain stories, they will not all apply to every story. It is not necessary for an author to answer all, or even any, of the questions in order to start writing, (or to finish writing, either). The idea is simply to provoke people into thinking about the ways their settings and backgrounds hang together … or don’t. If it’s useful, use it. If not, don’t.

Some questions apply to more than one topic, and have been duplicated under more than one heading. This should not be considered as an exhaustive and final list, but as a beginning point from which each individual writer can compile a personal list.

(more…)

Tags: Patricia C. Wrede, world building
Posted in The Craft of Writing, Writing Technique | 9 Comments »

• « Older Entries