Preternatural Acts

Writing fantasy fiction is walking a tightrope. On the one hand, if you use too many fantasy clichés - words like "eldritch", "etherial"; characters like pointy-eared elves and gruff, grumpy dwarfs - you're in danger of annoying readers whose tastes run to other genres, not to mention boring readers who read only fantasy, and, which is more, failing to stand out from the fanfic crowd.

On the other hand, slavishly avoid all the clichés, and you will either alienate most of your target audience, or find yourself searching the thesaurus for alternatives and grossly inflating your text with descriptions.

Cliché is good, in moderation. Think of the trouble you'd have describing your main character when he is casting a spell if you can't use the word "glow". Whether "eldritch", "other-worldly" (which is the literal meaning of eldritch, btw), mysterious, supernatural, eerie, wierd, queer (can't really use that one any more), casting magic is almost always associated with a glow of some sort. If you want to avoid this cliché, you have to come up with  a new and refreshing way of indicating that someone is doing magic. It's been tried, with varying degrees of success. 

The problem is that unless your story pivots on this different kind of magic, you'll spend and awful lot of time describing how it works, and not advancing the plot.

The Cliché is Often Right

Eldritch, as I mention above, means "from elsewhere". Usually this is used to mean "beyond the grave". It's wrong to use it if all you mean is "creepy" or "scary". It's right and proper to use it if you mean "other-worldly" or "from beyond the grave" AND creepy and scary. 

Unnatural is often a much more unsettling word than "supernatural". Supernatural is now so over used that it is almost impossible to say it with a straight face. Indeed, many readers take it to be the author saying: "use your imagination, I can't be bothered to". Hiding it behind near-similes like "preternatural" or "eldritch" just looks cheap, or plain wrong. Theres a significant difference of denotation between super- and preter- natural. Supernatural denotes "above or beyond the natural". Preternatural denotes "more than is usually natural". There need be no magic behind it at all, although there can. If Herman the Hero is the greatest swordsman in the known world, then his skill is preternatural. If his arch enemy, Dave the Dark Lord gets his amazing skill with a Poleaxe from the Amulet of Totally Amazing Skill with a Poleaxe, then his skill is supernatural.

Use the cliché words with precision, and they cease to be jarring and irritating. Don't be afraid to use them repeatedly if they mean exactly what you want them to mean.

Homophonemes

Words that are wrote differently but said the same. There aren't all that many of them, and most of them are short. One syllabic.

They don't confuse us when we say them aloud, so why do we write them different?

There is an honest answer, and a dishonest one.

The honest answer is short, incomplete, and not very satisfying, although it is, as forestated, honest:

convention

Convention means that we have all agreed, and that latecomers agree that they also agree, as they arrive, that we will all do it the same way, and having thus agreed, he will cause consternation who chooses not to agree with, and follow, said convention.

(A little aside on consternation. Normally one person can't be consternated, or consterned - neither participle really exists, but consternation is a description for groups only - rather like convention and for similar reasons. I like to coopt consternation for the feeling of confusion that arises from an idea being expressed in a form of words that is sufficiently exotic, eccentric our outlandish (all of which mean the same thing, and are therefore heterophonic homologs) that it causes a moment's hesitation whose wellspring is the confounding of "did I hear that right", "did s'he really say that", "is that what s'he meant", "is s'he trying to confuse me" "?" (The question mark is for all four. It looks wierd in the middle of a sentence.)

Convention is handy because it means that we don't have to provide a justification for something that we just feel suits us. The last phrase is my test for a convention.

The dishonest answer is that we spell them differentwise to avoid confusion. Now I may have already mentioned that we aren't confused when we're speaking aloud. The dishonest answerer goes on to say that yes, well, but, when you speak aloud there are all sorts of additional clues as to the meaning of words, such as body language, intonation, facial expression.

Do you think you need these additional clues in order to differentiate "there" from "their" or "one" from "won" ?

"Their one won there."
"There won one their."

Wierdly, the first is a "correct" sentence, the second is nonsense, but if you say them aloud they mean the same thing.

In French, noone ever confuses a bucket, a seal (wax) , an idiot and a jump, even though seau, sceau, sot and saut are all nouns! (And pronounced exactly the same, regardless of what some linguists may claim.)

The truth* is that it is a convention, and while unnecessary, it is sometimes handy - like describing in print the difference in meaning between "their" and "there", the reader knows which one you are referring to.


*For a given value of quince jelly

Grammar (we love you)

Stephen Fry's blog of last week (here) raised some points that needed to be raised, and raised them in his necessarily extensible, and indeed extended verbiage.

Long, and rightly so, in his criticism of the pedants - that I like to call Grammar Nazis, who believe that there is such a thing as "correct English".

I believe there is such a thing as comprehensible English. I encounter it all the time. Truly incomprehensible English is a very rare thing indeed, and usually requires a special skill, not to interpret it, but to create it.

Ibelieve there is such a thing as correct grammar, too. It is any grammar that correctly describes a given figure of speech.

Following the rules of grammar is rather like following the contours on an ordnance survey map, instead of following the roads. The contours are there to describe the landscape, not to keep it from floating away. Shall I nail it down? I shall though. Following the rules of grammar is not correct, nor is it safe, helpful, or likely to result in clarity, or even comprehensibility. The rules of grammar are there to help people to talk about language, possibly to help them understand their own language, and certainly to help people to make sense of a foreign language.

Grammarians are there to invent the language that describes language. Grammar is there to describe language.

I do not, and neither do, nor should, you, follow the rules of grammar. We lead them.

The Proof of the Blogging

Bloggers fall into three categories.

• Those who don't proofread their entries before posting because it's a blog
• Those who don't proofread their entries before posting because they've never heard of proofreading
• Those who don't proofread their entries until after posting

The proof of the blog is in the posting; something about the act of committing something changes the state of mind of the author, and he can suddenly spot errors much more easily. Outside the blogosphere this generally manifests itself as the discovery of glaring errors in your document when you see it, upside down, printed out on your boss's/customer's desk, or indeed when your customer has approved it for publication.

At least in a blog we can go back and make corrections to something already published at almost no cost at all.

I therefore advocate proofing of blog entries, but only after publication.

A Little Writing

Well folks, NaNoWriMo is almost upon us again. I began something last year, and then slipped a disk and spent three months on my back. This year, I'm going to go for it once again. I hope I don't get another serious injury. Writing isn't usually all that dangerous, no matter how much mightier than the sword the keyboard may be.

A9n

I didn't know how happy I was, until I discovered that I had been living without knowing of the existence of "i18n" and "L1on".

These abominations are what I think of as tertiary jargon. Primary jargon arises organically, by accident, often from slang, corruptions, abreviations and audibility adjustments (a lot of printing jargon uses words that are easily distinguished against a lot of background noise). Primary jargon has a certain nobility; its very existence justifies its existence. Secondary jargon is a conscious invention in the presence of a need for a word - usually to differentiate between concepts or items where no differentiation is needed in other domains or contexts. Sometimes it is created in response to an innovation. Tertiary jargon is invented by people who think that jargon is cool, and is used by people who want to show that they are with it, fab hip and trendy, and generally on the bus. Primary and secondary jargons can both enrich language, provide extra meaning, and give practical benefits - even if in some cases the benefit is restricted to those using the jargon, such as nautical and theatrical jargons. Tertiary jargon is a form of weaseling; it leaves us with less meaning and less understanding.

True, it takes less time to type, and to say, "i18n" than to type or say "internationalization" (although if you type at up to 100wpm who cares?).

Well I've just been handed an internationalization project and you can be sure that on all communications and documents I shall be writing it in full. I can't think of a reason why I would ever want to write it in a text message; I think if I had a word like that to say to someone that I'd call them and say it aloud.

en > en

I wonder sometimes about the sanity of it - but of course I understand the mind-set that says that if we internationalize our software that we should support everything classified as a language. Essentially it becomes a political, or at the very least politic choice, though, to have an enUS version and enUK, enOZ, enSA, enMY, etc, etc... Taking this to its equitable conclusion results in a profusion of languages where every pidgin, dialect and creole is included. There are at least 10 versions of French that are spoken worldwide - even frCA is at least as different from frFR as enUS is from enUK.

Going to these lengths is perhaps laudable, and probably, in the end, worthwhile, if you are the world's largest software company. And I'm all for diversity of language. The more variation there is the more modes of expression there are. At home I often switch between en (Int) and fr (FR) depending on the subject of the conversation - a facility that I value enormously.

I've been looking at Facebook's recent initiative to produce an English (UK) version. Now Facebook may use American spellings, but the language it uses is largely international English - whether they mean to or not. And what is International English?

It is a subset of English that has a reduced vocabulary. In software, if your interface designer is disciplined, you can end up with an en(Int) version unintentionally, just because he tried to keep it simple.

Most of the "translations" from enUS to enUK in Facebook are not translations at all. A few good writers have improved the style and clarity of some of the onscreen text, and the result is more comprehensible to all English speakers, native or not, worldwide. (There are also a few pointless "corrections" by the grammar Nazis, and some varied spellings. Surprisingly little fighting over -ise -ize.)

It seems to me that a good designer should consider the political implications of his choice of language. I suspect however that in many cases the designer isn't considering it at all. He is either making the assumption that he will cause offense if he only uses Perugian Italian, Parisian French or NY Engligh - in which case he should damn well say so, or he is making the assumption that a Taiwanese won't be able to use software with an interface in ch(PRC) - which is quite untrue.

When you set the editing language in MSWord, you're doing something else altogether; MSWord tries to help you to write without error in all the languages + variations that you speak. It is hence a requirement that every language with a written tradition be represented in the editing and correction tools, but by no means is this necessary for the interface itself. Indeed, it would make me completely crazy if the tool bar and keyboard changed language everytime I change the editing language.

Selection of languages for the interface should be more than just pragmatic. It should meet user expectations. An interface that can be presented in simplified English, simplified Chinese, French, Italian, Russian, modern Spanish and Japanese (westernized or standard) will meet the expectations of, and be usable by, most of the human race - and most of them will be happier that you have piled your resources into making the software efficient and easy to use, than you could possibly have made them by giving them an interface in their particular regional variation of their particular language.

Indeed, the grammar Nazis can't possibly object if you tell them explicitly that you have used an "internationalized" version of their language. And the minorities that seek to gain political capital from complaints that their language has been marginalized? If you can't ignore them, as they deserve, then get the buggers to pay for a localized version; you answer should always be "our product can be translated into any language". Give them access to the language files. After all, you'll offend far more easily by making errors in arLE (okay, that one's a bit more obscure: Lebanese Arabic), than you would by doing just one version of Arabic (there is an ar(Int)), and letting users customize it to a local version if they need to.

Ok. This wasn't mean to be a lengthy rant. The message is pretty simple. Keep it translatable. Limit your standard package to languages spoken by four fifths of the world. It's not as if your interface is a novel by Thomas Hardy. If you have more than about 150 different words in your interface, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.