A Problem of Language

Hello, All,

I am back from my trip. If you are interested in knowing more about the trip, you can check out some selfies taken by the water bottle I purloined from my son’s waterbottle collection here, here, and here.

Purloined Water Bottle (PWB) visits Grphyn Park (or Chatsworth, your choice)

Today, I thought I would share with you some thoughts I am drawing up to accompany my Regency fantasy romance on the subject of language use.

A Note On Language

Writing about the Regency period is a funny thing.

If you write about ancient Rome or Timbuktu (why isn’t it better known that Timbuktu was the great library city?) or the doings of another galaxy, no one chides you about using words that did not exist in that time and place, assuming you don’t use the latest slang. The moment you want to write about the Elizabethan, Regency, or Victorian times, however, suddenly, there is an expectation that it needs to be done in the language of the day, to such a degree that people strive never to use words that had not yet been coined—even if those words would sound correct to the average modern reader.

Can you imagine if we wrote about ancient Rome or China using only words that had already been invented in those days? Or about the aliens of Alpha Century using only their language?

The argument in favor of this careful scholarship is that one wants to paint, with words, a picture of the times, and this is a legitimate desire. This is exactly what readers wish the story to accomplish—to draw them into another time. One does not want to sound too much like the modern world and jar the reader out of the story.

This is a very important point.

But neither does one want to lose readers with too strict an adherence to the speech of the times. (This began to happen to a Western TV show, I believe it may have been Deadwood. They originally had true-to-the- time swearing, but this caused viewers to think it was a religious show, so they toned it down and moved to modern swearwords.)

Furthermoor, many authors cannot convincingly write like Jane Austen, even if they wish to. Likewise, bad Elizabethan dialogue can be worse than modern speech in the mouths of historical characters. On top of this comes the issue of less-than-stellar scholarship. This leads to situations such as overzealous readers rejecting anything that isn’t worded precisely the way Jane Austen might have worded it—even if it is correct for the times. ( I have seen supposed scholars of the Georgian and Regency periods reject as inaccurate phrases written by Sir Walter Scott or Georgiana Cavendish, the Duchess of Devonshire, both of whom lived and wrote during the same period.)

This phenomena is often called the Problem of Tiffany, because Tiffany was an ancient diminutive for the old fashion girl’s name Theophania but to the readers’ ear it sounds modern.

Thus, I have decided to try to walk the middle road. I endeavor to keep the mood and feel of an earlier age, but I am not going to worry needlessly about the exact coinage date of older words or avoid using a slightly more modern word if no earlier word will do.

So, if a modern word has a clearly understandable counterpart, I will endeavor to use the chronologically accurate counterpart. For instance, Archaeologist was not in common use until a couple of decades after my period. I could claim that the Wise used it earlier, or I can use the perfectly serviceable word Antiquarian, a word that is comprehensible to modern readers.

In other cases, however, things are not so simple: For instance: Maverick—not coined until many decades after my period and, technically, applicable to cattle rather than horses, but if I used the words that might have used for the same thing at the time, such as bachelor (a lone male horse without a herd) or mustang (a stray wild horse), the intended colloquial connotation of a ungovernable lone horse with the same positive connotation as lone wolf would be lost on the modern reader. So, Maverick it is.

This process is made easier in my books by the existence of the World of the Wise. The sorcerers and their families, having been separated from the Unwary mundane people, use some words and terms differently than we do, and they occasionally obscure the date of origin of a person or thing. (For instance, waltzing was not popular among us Unwary until the second decade of the 19^th century, but the Wise had already imported it from Vienna a decade earlier.)

I could say Samuel A. Maverick was not born in 1803, as the Unwary believe, but in 1703, and had been doing what he did among the Wise for well over a century before the Unwary caught on, but really, I think it is better, in some cases, to just use the word understood by modern audiences and leave it at that.

In addition to the consideration of the timeliness of words comes the issue of dialect and accents. In this matter, I have decided to let readability be my guide.

Writing Zs for THs to indicate a French accent is hard on the eye, so I must trust the reader to hear the accent in their head after I describe it.

But Scots is an established modern dialect (some say a language of its own) with conventions for writing that are well known to a substantial portion of readers. The average reader probably knows that I dinnea ken means I don’t know or can find out without much difficulty, but there are other Scottish spellings and substitutions that are more difficult to visually interpret. When writing the dialogue of the Scottish characters, I have chosen to use alternate terms where they would be clear to the average reader’s eye and to forgo any that would make the phrase hard to decipher. A little can go a long way toward helping the reader “hear” the Scottish accent.

(For instance, I have decided not to drop the D on the word and or change the U sound in the word, but—even though it would arguably be more accurate to write an’ or boot—because both of these changes make the sentence harder to read. )

In conclusion, what a reader looks for in a historical romance can fall across a rather large range: from absolute Jane Austen-like accuracy to any old thing as long as it tells a good story. What pleases one reader might displease the next. No author can please everyone in this matter, but we can strive to weave a romantic picture of the times in plain language, without too many jarring modern terms or phrases.

To this end, I have endeavored to do exactly that. If I fall too short or go too far in one direction or the other, my humble apologies.