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Alternate History General Discussion

Aznavour said:
This genre could benefit as much from an influx of linguists as it would with people who knew economics. (Not actual economists though, those guys have weird ideas)
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There's actually a parallel debate at the other place about how a relatively novel focus on economics has killed a lot of ideas for TLs in the cradle.

I personally, am all for it, mostly because I am tired of AH that treats the whole world like a Paradox game map.
Aznavour said:
Semi-related thought, if an AH has, say, a PoD in the 1600s but advances all the way to the 1900s, should the writer have his characters travel by “Aeromobiles”, “Landships” and”autogiros” or just call them cars, trucks and helicopters and get on with it
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I think it really comes down to what the end goal is- is it to write an engaging story set in an alternate history? If so you should err on the side of caution and use alternate terms only where they firmly give a sense of place and time. A writer who did this well (but got SO CLOSE to the line of too much) was Michael Chabon in The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Writers who do it not so well are every modern first time fantasy writer. If you're not trying to do a story, go wild. Include a glossary.

I have occasionally lost myself to etymological rivet counting and that's with a scenario where the major divergences are in the 20th century.
 
JesterBL said:
I think it really comes down to what the end goal is- is it to write an engaging story set in an alternate history? If so you should err on the side of caution and use alternate terms only where they firmly give a sense of place and time. A writer who did this well (but got SO CLOSE to the line of too much) was Michael Chabon in The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Writers who do it not so well are every modern first time fantasy writer. If you're not trying to do a story, go wild. Include a glossary.

I have occasionally lost myself to etymological rivet counting and that's with a scenario where the major divergences are in the 20th century.
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This is the old readability vs plausibility dilemma (or legibility vs verisimilitude debate if I'm feeling pretentious). Plausibility-wise any divergence more than a century (and in some cases later) would mean that any work should have a lot of words changed due to divergences, but as a reader there's no fun with every third word of a novel having [square brackets] or footnote explanation following.

For works intended for a broader audience I tend to change a few words to make a point that it's a different history, but pick terms that can be understood easily from context, and then use modern words for the rest. Much like (for different reasons) if trying to represent dialogue in a different dialect, I tend to pick a couple of words to represent that it's in a dialect, and then use modern words for the rest - too hard to follow otherwise. (Though that's for dialects and the words must be carefully chosen - I don't like writing which represents characters from a whole other language saying (for example) por favor to show they're Spanish.)
 
Aznavour said:
Semi-related thought, if an AH has, say, a PoD in the 1600s but advances all the way to the 1900s, should the writer have his characters travel by “Aeromobiles”, “Landships” and”autogiros” or just call them cars, trucks and helicopters and get on with it?
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Those three pass what I call the "Grand Colonel Test", where even a neophyte reader can understand the meaning of the different word. (It comes from a military rank I've used in my worldbuilding, which is the equivalent of a one star general from a military that doesn't like the 'general' word, and is pretty obvious.)
 
Jared said:
This is the old readability vs plausibility dilemma (or legibility vs verisimilitude debate if I'm feeling pretentious). Plausibility-wise any divergence more than a century (and in some cases later) would mean that any work should have a lot of words changed due to divergences, but as a reader there's no fun with every third word of a novel having [square brackets] or footnote explanation following.

For works intended for a broader audience I tend to change a few words to make a point that it's a different history, but pick terms that can be understood easily from context, and then use modern words for the rest. Much like (for different reasons) if trying to represent dialogue in a different dialect, I tend to pick a couple of words to represent that it's in a dialect, and then use modern words for the rest - too hard to follow otherwise. (Though that's for dialects and the words must be carefully chosen - I don't like writing which represents characters from a whole other language saying (for example) por favor to show they're Spanish.)
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This.

I think one needs some different words for the reader to develop a sense of the culture and "flavour" of the alternate society.

In Land of the Heart, virtually all the dialogue (all of it so far) should strictly have been in Shona, but who would read it outside Zimbabwe then? I've used Shona for titles that are often used as is in English (like Tsar, Kaiser, gendarme) and for cultural artifacts that would need a long phrase in English where Shona has a single noun, such as mbira for a finger piano in a gourd.
 
Jared said:
This is the old readability vs plausibility dilemma (or legibility vs verisimilitude debate if I'm feeling pretentious). Plausibility-wise any divergence more than a century (and in some cases later) would mean that any work should have a lot of words changed due to divergences, but as a reader there's no fun with every third word of a novel having [square brackets] or footnote explanation following.
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Indeed. In WIAF the POD predates the invention of Pinyin by several decades, but for the sake of convenience I use it anyway, because coming up with another transliteration system and then having to put brackets all over the place would make for a tedious reading experience. In the case of stories written before the 1950s in-universe, obviously, the Chinese names are in Wade-Giles.

Jared said:
For works intended for a broader audience I tend to change a few words to make a point that it's a different history, but pick terms that can be understood easily from context, and then use modern words for the rest. Much like (for different reasons) if trying to represent dialogue in a different dialect, I tend to pick a couple of words to represent that it's in a dialect, and then use modern words for the rest - too hard to follow otherwise. (Though that's for dialects and the words must be carefully chosen - I don't like writing which represents characters from a whole other language saying (for example) por favor to show they're Spanish.)
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That's such a common mistake, I believe it's referenced as a trope: writers who don't understand how speaking in a second language works tend to have characters say complex words in English and revert to their native tongue for simple ones, when in real life it's the other way around. To use your example, no native Spanish speaker is going to say "por favor" when speaking English, because if there's five English words they know, "please" is going to be one of them.
 
Hendryk said:
That's such a common mistake, I believe it's referenced as a trope: writers who don't understand how speaking in a second language works tend to have characters say complex words in English and revert to their native tongue for simple ones, when in real life it's the other way around. To use your example, no native Spanish speaker is going to say "por favor" when speaking English, because if there's five English words they know, "please" is going to be one of them.
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Easy to see how it happens, the author probably doesn't know the complicated word in Spanish.
 
Hendryk said:
To use your example, no native Spanish speaker is going to say "por favor" when speaking English, because if there's five English words they know, "please" is going to be one of them.
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I'm not so sure that's universal though. For people who frequently code switch, a sentence in one language may have a word in the other language, not because you don't know both translations, but because you do know both, and at times you don't notice that you're switching. At least that's my personal experience.

It's also done for emphasis - a South African or Zimbabwean may say a whole sentence in English, but start it with mara/asi (but), or end it with hanti/neh? (isn't it?) as emphasis.
 
Incognitia said:
Easy to see how it happens, the author probably doesn't know the complicated word in Spanish.
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And also may assume the readers don't either, probably correctly for a lot of languages. I don't think this writing trick is used much out of a few languages for that reason? Every X-Men reader knows Germans say "ja" and all Russians say "comrade", but Storm AFAIK never drops in any local dialect terms or slang from Kenya
 
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Warthog said:
I'm not so sure that's universal though. For people who frequently code switch, a sentence in one language may have a word in the other language, not because you don't know both translations, but because you do know both, and at times you don't notice that you're switching. At least that's my personal experience.

It's also done for emphasis - a South African or Zimbabwean may say a whole sentence in English, but start it with mara/asi (but), or end it with hanti/neh? (isn't it?) as emphasis.
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Yes, this is a thing that happens a lot in both directions with people who are Welsh/English bilingual in my experience.
 
Hendryk said:
That's such a common mistake, I believe it's referenced as a trope: writers who don't understand how speaking in a second language works tend to have characters say complex words in English and revert to their native tongue for simple ones, when in real life it's the other way around. To use your example, no native Spanish speaker is going to say "por favor" when speaking English, because if there's five English words they know, "please" is going to be one of them.
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I think most English writers write primarily for the English audience and use foreign words to flavour the text, rather than pretend they're something perfect in a foreign language. Something written in a different language wouldn't have that problem.

Chris
 
Convinced that Turtledove's In The Presence of Mine Enemies would be strangely well-suited for a visual adaptation.

  • Easy and obvious POD/setup (Axis victory, 1991 USSR parallel)
  • The deliberately unromantic nature means that you could film it cheaply in some ex-East German concrete block and have it fit the theme.
  • Time constraints mean you could cut the bridge games/padding from the book and focus on the big, well-done set pieces (revelation of his secret Judaism, the "August Coup")
 
Coiler said:
Convinced that Turtledove's In The Presence of Mine Enemies would be strangely well-suited for a visual adaptation.

  • Easy and obvious POD/setup (Axis victory, 1991 USSR parallel)
  • The deliberately unromantic nature means that you could film it cheaply in some ex-East German concrete block and have it fit the theme.
  • Time constraints mean you could cut the bridge games/padding from the book and focus on the big, well-done set pieces (revelation of his secret Judaism, the "August Coup")
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A mini-series, a movie is to short.
 
Coiler said:
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Dear whatismoo,

I was very distressed to read your tweet, which spread falsehoods.

I'll have you know post-truth Posadist syndicalism is very much not a fringe political belief. The most recent meeting of the Seventh International of Workers' Radiant Liberation had twice as many attendees as the year prior, with my upstairs neighbour having joined of their own volition.

Furthermore, Hearts of Iron IV is part of the immortal science.

I ask that you please retract your statement immediately.

Regards,

J.K. Posadas-Mosley

P.S. I am not a crackpot.
 
Hendryk said:
How would you define HOI-brain to someone who is barely aware of the game such as myself?
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Two of the biggest examples I've seen as manifested in AH are:
  1. Giving people the impression that countries can just switch ideologies/political systems at the drop of a hat and a few inputs. As @monroe templeton said, this kind of encourages the super-niche-fringe.
  2. Focusing massively on obscure OTL figures, which leads to wiki-plucking (ie searching the internet for names and dropping them into the TL without really getting them).
 
Hendryk said:
How would you define HOI-brain to someone who is barely aware of the game such as myself?
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Believing that hitting just the right buttons/shooting just the right people/triangulating just the right set of viewpoints/finding and listening to just the right advisors/passing just the right laws, et cetera ad nauseam, will lead to an optimal outcome where everyone is happy and no one else will complain ever. Which of course is complete nonsense as one of the most endearing and repulsive traits of humanity is its inability to be satisfied with anything up to and including perfection.
 
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