Alternate History: J,K,L

[Gary Oswald]

Discuss this article here

 

[Hendryk]

You can lose yourself in the weeds of trying to track down whether a Duffle Bag would have that name or whether a Car would and changing language too much can veer into extraneous fantasy language that makes the work difficult to read and makes them hard to enter into.

Losing oneself in the weeds is half the fun though. Personally, with a TL set in the first decades of the 20th century, I've had to check such language elements as the use of "OK" to signify approval, when "jerry can" entered the English lexicon, and whether Art Deco was known as such during its heyday.

 

[Charles EP M.]

My fave AH jargon is Doctor Who: Inferno giving Evil UNIT the translated ranks of SA and SS, which even if you don't know that they just sound nastier and harsher.

 

[Thande]

Thanks for including Kuhn, and the etymology of oxygen is a great point to bring up about how these things are more complicated than people think.

Losing oneself in the weeds is half the fun though. Personally, with a TL set in the first decades of the 20th century, I've had to check such language elements as the use of "OK" to signify approval, when "jerry can" entered the English lexicon, and whether Art Deco was known as such during its heyday.

Context is important. I find one can have fun with alternate terminology more by show, don't tell, i.e. you don't need a footnote to say this is the TTL word for bicycle if it's obvious from context as your character is riding it and pedalling.

 

[Gary Oswald]

Thanks for including Kuhn, and the etymology of oxygen is a great point to bring up about how these things are more complicated than people think.

The bit into Look to the West about oxygen theory and your justification of it by Kuhn, has really stuck with me and is one of those things I really wanted to cover. LTTW was genuinely eye opening to me in terms of realising just how the genre could cover science (especially compared to how it often is covered) and it's one of the things that makes that series so special (the universal solvent is another great example of that).

 

[Hendryk]

Context is important. I find one can have fun with alternate terminology more by show, don't tell, i.e. you don't need a footnote to say this is the TTL word for bicycle if it's obvious from context as your character is riding it and pedalling.

The readers of @Bruno's story The Road to Yakutia will just have to figure out on their own that a Bryner is a screw truck and a ground glider is a hovercraft.

 

[Thande]

The bit into Look to the West about oxygen theory and your justification of it by Kuhn, has really stuck with me and is one of those things I really wanted to cover. LTTW was genuinely eye opening to me in terms of realising just how the genre could cover science (especially compared to how it often is covered) and it's one of the things that makes that series so special (the universal solvent is another great example of that).

Thanks. Obviously it's something you realise when it's your specialist subject, and there will be other potential AH writers who could do the same about other areas. On here most people are political and military history types, so we know it's daft to say "Germany wins WW1. So anyway, twenty years later, Hitler invades Poland." But there's plenty of stuff in AH which is the same level of illogic applied to other things, because people don't realise that (e.g.) scientific and technological progress isn't just a predictable, predetermined big meter that goes up step by step in the background of their Civilisation game. And as I said, I'm sure I've made the same fallacy in my writing about things I'm not an expert in, like sports or the arts.

 

[Coiler]

The readers of @Bruno's story The Road to Yakutia will just have to figure out on their own that a Bryner is a screw truck and a ground glider is a hovercraft.

TBF, "ground glider" is pretty intuitive, especially if there's context in the description (ie, "the ground glider sat on an air cushion, its motors whirring noisely..." )

An underappreciated part of jargon also can come from different languages. Not just English's infamy as a word thief, but also how terms in one language don't often translate that easily into another. One of my favorite OTL examples is a too-literal translation of a Chinese text that uses the term "bird-gun" directly. I thought it meant "shotgun" (because that's adapted to hunting birds) but a closer look revealed a better translation would be "musket".

In some of my own worldbuilding/fun exercises, I try to go with "would a reader with no technical knowledge intuit this well." Using some made-up conlang term to describe a large gathering of people would be confusing-they wouldn't know how big it is, and it could come across as self-indulgent. But using the term "Grand Colonel" instead of "General" does click.

 

[Alex Richards]

Thanks. Obviously it's something you realise when it's your specialist subject, and there will be other potential AH writers who could do the same about other areas. On here most people are political and military history types, so we know it's daft to say "Germany wins WW1. So anyway, twenty years later, Hitler invades Poland." But there's plenty of stuff in AH which is the same level of illogic applied to other things, because people don't realise that (e.g.) scientific and technological progress isn't just a predictable, predetermined big meter that goes up step by step in the background of their Civilisation game. And as I said, I'm sure I've made the same fallacy in my writing about things I'm not an expert in, like sports or the arts.

The arts in particular can be odd for how figures who are essentially unknown in the wider world are massively important.

Nadia Boulanger was born on her father's 72nd birthday and didn't start to appreciate music until a few years later when her mother was pregnant with her younger sister (Lili, who tragically died very young). So it's probably quite easy to have her never exist or never get into music.

She ended up teaching basically everyone in the mid-20th Century. Barenboim, Copeland, Glass, Piazzolla...

 

[Hendryk]

The arts in particular can be odd for how figures who are essentially unknown in the wider world are massively important.

Nadia Boulanger was born on her father's 72nd birthday and didn't start to appreciate music until a few years later when her mother was pregnant with her younger sister (Lili, who tragically died very young). So it's probably quite easy to have her never exist or never get into music.

She ended up teaching basically everyone in the mid-20th Century. Barenboim, Copeland, Glass, Piazzolla...

I have a soft spot for Lili Boulanger since she died of the same chronic condition I've been living with for the last two and a half decades.

Sadly, given the state of medicine at the time, there almost certainly would have been no way for her to live much longer.

 

[Hendryk]

An underappreciated part of jargon also can come from different languages. Not just English's infamy as a word thief, but also how terms in one language don't often translate that easily into another. One of my favorite OTL examples is a too-literal translation of a Chinese text that uses the term "bird-gun" directly. I thought it meant "shotgun" (because that's adapted to hunting birds) but a closer look revealed a better translation would be "musket".

A favorite example of neologism in Chinese is the word for "cinema", which, when the medium was introduced to Chinese audiences in 1896, was 西洋影戲 xiyang yingxi, literally "shadow puppet play of the Western ocean [people]", since they approached it as a variant of the traditional art of shadow puppetry. But by the 1910s, when it had become clear that it was a new form of entertainment altogether, it was renamed 电影 dianying, i.e. "electric shadows".

 

[RyanF]

Having Jargon and Kuhnian Incommensurability (wasn't this the name of the dragon in Dragonslayer?) together in the same article makes for a nice juxtaposition.

 

[Max Sinister]

Jargon's OK, as long as you provide a link to a glossary, FAQ or such.