Black Gate

And why should they? Most of them don’t live in universes where damnation is a possibility. What? You didn’t think that swearing, cursing, or slang had just as much to do with world-building as how your characters speak in general?

Does everyone know the bi-lingual pun that’s in The Princess Bride? It’s the part in the film where they’re rounding up everyone in the Thieves’ Forest and the guard says to Iñigo, “Ho there!” and Iñigo replies, “Get away with your ‘HO there.'” Now, if you know that the f-word in Spanish is “joder,” pronounced HOthere, this is a pretty funny bit. If you don’t… well, you do now.

Aside from the comedy potential, William Goldman (who wrote both the novel and the screenplay) is underscoring the point that Iñigo is Spanish – which in itself underscores that The Princess Bride is set in a recognizable version of the primary world.

For our purposes, Iñigo’s example illustrates one of the prime sources for swear words: sexual acts. Anyone who pays attention is familiar with the other sources: religion, family relations, body parts, and bodily functions. Yes, sexual acts are bodily functions, at least in part. But eating, for example, doesn’t usually give rise to swear words – unless there’s something taboo involved, which gives you another clue as to the origin of a lot of profanity.

Take a moment to consider the origin of the word profanity (just in case you think religion is no big deal).

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Last week I talked about how Fantasy and SF writers deal with the idea that our characters aren’t speaking English, and I focused for the most part on primary world fantasies (by which I mean fantasies with an obvious connection to our world as we live in it) and on SF works of the near and far future.

I wanted to deal with secondary world fantasies separately, partly because that’s what I primarily write myself and partly because I think that use of language might be even more important here, where language becomes most clearly part of the world-building process. Think about it: you don’t have to be half Spanish and half Polish like me to know that how we express ourselves is all about our cultural backgrounds.

So whether we call them secondary world fantasies, heroic or epic fantasy, or sword-and-sorcery, it’s how our characters express themselves – and even how the narrative voice expresses itself – that gives our readers their primary entry into the worlds of our novels and stories. Language has to make these places strange enough that readers understand they’re dealing with a complex imaginary world, while at the same time making those worlds enjoyably accessible.

Some of the same tools we use when trying to add an element of strangeness or “Other” to the primary world (playing around with syntax, avoiding contractions) can make the jump to how we express language in secondary world fantasies as well – but there are some problems that might be unique to those complex imaginary worlds.  And therefore some tools that might be unique as well.

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An actor was once asked, “Did you speak German in the film?” He answered, “Well, we spoke ‘movie German’, you know, British actors using German syntax.”

We’re all familiar with that phenomenon, aren’t we? Though nowadays we’re just as likely to get the actual language with subtitles, at least for short bits of dialogue. That’s fine for film, but it does make you wonder, how do writers deal with the language issue? Especially those of us writing Fantasy or SF?

After all, we’re not all linguistics professors capable of making up a complete language (or more than one, if it should be needed) like you-know-who.

Regardless of what language I might use to speak to friends or family, I write novels in English. And like most of my colleagues in the fantasy-writing world, few, if any, of my characters are either English or English speakers.

Back in the day, when one of the standard conventions of fantasy literature was the stranger-in-a-strange-land (human from our world transported into the secondary world) the issue of language got dealt with in different ways.

CS Lewis ignored it, essentially, in the Chronicles of Narnia, where all the Narnians at least (including the animals) speak British English (and in Calormen, they speak with an Arabian Nights syntax).

As the genre evolved, writers like Barbara Hambly had their primary world characters simply learn the new language, while others had wizards or other magic users intervene to solve the problem magically – what we now consider “the old translation spell ploy.”

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I love sword fighting. All of my favourite movies involve sword fights, and most of my favourite books. I love the Star Trek TOS episode where Sulu runs around with a sword, so it should come as no surprise that I primarily write sword and sorcery novels.

The sorcery part’s easy – pretty well everyone knows I’m making that up, and so long as I keep things internally consistent, I’m in the clear.

But what about the sword part? I can’t just make that up, can I? Viz. this exchange, which took place on a martial arts panel at Ad Astra back in the 90’s:

Panellist: “You know in the movie when Wesley and Iñigo are fighting? Well, they’re not really using the moves they say they’re using.”

Called out by a wit from the back of the room: “Gee, they are in the book.”

And there’s at least part of your answer. You can write whatever you like, but, like William Goldman in The Princess Bride, it behoves you to do some research.

There are some great books that explain all kinds of things about swords and swordplay. There’s Captain Sir Richard Burton’s The Book of the Sword. There’s By the Sword, Richard Cohen’s excellent book on the history of duelling and fencing from ancient into modern times. And there’s also John Clements’s Renaissance Swordsmanship, which has illustrations showing fighting with different kinds of swords, against different kinds of  weapons. It also describes fighting moves in such a way that you can put together a fight — so long as it’s not too complicated.

But is book learning enough? I don’t think so.

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