OOC: Next Novel (with poll)

[sythyry]

So, I'm poking at the next novel. Some particular goals:

1. A small story: about a manageable number of characters, keeping the world-shattering events down to a modest number. (Marriage of Insects and Sythyry's Vacation are small stories.)
2. Something that has some chance of being saleable. Specific desiderata:
   1. Recognizably fantasy instead of the fantasy/sf blend I seem to indulge in usually. At least, as much fantasy as World Tree is.
   2. Not so much emphasis on potentially-disturbing stuff.
   3. Minimal sex. (Yeah, I know that sex sells, but not the way I write it)
   4. Minimal war. (Yeah, I know that war sells too, but war isn't a small story.)
3. Totally in my style, and playing to my strengths.
4. Specific influences currently in mind: Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality of Man; Roger Zelazny's Amber (first series); Alan Dean Foster's The Tar-Aiym Krang. The first two are among my favorites. Krang is not; I read it once in the mid-70's, and found it adequate.

The backstory of the setting concerns two species from different worlds. The first is the couatl, winged feathered serpents, who learned how to slither delicately between worlds (which few species can do). They were clever and friendly and gentle, and were explorers and traders, and learned much in their travels and became very civilized. In time they came to the world of the lammasu, mighty winged lions. The lammasu were not gentle. They learned the power of throwing open the gates between worlds, and they went forth and conquered a thousand worlds. Including the coatls, of course.

I'm kind of thinking of the coatls as very loosely like classical Greece, and the lammasu as very loosely like classical Rome at its peak -- and like the Instrumentality of Man from Cordwainer Smith. The domain of the lammasu is run with ruthless benevolence. The lammasu try to make it a decent place to live, for nearly everyone. This is a strategic point: it cuts way down on rebellions and other troubles. And the lammasu intend their empire to last forever. (As of the start of the story, it has been around for centuries and is quite robust.)

So here's the fussing of the day: vocabulary.

I am thinking that the vocabulary of inter-world travel will come from the coatls, since they did it first, and the vocabulary of empire will come from the lammasu. I have a modest number of technical terms in mind. I could just use "gate" or "portal" as the way you leave one world and come to the next, but that's so overworked I dunno. Anyways, I am considering trying to abuse the Nahuatl language for couatl words and the Sumerian language for lammasu ones.

I'm making some attempt to pay attention to actual Nahuatl and Sumerian. I'm ultimately more concerned with literary use than linguistic purity.

"š" is pronounced "sh". There are a few other odd letters that scholars use for Sumerian (ģ for an ng sound); I might use some of them too.

So here's my core vocabulary.

Word	Language	Short	Definition
calac	couatl	gate	Portal between tlalli. A calac leads from one tlalli to the next.
coatl	coatl	winged serpent	One of the older, more powerful, and more civilized species
Ensi	lammasu	governor	Nešgeš-appointed governor of a tlalli
gi-nun	lammasu	slave	Subject of Nešgeš, but without the priveleges of a mašda. (About 5%)
lugal	lammasu	lord	One of the most important people of the Nešgeš. (80% of lugals are lammasu)
mašda	lammasu	commoner	Citizen of the Nešgeš. (About 95% of the subjects of the Nešgeš are mašda)
Nešgeš	lammasu	empire; instrumentality	The empire of the lammasu, controlling dozens of ohtli and thousands of tlalli
ohtli	couatl	road	A string of tlalli connected by calacs
tlalli	couatl	land; worldlet	The region readily reachable by a calac. Usually a populated country some 50-100 miles in diameter. Generally much smaller than a whole world.

And here're some specific questions. I'm doing this as a LJ-quiz because it's all scales.

[Poll #1487398]

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

Quetzlcoatl is going to be a reasonably familiar figure to most readers. I'd suggest that if you call the winged serpents 'coatl' it builds an expectation that at some point these are going to be revealed to be the same species as the Aztec god. Unless they really are, I might avoid that.

I'd use familiar English terms for things such as a gateway, a citizen, or a slave, unless there's some important difference between a gi-nun and a slave. The terminology gets in the way of the concept.

Lugal and Ensi I'd prolly keep, though - people are used to hearing political titles in their foreign versions - the Mikado, the Fuehrer, etc. Leaders' and nobles' attributes tend to be much more culture-specific than those of citizens and slaves, too.

[quoting-mungo.livejournal.com]

Strongly disagree with you on the point of "slave". Most American readers will likely associate the word with the "sub-human" connotations of American pre-civil-war slavery. Considering the lammasu are roughly parallel to Romans, it's likely gi-nun better conforms to the Roman "sub-citizen" notion of slavery. Avoiding people drawing that kind of connections is a good reason to use different vocabulary.


-Alexandra

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

An alternate possibility is something akin to "bondsman". Someone who is in bond is not free(by definition), and those who are may use the word as pejorative - but it doesn't seem to me to carry the heavy loading that that's all they ever have been and all they ever will be.

I do agree that bare "slave" is likely to give too much a negative loading(as "servant" would be too much a positive).

If it's ever used as punishment, the term(whatever it turns out to be) could in fact be just as much a pejorative, in a different way - assumption being that someone in bond did something to deserve it(even if that's not true for ALL people in bond). Not quite the same conviction to it, but... People often don't like to be reminded of how far they might fall.

If there is at least some racial bias or even mild xenophobia involved in the institution, a created word would make that much more sense, as it involves a whole bundle of emotions that no human institution of slavery ever could.

[shurhaian.livejournal.com]

See q_m's thread, but - although gi-nun may encompass an entirely valid meaning of 'slave', it may not call to mind the right meaning in the majority of the readership. Modern institutions of slavery have been pretty vile compared to what I know of the Romans - not to say theirs was flawless, but that at Rome's height, slavery seemed to offer at least some more hope than that which most people are familiar with.