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Fantasy languages

M.A.N.

Scribe
@Ravana: Wow! I mean ... wow!

I don't know how well you know Nick Perumov. He's pretty popular in Sweden and obviously a god in his own country, Russia.
I've read the first book and there's a lot of words from his own fantasy language in it. What make's it special is that he (and the swedish publisher) uses cyrillic letters. (And some even upside down I think!)
This looks pretty impressive, but impossible for most westerners to read. And the problems get worse when these names of really important swords and characters looks similar, but you can't voice them and so you can't seperate them.

So if I had a choice, I would love to read his books without his own fantasy language.
As it is now, the whole bit with his fantasy language is what makes me not read them.

Take care,
Magnus
 

Ravana

Istar
Problems arise with such simple things as yes/no questions. … I have to create a complete different mindset where saying something "not true" is not just bad style, it has to be completely alien to the speakers.

Right. Didn't say it was easy, just that it's not "impossible." Consider the examples I give: "Is that Bob?" is a yes/no question (I chose one on purpose, for just that reason)… but the answers don't contain any negation. They're positive assertions of some other fact related to the question.

Like I said, it would probably do some wonky things to excluded middle ("P or not-P, but not both"): "not-P" would no longer be a possible category for that language's logic. (And without it, classical logic would collapse, by the by. There are alternative logic systems that don't use excluded middle as an axiom… though I'm not aware of any that don't use explicit negation.) Though that's a syntactic problem more than a semantic one: you don't really consider "the set of all things that are not Bob" when answering that question. (I'm sure I could find some semanticians, certainly some philosophers of language, who'd disagree with me on that.) For that matter, assertions of identity could potentially get odd, too: "Are Bob and Ted the same person?" (= "Is Bob Ted?") would end up getting a response along the lines of "Bob is Bob and Ted is Ted," assuming it was possible to parse the question at all. Counterfactuals and hypotheticals would get pretty convoluted, too.…

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M.A.N.: Thank you. No, I'm not familiar with Perumov. Might have to look for him. And what's so hard about learning to read Cyrillic? Only differs from Greek by a half dozen letters or thereabouts.… ;)
 
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