overlordror
Acolyte
Hello!
Recently I've gotten a muse for a world in which a young woman is taken from what is considered civilized society into a group of tribal people who live a semi-nomadic lifestyle. These people speak an entirely different language from the young woman, so she's having to learn through gestures and the one person of tribal descent who does speak her language.
How can I properly convey the difficulty of two different languages in one setting? One example suggested to me was to have those who are speaking Vanari, the tribal language, be in italics so the reader knows that it is different from the Common language that is found at the beginning of the books. The problem I have with this is that writing in English and italics to denote language is a fine choice, but what if you want to use the specific Vanari word for something? Is peppering in these foreign terms acceptable so long as they've been properly explained?
For example, one of the beliefs of these tribal people is that there is a Mother Mare that takes care of them all. In their language, she is called anne kisrak. After that initial introduction, is it more acceptable to just continue to call any reference to this mother mare?
Recently I've gotten a muse for a world in which a young woman is taken from what is considered civilized society into a group of tribal people who live a semi-nomadic lifestyle. These people speak an entirely different language from the young woman, so she's having to learn through gestures and the one person of tribal descent who does speak her language.
How can I properly convey the difficulty of two different languages in one setting? One example suggested to me was to have those who are speaking Vanari, the tribal language, be in italics so the reader knows that it is different from the Common language that is found at the beginning of the books. The problem I have with this is that writing in English and italics to denote language is a fine choice, but what if you want to use the specific Vanari word for something? Is peppering in these foreign terms acceptable so long as they've been properly explained?
For example, one of the beliefs of these tribal people is that there is a Mother Mare that takes care of them all. In their language, she is called anne kisrak. After that initial introduction, is it more acceptable to just continue to call any reference to this mother mare?