For To Search the Starry Sea, I’m writing from the point of view of a far future starfaring culture completely independent of Earth. They’ve preserved our concepts of “hour,” “day,” and “year,” but these units of time do not correlate in any way with the revolutions of the worlds on which they live (basically, a set of tidally locked moons orbiting a gas giant planet several AUs from its sun).
The people of this culture use terms like “morning,” “evening,” “day,” and “night” to describe their waking and sleeping cycles, but having been cut off from Earth for so much time, they don’t associate these times with the position of the sun. In order to convey that this is different, I’m thinking of spelling “afternoon” like “afternune,” to show that there’s been some cultural drift since the migration from Earth.
Does that work? Or if you had to read “afternune” instead of “afternoon,” would it completely throw you out of the story?
Or am I just not making any sense at all?
It would totally throw me. I agree with David Wolverton in one of his recent Daily Kicks: “You will note that even the best fantasy writers tend to set their stories in worlds that are very earthlike. The reason for this is obvious. If you create something too strange, too different, you will find it almost impossible to connect with your reader on a powerful emotional level. In short, if you set your world on a planet where the people eat fire for breakfast and breathe methane, where not one single animal has any earthly counterpart, your reader will soon feels completely lost.”
So, however realistic you’re trying to be, it sounds like if you really want to connect and communicate effectively, you’ll have to use earth’s terminology.
The terminology is the same, just the spelling is different (afternune vs. afternoon). Would it really throw you as much as if the characters were “eating fire and breathing methane”?
To answer your question, it would throw me a little, but I think I’d work past it.
However, if their life cycles were controlled by something else, I’d use that instead: planetfall, gasflare, etc. “It’s third planetfall, time for bed. See you next gasflare!”
If they weren’t based around anything except a clock (like astronauts on a ship), I’d just use the words days/hours/minutes (spelled correctly), even if the actual celestial bodies that the units are based on are long history.
I had an experience like that when I read Dune. I was constantly trying to figure out which of his terms/concepts were derived from Arabic–trying to figure out how much Arabic I thought he knew.
For me it was a positive–forced me to become intellectually involved with concepts that could have otherwise slid by. I think you’d have to do it ‘just right’ for it to work the same way with words in/derived from the same language as the story.
In general, though, I think it’s definitely a workable idea that could lend a sense of ‘otherness’ to your story. I think that you’d want to be careful to use those terms often enough to make your point, but not so often that they became distracting.
From a linguistic standpoint, the spelling change doesn’t make much sense. To me. When I studied linguistics at BYU, it seemed that every orthographic change had a reason, usually running the way towards simplification. Noon vs Nune does not really simplify; there are the same amount of letters, and the -oon to -une ending has nothing in common roots wise. Just pronunciation-wise. To me, I think it would make more sense if you changed it to “afternun” or “afternon”, and don’t add the silent e on the end. It seems to me that when things change, they usually lose elements more often than gaining them. “Tomorrow” used to be “to the morrow”, didn’t it? Then it got condensed to “tomorrow”.
And it would not bother me. I think it would be interesting. While I agree that it would be too hard to relate to characters who breathe farts, honestly the books that don’t take into account language specific to the setting bother me. Like I just read a series called “the Luxe”, and most of the dialog was so 2010’s…when it should have been 1901’s.
But don’t go overboard.