Teaser Tuesday: Because I'm Just that Kind of Geek

[hrj]

People often tell you that the best books are written when the author is writing the book they most want to read. The flip side of that, is that not all of your potential readership is going to love the same things you do. But some will. And as long as the hidden "Easter eggs" can be read as background color, I see nothing wrong with tossing in a bit of geekery that only a subset of readers will fully appreciate. I suspect I hold this attitude in large part because I'm accustomed to SFF readers who are usually quite cheerful about swallowing worldbuilding on topics they aren't expected to be experts in.

I have regular scenes where my characters debate the logical and philosophical underpinnings of thamaturgical theory. Of course I don't expect the reader to understand it in detail, nor do I intend to have the characters sit down and explain it to them. The scenes serve the purpose of saying, "These are experts, interacting with each other at a no-holds-barred level, and your take-away is to appreciate the fact of their expertise, not to become an expert yourself." In a hard SF novel when the characters have an as-you-know-Bob discussion of how the warp drive functions, the point is that you're supposed to believe that those characters could build a warp drive, not that you should come out of it being able to build one yourself.

So, no, I don't actually expect any but a very few of my readers to be familiar with 15th centry Latin memorial inscription formulas or the ambiguities of how they might be expanded. But some day, when I write Tanfrit's story, I hope some of those few will think back to the following scene and say, "Ha! I wondered about that!"

* * *

Chapter 10 - Margerit

There was a gate hanging crazily off its hinges that let them into the little yard. The door to the cottage itself was long since gone and the opening let in barely enough light to see the noisome remains of straw bedding. Margerit ducked back out quickly and examined the yard from within. The wall had been built from odds and ends of stone: smooth boulders tumbled by the river, small worked squares that must have been repurposed from some other source, a tall broad slab that stood the full height of the barrier and might well have determined its course. On second examination, the shape of that stone became familiar and she went to crouch before it and touch the traces of carving that still showed through the moss.

A sharp stick uncovered the edges of lettering and the shape of an escutcheon above, though the device on it was only recognizable as bearing birds of some sort. Barbara joined her, scraping gently at the moss to reveal the beginning of the inscription. HIC IACET…

“No surprise,” Margerit said. “I wonder what churchyard they pillaged for this?”

“The stone is set rather deeply. If I didn’t know better, I’d think it marked the original grave. Let’s see whose memory we’re meant to call to mind.”

They worked more carefully now, picking the dirt and vegetation out of the lettering. The end of the line held only a single name. Margerit’s heart began hammering as it came clear: TANNFRIDA.

Barbara laid a hand on her shoulder. “She wasn’t the only woman by that name. Don’t assume—”

But Margerit had attacked the obscuring moss more frantically. Why else had the mystery led her here if not for this? The drizzle started again, but she took no notice of anything except what the stone revealed. The Latin was clumsy and ambiguous, abbreviated to fit the stone and not the standard formulas of a churchyard monument.

HIC IACET TANNFRIDA
DOCTORA UNIVERSIT’
ROTANACI CURAV’
SUSANNA SOROR CARISS’ EIUS

“Doctora Universitatis Rotanaci,” Margerit breathed. “It must be. But…?” So many questions. Why here? Why did the dozzures at the university deny she had ever taught there? Tanfrit’s scholarship was legendary, even in the few scraps that survived. Why was she buried here in obscurity, commemorated only by Susanna, her most beloved sister?

“Why here?” she asked aloud.

Barbara offered a hand to help her rise. “You know what the legends say, that she was a suicide. They couldn’t have buried her in a churchyard.”

It wasn’t the question she’d meant to ask and the answer made no sense. “But those legends say she threw herself in the Rotein from a broken heart and was lost,” Margerit countered. “This isn’t lost.”

“It could be a cenotaph,” Barbara cautioned. “But no, not if it says iacet. And yet—”

They stared at each other in wonder, forgetting all the rest of the world around them. “This is it,” Margerit said abruptly.

Comments

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

<3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3

Also, you're a nerd. Just sayin'...

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Yes I am.

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

I love those kinds of world-building details.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

And fortunately I have friends who helped me get the Latin right!

[lferion]

Ooo! *Shivers in both delight & creepyness* This is really neat.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I have plans for tossing in a few more hints and riddles along the way, though I'm not sure I'll get to writing Tanfrit's story until the main Alpennia series is done. (It's a matter of momentum. Plotwise, Tanfrit is entirely stand-alone. So there's no point in the main series where it needs to have been already written for other things to make sense.)

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

And of course you know that it's the little bits of logic that make me squee the most. :)

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

Actually, I've started paying attention to how often logic/philosophy is explicitly mentioned in fantasy books, especially those of the vaguely medieval derivation, because of my long-standing unhappiness with the place these subjects have in contemporary medieval studies (as in: highly overlooked, whereas I think that you're going to be hard pressed to understand what was going on in the 12th-14th C if you don't have at least a basic understanding of Aristotelian metaphysics and how this relates to catholic theology; which is why I'm continually campaigning for MOAR LOGIC at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds every year). (So, yes, I may also have squeed a bit when logic was mentioned in beth_bernobich's pirate novel.)

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Keep holding that thought, because eventually I'll need to figure out what-all Tanfrit is working on when I get to her book.

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

I have just thought of the ultimate cool fanfic: If someday I write a commentary on Tanfrit's book! :)

[hrj.livejournal.com]

:0

[ricardienne.livejournal.com]

I've been avoiding your teaser posts because I don't want spoilers, but I was scrolling back through your tag today looking for your posts about about geography/language, andthe Latin caught my eye...

I don't have the linguistic background to know what's most plausible for a demotic adjective (Rotanacus, Rotanacensis?), but "universit[atis] Rotanaci seems wrong: it's got to be a feminine. For medieval inscription, I would think Rotanace would be plausible (-ae --> -e being pretty standard). Or I suppose you could call 'Rotanaci' a locative of 'Rotanacum' -- I that would be an unusual choice.

Anyway, I apologize for barging into a post a month old and playing copy-editor -- especially since I don't know what your intentions are with Latin! Plenty of medieval inscriptions have "bad" Latin, or very idiosyncratic Latin. (And, I suppose, if I were a historian, I might want to make much out of why someone of this period called it "the university, the one in Rotenek" and not "the university of Rotenek.")

EDIT: of course, as soon as I posted this, I looked again and realized that Rotanaci was a regular old genitive... I'd like to say that there's something that still seems odd about using a genitive/locative and not the adjective, but I can only go on anecdotal impressions there.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

"The Latin was clumsy and ambiguous" It's actually meant to be not-quite-right, suggesting that the text of the inscription was composed by someone who was not a Latin scholar, who was copying standard inscriptions but had to make up some parts as best they could. There's a deep-background reason for that detail that doesn't specifically come into play in the current story. Good eye!

[ricardienne.livejournal.com]

This is one of my favorite authorial conundrums to think about as a reader: it's very difficult, I think to convey "this thing that you think is wrong is in fact deliberately wrong for in-universe reasons that are in fact v. important" without overdoing the exegesis.

(Of course, from a readerly perspective every detail must imply an internal logic, whatever the actual cause.)

Also, I should say that your posts about Alpennian linguistics are sending me into transports of delight!

[hrj.livejournal.com]

The really esoteric scholarly stuff is tricky. Most readers probably take it as just background tapestry and don't think further. For the ones who have either the background or the curiosity to look deeper, I need to have persuaded them that I know what I'm doing well enough that they'll trust that everything is meaningful. I do a lot of slipping in deep-background details whose practical purpose is simply to make the world feel solid and three-dimensional. Because in a three-dimensional world, you don't necessarily understand the significance of everything you see and hear. Not immediately anyway. I love reviews that mention the reader discovering that all those details were Significant and how suddenly they saw the entire story from a different angle.

I blog about those details in part to validate the people who thought they saw something going on but weren't sure if it were intentional. The use of forms of address and nicknames and whatnot are one of those. Every single choice of how a character addresses or refers to another character is carefully meaningful. But I'm satisfied if it just "feels right" whether or not the readers notices the details.

One of these days I'll do some more detailed work on the Alpennian language, but it would only appear in the book if I had a point of view character who didn't speak Alpennian. (There will be a couple of those, so I'll have the opportunity.)

By the way, I try very hard not to include any spoilers in my teaser excerpts--though people have different ideas of what constitutes a teaser.

[ricardienne.livejournal.com]

It is very pleasant as a reader (or at least as the kind of reader of fantasy that I happen to be) to pick something apart and find that it is solid all the way down. I have to admit that reading your essay on Alpennian derivations felt a little bit like cheating and looking at the answers on my part, because I had gotten about half way there in figuring out all the sound rules (what? Is that not the first thing you're supposed to do when confronted with set of words in a made up language?? although I don't have the background at all to have even tried to explain why they would go that way.)

Or rather (if this is an appropriate place for praise and thanks): it's so wonderful to find an author who is a geek about precisely the things that I am also a geek about!

The burning sociolinguistic question, for me, though, is what the T V situation is in Alpennian?

[hrj.livejournal.com]

You've inadvertently answered my idle curiosity as to whether you're the same person as sigaloenta on tumblr! No, I haven't been stalking you -- a friend thought I might be interested in your speculations there and I've been being very very good and not sticking my nose in on tumblr to give Voice Of God answers. It was the question about T V that gave you away. :)

Half the fun of doing language things in fiction is hoping that some reader, somewhere, sometime will treat it as an enjoyable puzzle to solve. Thank you!

As to the T V situation, it remains undetermined for the moment. I do have plans to develop more details of Alpennian grammar, but I need to do a bit more background research on the variety of ways in which Romance languages developed so that I can pick and choose some "dip-switch settings" to combine with the vocabulary and phonology guidelines in order to generate chunks of language without having to sweat over each bit individually. You can be absolutely certain that Alpennian makes formal/informal distinctions in pronouns. But as to exactly how, it's still hidden in the grammar books I have yet to write.

[ricardienne.livejournal.com]

hah! yup, that's me: different screennames, variable fandoms, but the preoccupations remain the same.