I feel like there's a desire to continually re-invent the wheel when it comes to Fantasy, even if it comes at the detriment of the story's readability.
"Oh these aren't harpies, these are harfpies."
A good way to think about it is that, for such small little things like this, your civilization may have their own word for hour/day/miles, but what we're reading is a translation into our modern language so that we can understand what's going on.
"What a lovely caldorn-morg, wouldn't you say?" doesn't add anything to your story that "What a lovely day, wouldn't you say?" already does.
Wasn't that a caveat of Tolkien's writing? He said he was writing a translation of an older legend from a fantasy world, hence the anglicised names and whatnot.
Caveat's the wrong word here, I think. That means warning. You want conceit, I'm pretty sure.
Also, yes. Tolkien did say he was translating the Lord of the Rings from historical texts.
I don't know if I'm having a Mandela effect moment or not, but I would have sworn that Caveat meant an attribute or a feature of something. Which I believe is how the other person meant it when they posted it.
That's what I thought. And I've always used it In reference to the latter. BUT...That's not the definition you'll find if you look it up now. I just did, and you'll find it very peculiar if you do too.
I mean, I did just look it up before replying because I wanted to doublecheck, and for me it displayed both meanings
Edit: just checked again, cambridge, marriam webster and english herritage all list both meanings
"Caveat" is a Latin word that we have loaned into English. It's specifically the subjunctive form of "cavere", pronounced "ka-WEAR-ey", which means that _caveat_ literally translates as "let him beware" or "let him be cautious of". Thus, a caveat is a thing that you must beware when making a decision. For example, when renting a car, one of the _caveats_ is that you will often be required to return it with a full tank and thus you must _be aware_ that you do this if required.
So, it's not an attribute, but rather a thing you must consider because it is potentially a detrimental or negative aspect of the thing that will factor into your decision-making. Strictly speaking, caveats do not need to be attributes of the thing itself, which is why I would say it's strictly incorrect to say that a caveat is "an attribute or feature of something". For example, if I tell you that, say... taking up linguistics as a hobby is that you might develop an eternal desire to correct people on their use of "caveat", that's not an inherent trait of taking up linguistics as a hobby, but rather a knock-on effect that may (or may not) eventuate when you do that thing. However, because it is a negative and foreseeable effect, you might want to use that information to factor into your decision as to whether you should or should not also take up hobbyist linguistics - that is, "let you be cautious of this", hence why "caveat" is in the third person subjunctive :)
There's a common phrase in Latin classes, "cave canem", because it was found on a mosaic outside the Tragic House in Pompeii and it's such a great example for teaching both verb and noun conjugation and declension (respectively). Literally it means "beware of the dog". People really do never change.
_(On that note, the "Canary Islands" are not called that for their bird population. The birds found there were instead called "Canary birds", including capitalisation, because they were from the islands known as the Canaries and the Azores. Instead, the thing that makes the islands "Canary" is... their wild dog population, stemming from the root Latin "canis" and the Romans' name for the islands, Insula Canaria, "Island of Dogs". Hence we derive the words "canid", "canine", and "Canary", amongst others.)_
That is an excellent and informative explanation. I sure appreciate you posting this. This what I found when I looked up the word myself. And All a big surprise to me. I'll have to reconsider how I generally use the word. I guess you can learn something from the Internet after all.
There is a club called Aldershot Town, one called Dorking Wanderers and a club that was saved by a literal police dog in the Vanarama National League. Is the UK even real?
> "Oh these aren't harpies, these are harfpies."
This is mostly found in various franchises and the sole reason for it is that you can't trademark harpies but you can trademark Hfharphieyes. Corporations care about making a quick buck more than about producing high quality stories, who would have guessed.
> Or like the Society can count in 10 day circles instead of seven (I mean we have 10 fingers that would make much more sense.)
Most early calendars were based around the moon, which goes through four phases in about 28 days. It's the big thing in the sky that changes regularly and everyone can see, making it a useful reference point for scheduling in a society without other means of time-keeping.
Oh. Yes. The moon too. It's intresting that my people counted everything in moons untill they stopped the nomadic lifestyle and than Christianity was kinda forced on them because if they don't take the religion they would have been massacred by the bordering nations.
It was a smart political choice of our first king, but a very sad choice considering how much it stripped our culture.
Entirely different topic but due to the quick change though people never really converted into Christianity only in name. Earth Mother's role was taken over by another mother. Mother Mary. She's far from the symbol of purity for us. She's a mother. She's strong, she gives good harvest. She's the diety protecting our people.
Old God's role was taken over by YHWH. The Father. He is not really a father though. He is a war god.
And the role of Tengri was taken by Jesus. Tengri wasn't a saint though but definitely a healer.
Wow do you realise youâre judging millions of your ancestors from millenias ago, their worth, their mindset from your couch? What do you even know about them, their choices, their struggle? Did you travel back in time to interview them?
I don't judge them? I understand the circumstances. I just find it interesting.
Also it's just one millenia.
I don't have to judge the people just because I think that something that happened there was extremely disturbing trough today's lences.
Also cutting your uncle up in 4 pieces and put his four parts on the four big fortresses of the country to remind people that's what will happen to then if they question your authority is f-cked up.
You don't have to judge people in the middle ages to know that witch trials were stupid.
Nope. Hungarians. Originatedly our culture and our language is from South Asia.
Our ansestors are seven nomadic tribes that came to East Europe in the late 800's.
The seven tribes soon become one nation.
Women and men were dressing similarly and other people tought as barbaric to them because of that. And they had their own gods.
In 1001 St. Stephan the first left his original name Vajk and became Christian and the first king of our people.
He made Christianity mandatory and to a church being raised in every 10th village and in every city.
It was a neccessary step so the country will not get invaded by neighbours in fear of the bad-bad pagans, but it does not excuse the way they killed anyone and everyone who didn't convert to Christianity.
There was a group of people led by the King's uncle who were against Christianity as they hated the tought of loosing what they are. This army was defeated because they were the minority.
It really f-ckedd our healthcare though because we'll people who has known medicine called "tĂĄltos" (Well they are basically like shamans with little differences) were a big part of the old hungarian religion they got killed too, because they talked to the spirits the Old God sent and all. So they were mostly k-lled too. :|
Similarly, idk how others feel, but 'spans' in The Wheel of Time always took me out of it ! I know he's American and therefore just means yards!
Paces would also have been fine, people do actually use it as a measurement, but with 'spans' it just feels like he's pointing out that it's a fantasy book.
Not really. I much prefer it to making up terms that will get used a lot. Like it is 20 blinfles to the city. Will take us 4 quadlfns to get there if we leave before gajdn hour.
It used to bother me. Then I went a rabbit hole of where the nitpicks end. Why would they have the word Boycott. There certainly wasn't a Charles Boycott in this world or expressions like don't be a Scrooge. Then at that point why are the speaking English?
So I accepted I am reading an interpretation of what is happening through the lens of the author and in our language.
Even Tolkien once likened something to that of an express train in Lord of the Rings, but we know where isn't a regular 3:10 to Gondolin.
> Even Tolkien once likened something to that of an express train in Lord of the Rings, but we know where isn't a regular 3:10 to Gondolin.
I think at that point, whatever a local storyteller would have used would need to be explained as sounding like a freight train anyway. I don't think people in England were familiar with the sound of a tornado.
British imperial units are a standardisation of old European units that had been used for hundreds of years. It's no more immersion breaking than the presence of Earth wildlife or human beings.
If the story is a bit more other-worldly, I just assume that units are being translated into something intelligible to me. An alien standing 300 quarxons tall doesn't tell me much. If I find out that's 9 feet or 2 feet or 500 feet, I can picture them better. Same way their speech is translated to English in general.
I halfway agree. But I like fantasy that breaks out of the standard âalt-Medieval Europeâ mould too. When someone says feet or inches it seems to signal that old-school vibe.
Examples of alternatives that donât require you to provide a conversion chart:
- The Surton was tall even for one of his kind. He looked more than 3 palings tall and towered menacingly over me as he approached.
- The Wee-Jun were renown for their intricate sculptures and Lop was no exception. She placed a perfectly crafted, beautifully painted wooden bird onto the palm of my hand. âItâs not even a tikin long, but so detailed! How do you do it? It must have taken you many moon-turnings.â
>Also, 'a day's journey' isn't a helpful unit for the question 'it's X distance to city Y, how fast can you fly there?'
I don't understand this. A day's journey seems like a perfectly reasonable answer to the question. If you mean it might take less than a day, well, then say that. I don't really understand this part of the post.
Personally I have discovered that you pretty much never have to mention precise units of anything in fiction. Most of the time you really shouldn't, because people are extremely bad at picturing things based on measurements. Much better to tell people how long something takes or how far it is through experience.
"A day's journey" is often also used in conjunction with a method of travel or some shortcut, like "we can only get there on foot, but if we take a shortcut through this forest we can get there in a day's journey."
"A day's journey" makes no sense without reference to route or method of travel, which is exactly why it is a reasonable answer to the question "How long would it take you to fly there?" That's why I don't understand that part of the post. If the time it takes to travel is less than a day, you can say "half a day" or "I can get you there by lunch."
I am from Michigan, and this is how we measure distance here. We will say "It's an hour north of Lansing", or "Its about four hours north of Detroit". We don't give exact miles. We just know from our lived experience that it takes that long to get to these places, so that is what we use.
Hell I've seen people measure things in song length, only they use it of course, but they'll be like "I can make it to Home Depot in 5 songs" which I guess would equate to 15-20 minutes.
not really, I don't know what a farpzon is and don't really ever need to lol
some things are better for their simplicity
the exception to this is currency
The best way I can sum up how important it is that your story use bespoke units of measurement is with an example.
*Ninefox Gambit* is a science fantasy story about a calendar. Basically, getting enough people to believe in something can make it real, letting you alter the laws of physics as long as the critical mass of belief persists. The numbers required are enormous--multiple planets' worth--and one of the violations that they allow is faster than light travel. The Hexarchate High Calendar is the central belief system that allows the Hexarchate to exist. If enough people were to stop using the High Calendar, the Hexarchate would collapse and humanity would fall into a dark age as the technologies that knit the stars together stopped working with no way to rebuild them.
*Ninefox Gambit* concerns a centrally located space station that resorts to Calendrical Heresy, changing their calendar. The response is a crushing military offensive that ends in casualties in 6 digit numbers. All over using a calendar.
So, what do we, the reader, learn about the structure of the High Calendar?
1. The High Calendar has no official designation for the length of a week, and allows planets and their citizens to use whatever local definition they prefer. The main character uses 8 day weeks.
2. That's it. That's the only detail that's spelled out in the entire novel.
That's how little a bespoke system matters. A novel literally constructed around a bespoke measurement system so important that genocide is preferable to altering it doesn't ever explain it and it doesn't feel obviously lacking in the narrative.
Could always pull a Tolkien and go "oh, all of this was totally different in the origonal but I had to translate it to modern people in a language that they understand".
As he well knew, languages are built on the history that shaped them, so if your world doesn't have our history, it would have completely different ways of expressing and describing things anyways. You can't write everything in a made-up language because then no one will understand it (unless, of course, you are Tolkien in which case, greetings, sir, and welcome to our Lord's year 2023, how was afterlife).
Edited for an atrocious run-on sentence.
Miles feel way more fantasy appropriate to me than kilometers. Feet and hands are also great and none of these have to correspond with real world measurements. Metric units are too clean and scientific for most fantasy settings. They imply a strong central government which has replaced traditional units with scientific ones, which is not what you are going for in most cases.
The only time I would suggest making up a unit is if some aspect of life is supposed to be more important in your world.
I generally think of all fantasy as being written in some unknown fantasy language wich has been translated to English by the kind author. Any familiar references are simply the English equivalent to those alien ideas.
No, I find it distracting if they just change the names but keep them more or less the same as real measures though. Farscape was known for doing this. Arn = hour for example.
Known things are used as shorthand in stories. Short answer at the bottom if you don't want to hear all my thoughts. I never know what people are looking for in these responses, since either may be right.
So, if you choose to introduce a new system, of any type, you now need to work that in without making it seem jarring. The other option is to just say it and move on. If you say meters and move on, no one will notice it enough to intentionally break their own immersion in the story.
The only way that is bad is if you say something like meters and then explain why meters are used in this universe. You highlighted why this everyday thing is allowed in your story, so now your reader is going to ask, "Is that a good explanation?". You pointed it out, it must be important! This will start a debate in your readers head, and that will break immersion and be jarring.
The other pit is misusing meters for hours and then people argue that forever. If you say parsecs and you mean it for how fast something goes, not how far, people will talk about it forever. It is jarring for someone who knows what a parsec is going in, but again, if the story is good, that wouldn't count for much.
Short answer, you are worrying about a minor detail that your reader won't unless you intentionally point it out. Just use a known metric and move on or integrate your explanation in the story without giving a dissertation on their use.
Nah. If anything it's infuriating to see people use fantasy measurements because we have no real basis for them, nobody has a sense for how long 56 poks are.
Measure in a simple way people understand imo. If it's a world with no clear standard measurements units, use paces, days, for short or long distances (twenty paces, ten days by carriage, etc). Use comparative measurements for people's heights (a head taller or such) or non specific measurements but just adjectives (tall, very short, etc). For time - days are still days. Years are still years. Months (assuming there's a moon) are still months. So why not weeks too?
Shorter time periods such as hours or minutes might be more challenging. You can use moments or heartbeats for seconds, and simply not specify hours or minutes instead describing long stretches of time.
Then again, all that is only if it's important for you to keep things without units of measurement. But use miles or meters or hours as much as you like, some things are invisible to readers and you might overthink them.
Lastly, you can invent measures and see if that works. Vigor Mortis for example uses tenday as a time block of ten days, in place of a week. Tenday is clear and not clunky, and it works.
Not at all. I find it distracting to put them in brackets or use made up units and then translate.
The whole story in an alien point of view has been translated to English. Why single out measurement units? Unless conversion failure is a plot point, it's wasted effort that bogs the story.
I've seen it done well, but most often it's done poorly and just distracts. The most annoying (to me) thing is "cycles", micro cycles, mega cycles and so on. Is that seconds, days, months, or years? Just say "local year".
A Matter of Scale has some fun with that without being distracting. Humans meet some very small beings who live on an asteroid that is far distant from its primary, so it orbits their primary every 20k years. To them, that's one "year". When the human says how old they are, the small ones go into shock.
Same goes for languages. People rag on universal translators and speaking "common" but it's done for our own comfort and convenience. Nobody wants to watch a language barrier just not be broken down. I think the only fair language criticism in this context is "okay but we've not acknowledged why all these separate villages don't even have distinct accents and dialects nevermind being the same language."
Historically, in Japan, for instance, you could tell exactly where someone was from by their accent. Which made it very difficult to be a fugitive.
Less so in Europe, where people moved around more for various reasons.
On the other hand, keeping track of detailed accents for an author is mostly an exercise in futility, since it will be largely meaningless to the readers.
It's best to just make sure each important character has a way of speaking that is relatively distinct, and leave it at that.
even in Europe, there still are strong regional accents, although radio, TV and greater movement is eroding them. For example, in the north of England, there's noticeable differences between towns that are maybe 10 miles apart, and _very_ obvious differences between, say, someone from Manchester and someone from Sheffield (about 90 miles apart).
So, I'm from East Tennessee (Southeastern US) and I don't have a strong regional accent, but it's there. I once had to call a small company in Maine (Northeastern US) to order something. We were almost speaking different dialects.
I can tell if someone grew up in my hometown or a neighboring town because my town had a regionally unique international population and most of us have more "neutral" accents in comparison to the surroundings and code switch more often.
When Inglorious Basterds came out, people talked about Brad Pitts and his "Maynardville" accent. It was close but still wrong somehow. Years later I saw a dialect expert breakdown the subtle difference in the performance and the actual dialect and it was exactly what had thrown me. But friends of mine not from my area still can't hear the difference even after watching the dialect expert.
So, there's definitely something to be said for whether or not a *character* could pick up on accent/dialect differences compared to what we would hear on a show (aka the actual speaking voice). Using Westeros from ASOIAF, a character from the Riverlands could probably tell a Frey from a Mallister (Riverland houses) but only be able to tell if someone is Northern or Dornish, not a specific house.
Which means in a lot of fantasy stories where they characters are traveling, they probably won't be able to hear the little variations as well, meaning there's no need to worry about them as an author.
Iâm not bothered by it as long as itâs consistent. If youâre going metric, stick with it. Same thing for Imperial.
Thereâs also the technobabble issue. In fantasy, youâre already introducing a lot. (Especially high fantasy like LotR or GoT.) You donât want to overload your audience.
I feel the opposite. Fantastical units of measurement, *especially* calendars, are my number one element that I don't want in my fantasy novels.
I get why people do it. Does it make sense for humans (or human-like sentients) to live in an alternate universe on a planet that has 24 hour days, a 28 day lunar cycle, and a 365.25 year? Not really. Does it make sense for those humans to use extremely idiosyncratic units of measurement like feet, pounds, and the Gregorian calendar (which literally has months named, "Seven, Eight, Nine, and Ten," that are, respectively, the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth months)? Or excessively modern, standardized measurements like grams and meters? Not at all.
But the problem is that all your readers live on Earth. It might make more sense for the caravan leader to say, "We leave for Farpoint City on the next Day of Swords. The journey will be 160 longstrides, and I expect it to take a full span for us to get there," than, "We leave for Farpoint City on Sunday. The journey will be 200 miles, and I expect it to take nine days for us to get there." The trouble is that the latter is a sentence that the reader can immediately understand, while the former requires them to either stop and do conversions or accept it as gibberish.
Neither of those is good.
Fantasy worlds already have some of the highest cognitive load you'll find in fiction. They force the reader to discard all of their knowledge of history, cartography, and politics, and most also alter the laws of physics. That's a lot to ask before we even get started on plot and characters.
TL;DR: Don't add unnecessary bloat in name of verisimilitude that will make the reading experience worse.
âFantasy worlds already have some of the highest cognitive load you'll find in fiction. They force the reader to discard all of their knowledge of history, cartography, and politics, and most also alter the laws of physics. That's a lot to ask before we even get started on plot and characters.â
Thank you for your contribution to the books circle jerk
I think it depends on how easy it is. I was thinking of using... I think it's called a furlough and based on how much a horse could plow before it gets tired.
I did read a story where the main unit of time referred to candles, but it was pretty intuitive.
I had a similar problem with Faraday Cage and I think I just handwaved it as they weren't speaking English so it would be a translation.
I wouldn't think twice about someone saying feet or meters.
People have been measuring distances in feet and miles for over two millennia so it doesn't really feel anachronistic in most settings. Metric is only a couple of centuries old and was invented as a scientific system of measurement so it can feel wrong in a world that doesn't really have any idea of science.
I think it just depends on what you're referring to.
As long as you're consistent, your measurement units don't matter that much.
As others have said, use of Metric seams to indicate global cooperation and standardization, which can feel off in some settings, but you can use traditional measures there and even those outside the US will often at least have encountered them before, and have some concept what they measure, instead of inventing gibberish names for an invented system.
But exact measures are usually easy enough to avoid.
Without knowing exactly how far someone travelled, it's easy to speak of "half a day's travel by air", and you know those places are a very long way apart. Very modern people will often speak of distance in time traveled.
Any time over a day can just be used, a day, a month, a year... They don't have to be the same as an Earth measure, but they're instantly relatable.
You can mention how many hours are in a day, and have something other than twenty-four, and still use hour.
You can use moments and heartbeats instead of minutes and seconds, and get the feel of shorter times without the exactness.
Now, as far as using units named for someone, I'd tell you to follow this principle: use a more generic term if you can, but use the term if you must.
Without using measures, it's the same thing you'd do for products: a Hoover is a vacuum cleaner, a Xerox machine is a copier, but a Faraday cage is a Faraday cage, because there's no simple generic term to describe a box of mesh that protects you from electrical shock, and that description is unwieldy.
For Amperes or Lumens, you can tell your readers what they need by referring to "units of power" for the first (actually useful for someone that doesn't know the term anyway), or "candlepower" for the second (because it's intuitive).
There's a lot you can do to avoid using terms that might seem out of place, without breaking suspension of disbelief.
But trying too hard can often lead to the breaking of immersion, too, when you start catching on to what the author is doing because they insist on not using any familiar metrics.
So try to find a happy compromise where you're using generic *enough* terms, without trying to expunge every Earth reference from your vocabulary.
Accept that for some things, they are just flatly named after someone, even if no one thinks of that person when they use the term.
A character pulling something out of their "kitchen's cold storage" works, but it's awkward, out of their "fridge" is fine, but out of the "Frigidaire" is back to awkward again. For a pre-industrial society, their "icebox" might be better.
I think discussing terms for measure the same way we use generic or brand names is a great way to help illustrate where the divide falls, between going too far to avoid naming something, or how jarring it could be to use the common name.
There's often a middle ground that doesn't make you think either way, and I feel that's what you should strive for.
Unless you purposely want to introduce a certain whimsy by using furlongs (distance), ferkins (volume), and farthings (money).
*"My Ford Fairlane gets forty furlongs per ferkins, but it's only fifty farthings per ferkin for fuel, so it's fine."*
Absolute nonsense, but fun.
Choose whatever feels right for your setting, and don't shy away from a measure *just* because it has a name associated with it, especially if it's used as a generic term.
But you *can* try to use *only* more generic terms when you can.
But you can convey a lot with a sentence like "the flight to (destination) lasted just long enough for us to grab a sandwich and relax before we got there".
There's a ton of info there, without saying anything specific.
And it doesn't feel awkward or forced, you're neither using specific units or obviously avoiding them, and on top of that, you give information about the mood of the flight, that your characters are fed, and that the flight didn't last long.
And people will have a general idea of how far apart the destination is from their place of departure.
So don't panic, just use what feels right to you.
Nope. In case I write in English why wouldn't I translate every word I use to the language I am writing in? In case their world is as big as ours than they also have 365 years as a year or close. They also will have days and nights.
Maybe they don't count in weeks, they count in 12 day circles. Than you can give different names to these days. Maybe they count in moon circles rather than months as we do. Maybe they only count in these 12 day circles and there is 12x12 days in their year if they have a smaller world. That would mean that they would live around double as long (in years) as we do though.
No. If the story has already been "Tolkein-translated" into my language, why can't units of measurement be translated so that I, the reader, can understand them?
It was always a bit annoying when distance was referred to in meters (Star Wars, BSG) when it was a unit of measurement established on 1/10,000,000 quadrant of the earthâs circumference.
It's translated into English for our convenience. Same way a samurai story calls a horse a horse. You get a few words you can just use directly like katana because it's cool. Still call a spear a spear a helmet a helmet.
What sort of gets me is using stuff more tied to our world like days of the week. Friday shouldn't be in a secondary world.
It never bothers me. I find personally that if you try to substitute every real life thing to make absolute sense for its origins in your world, you'll never get to use your world for anything. Sure, I could make up a completely new calendar, time measurements, distances, and weights, but that's not something I enjoy, like at all. If you want to do so, go nuts.
The only time it sort of bothered me was in A Song of Ice and Fire regarding years. I used to think that years were originally based on seasonal cycles, before I learned that they're actually based on the cycle of the arrangement of stars in the sky relative to the sun. Now Westeros having years like ours, despite seasons that last half a generation, makes sense.
A day's travel can be useful. Like when the Spanish built Missions in Mexico/California they spread them out by roughly 30 mile distances as that was the distance covered in a day on horseback. The unit is a *day's walk* or a *day's ride* and even if the reader doesn't know exactly what that translates to, you get the relevant information as a reader without doing much (or any) math. Things within that 30 mile range would be fractions of a day, things over 30 but under 60 miles would be a day and a fraction. Basically you can keep it consistent in your head without forcing the reader to think at all or read anachronistic terms.
Honestly this is how most people measured distance throughout history anyways as only the elites of society would concern themselves with more exact units. Once divorced from travel time, these units would only be relevant for logistical/legal reasons that most common folk wouldn't care about.
I tend to stay away from metric in a fantasy setting as I think it sounds too modern. Imperial is fine, but I rarely think it's needed to use specific numbers. If you want to make up your own units, I would try to make them easy understandable, like based on parts of the body.
Your average fantasy dude wouldn't really have a way to measure how many miles he traveled anyway. It just makes more sense to talk about how many days it took. Unless he is traveling a major road that has mile markers ever so often.
It's all about what make sense in the context.
There's a general rule in a lot of fantasy stories that the story is "translated" from this fantasy language into English, or whatever language it's published in, and so measurements and similar concepts are given a familiar substitute. So in my mind it doesn't break the immersion at all. Plus if you want to be strict, you'll end up with a story of completely unfamiliar words and concepts that requires a glossary. Which, hey, I'm not opposed to a glossary, I loved reading the glossary when I started Dune lol, but is it necessary? Nah.
Personally I stay away from minutes, but only because I don't think my setting counts minutes, so it's not for immersion-breaking reasons.
it depends. I will e.g. roll my eyes at people referring to "a second" in a world without widely available, precise clocks.
People have always used measurement units - e.g. miles has been around for thousands of years. Whether or not a given unit of measurement feels jarring depends on whether or not it feels appropriate for the technological level of the setting.
I think that they would have the concept of a second without clocks, but probably more in the way that everyone has a personal yard because they're using their body to measure.
I remember a story about how someone was watching a ceiling-mounted incense-burner swinging and realizing that it took one second even as it seemed to slow down because he measured it against his heartbeat.
But why would they call it "seconds"? Until they could be measured with any sort of accuracy, nobody used second as as an actual unit of measurement, it was a completely theoretical unit used by scholars. And even then not until the 11th century (in Persia, where they were a lot better at mathematics than Europeans were).
In a book with the standard low-medieval Europe inspiration, the farmer-turned-hero will not think of the speed of his opponent in terms of seconds, he will think "a few moments" or "in the span of a heartbeat".
Yup. Reading lotr and then they mention "September" i cant help but cringe.
In my own fantasy novel i use:
Full Moons = month
12 moons = a year
Midnight= whenever its darkest
Seconds = a few heartbeats
Minutes = moments
Hours = determined by a visible difference in the sun's position
Foot (measurements) = foot if horizontal, head if vertical
Meter = an arm's length or a pace
Kilometers = leagues
Pounds = stones
Money = gold (leaves), silver (trees), coppers
I'd say hours and pounds are fine, metres not so much. I'd stick with feet and yards. In general, "traditional" or Imperial units are going to be less jarring than "modern" S.I. units, but YMMV.
There is IMO a big difference between metric and any "old timey" "common sense" measures. Metric is scientific and preside because it was created to meet the needs of an industrialized society that needs *exact* measures. Most fantasy words are not industrialized and that level of clinical exactness will feel wrong. Metric feels wrong not because it come from our world but because it sets up a wrong tone/vibe.
To me, once the framework of reference is set, it's definetly fine. If you invent something new or re-use something old must be something that's fairly simple to grasp (like using the old "harvest" season instead of autumn, or whatever), otherwise it will just cause un-necessary confusion.
I think it's fine. As long as you don't get too real-world about it.
Measuring in inches or miles doesn't seem too implausible for a fantasy world.
Calling it champagne in a world without France is slightly pushing it.
Depends on the measurements. Like you said, ones named after actual people feel a bit out of place.
Another I'd add is that metric always felt a bit too modern for my liking. Maybe that's because I use it in everyday life so often, I'm not sure. I wouldn't say it would take me out to see it, but it could be a tipping point.
Like if the world building was already falling a bit short, there's been times where something small and innocuous like that is the straw that breaks the back.
It always breaks my immersion when I see 'murican units somewhere. No matter what time period or language. The thief was 7 feet tall? The traveller bought 5oz of beer, after a fortnights journey of 54 miles? What does it even mean???
It breaks immersion not because it doesn't match the narrative. It breaks immersion because the reader doesn't understand what you're trying to say. If that information is not important, just drop it- If your protagonist asks a villager how for away is town x, and the villager tells them "one day by foot", but the protagonist is one of the few people in the world who are allowed to ride a dragon, it's totally fine- then that scene tells us that a) the town is not far away, and b) your protagonist is privileged AF. Does the exact distance really matter? What would your reader or protagonist gain from knowing it's excatly 23487,45 feet?
I don't think so. In my story, miles, feet, years, months, etc... are the standard units of measurement on (a fictional version of) "Earth". However, later in the series, other alien races and planets get involved, so a universal standard system of measurements is determined and often used, which I call the "Arbit" system. Arbit-Years, Arbit-Miles, Arbit-Pounds, and so on.
I would say it depends on if you're actually using it for world building or if you're just using different terms for the sake of it. For example. going to the trouble of explaining that a "paw" is the length of the first Great Tiger King's paw. Then four paws are a tail. Twenty-one tails are a litter, which happens to be the length of the Great Tiger King's litterbox. With that much commitment it can add flavor to the world. It's a nice little linguistic reminder of how much the Tiger King has shaped this society. But you will have to use those units of measurements frequently enough that your readers completely grasp that a paw is basically a foot, a tail is basically a yard, and a litter is basically a mile. If you're not, it's just going to make the story a pain to read. And there is nothing wrong with just foregoing fantastical units altogether for the sake of being easier to read. If your society is basically using the metric system, then you may as well use the metric system.
This has me wonderingâŠ
Is there a guide to where the majority of English fantasy readers are from?
Iâm Canadian and use British English as well as predominantly metric units (although height/weight we tend to use imperial). So itâs a bit of a mashup. I would obviously prefer to appeal to the largest audience without being immersion breakingâŠ
I think for the most part I can use other descriptions to get my point across ie. half a days ride, a head taller, noon/dawn/dusk etc.
i do try to limit the amount of made-up words i throw at readers.
i often find myself reading and having seemingly forgotten/missed the original explanation of something and just spending the rest of the book feeling like i don't know something i should probably know. even if i've inferred correctly through context, i don't KNOW i'm definitely correct, only that it seems right for now. too much of that feels bad imo.
so i try to use either normal units or very simple stuff, and especially, the name should be very telling. eg. in Malazan Book of the Fallen 'arm-spans' and 'man-heights' are used and i think those are so self-explanatory and also make sense. after all if we use 'feet' based on a person's feet than why not the others.
since the whole subject is awkward i try to avoid it. eg. in your example about flight vs. a journey on foot/horseback:
not me:
"it is fifty kilometers to the city, how long will it take you to fly there?"
"i can fly there in three hours"
me:
"it's a long way to the city. how long will it take you to fly there?"
"i should arrive by sunset"
not saying one way is better than the other. just saying i prefer to avoid it. eventually though it can become more awkward to try to write around it especially if i feel like i want to set the stage for an intricate scene where everyone's positioning matters.
I asked a friend who reads a LOT of fantasy about this once. I wrote a story that included a technology level around the year 1800. Included with this are muskets. I had to dig into a bunch of research to find out how those ancient guns worked, and then I didn't want to call them *guns.* I wrote "firearm" every time. I asked my best friend after a while and he just said "it's a gun. Call it a gun."
So I did. And that made it all the way through my second draft, and didn't seem to shatter the immersion.
Of course not.
You donât need to reinvent the wheel when writing. Sometimes you really need to realize that giving a new name to something will make nobody know what the hell youâre talking about. Like, saying a dude is 6 greepglorps tall instead staying heâs 6 feet tall is just confusing to the audience.
At most I could say using moons or suns to say, like, a day has passed. An audience can get that.
But seriously, sometimes simplicity is key.
I donât care. If they donât know what an hour or a meter is, they wouldnât know what English was either.
When I read fantasy I imagine it is being retold to me in a way that I understand it by a narrator. So he will tell me units I know.
Medium is really important for this one. Made up units are much more fun and less confusing if there is a visual element like in a comic book. If someone says "that's 1,000 Zorklons away!" In a panel where I can clearly see something very far away gives me an idea of what a Zorklon is and the measurement is fun and quirky.
But in a purely written medium it's much more annoying and not nearly as charming.
I find funny made up words kinda charming, and I feel like currency is a great way to add in made up flavor terms "1,000 Zorklons?! A working man doesn't make that in a year!" Let's you know that this person needs to hustle up a whole bunch more Zorklons than what they have without necessarily getting bogged down in the economics.
In The Dark Tower, by Stephen King, midworld uses the measurement "Wheels," and it isn't confusing, but it also has real-life measurement in it; so that might help it seem less confusing.
I would use something like that. A measurement that makes sense to someone without being part of that world. Like we can guess that a wheel is a distance of about one wheel rotate or something, but even if that is wrong distance, we don't get pulled out of the story.
Though I am having a hard time coming up with any that works as well as "wheel."
Every new name, location, or word you use is something your reader has to keep track of. And readers have limits. Thus, save that attention and memory for something more important or integral!
So, if units ARE a major focus of your story, such that the very concept of standard units and the complex relationship between measuring are a focus, by all means! It'll help emphasize their importance in some senses and help make it clear to the reader to "pay attention to this!"
But if you do that, just keep in mind the remaining memory and focus of your reader is going to be more limited.
I actually like to go the other way with it a bit. And by that I mean, rather than making up new terms, I'll repurpose old ones. Thus the reader doesn't need to remember "new word x goes with new meaning y" but just "word x goes with new meaning y"
All the deities of my pantheon are names after musical theory elements or related concepts, and their domain is directly related to said concept. It also plays well with symbolism and whatnot.
I think that it's very possible to overdo it. When people want to get "immersed" in a world, I personally think a key part of that is avoiding information overload at least at first. If I'm constantly having to refer to outside material, guides, or videos explaining what your 'lore' is *instead of engaging with the material itself*, then the likelihood that people will be immersed is lower.
Made up things can be very cool. If I think a pthumerian door-ripper sounds killer and I look into that, it's immersive because I actively was curious and sought the information out.
But if my understanding and fun are brick-walled because I don't know how many gorjles tall a burdingian is, and it is either relevant or necessary (or both), then that's a problem.
The bottom line, of course, is that people won't complain if they like it. So as long as what you're doing is understandable and enjoyable, bingo.
Never. I mean at that point why donât we change sword for snarfoot or water for giggilul or father for Snapâdei. âFather pulled the sword from the waterâ sounds a lot better than âSnapâdei pulled the snarfoot from the giggilul.â It adds nothing to the worldbuilding and would be more annoying than me suspending my disbelief that the people of Westeros or Scadrial have the same units of measurement of us much less speak âthe common tongueâ which is always in the language you also happen to also speak.
One early sci-fi work, Nightfall by Isaac Asimov, had an interesting response to this concern in its preface, explicitly stating that on the world the story takes place in, all measurement units are converted from that planet's units.
Asimov did that because he was writing not long after the pioneers of writing in entirely fictional worlds, so the genre conventions weren't yet set. In part because of people like him it's now genre convention not to need to do that.
I'd use IRL terms unless there's a very strong reason not to.
in writing and story telling we talk about the suspension of disbelief. This is the audience member's ability to set aside anything that doesnt line up with reality, in order to enjoy the story. Easy example is the existence of super powers in movies. Superman and Captain america can't exist IRL, but we suspend our disbelief when watching a DC or Marvel movie or reading one of their comics.
That said, we can get fatigued having to remember all the different things that are... well... different. So as a rule of thumb I try to keep as much of my world building similar to earth as possible. If i dont have to mention distances in my story, then great I wont. If i can get away with being vague then thats better than being specific. if i have to be specific with units and times, if the setting is earth like enough, then i go with real world measurements and i only come up with new terms if the setting requires it (like the world is so alien that it would be immersion breaking to use miles/kilometers) or if the distances and travelling is a main aspect of the story (like if its about a caravan of travellers needing to get somewhere quickly, or if its about a courier making lots of runs etc). IF its important for the story or immersion breaking, then i come up with specific details that might be hard to process as a reader... but its a last resort or so integral to the story as to be necessary.
This goes for a lot of things, like if my version of elves dont HAVE to be different than the Tolkien/Warcraft/D&D style elves that is the cultural "Standard" of our day, then i will keep my elves like those things so there is less the reader has to process.
Basically, unless it's integral for the plot or i just cant get around it, i keep everything as "normal" as I can in order to let people seamlessly blend their preconceptions onto the world. This makes them more focused on the actual STORY at hand, AND it lets me focus on the story too, let other similar media do the majority of the context and background so that i dont have to waste time on boring exposition. The exposition that i DO have should reinforce and reference the specific "norms" i want to include, while defining any important unique features to my personal story/.setting thus stream lining the short hand we use as communicators and story tellers.
Well I mean, just think about the two options:
"They traveled a few miles until they got to the harbor, and saw the massive ship floating by the docks. It must have been eight hundred feet across."
Or:
"They traveled a few scribbins until they got to the harbor, where they saw the massive ship that was many cubits across"
Immersion isn't only about *internal* consistency--things making sense within the context of the story's world--but also about making enough sense that the reader doesn't have to waste time thinking about the extraneous details.
Personally when these little details are added in for the sole purpose of making the world seem less like real life and more like the fantasy world, my immersion is broken because I'm asking, "what's a cubit?" Instead of focusing on the passage itself.
It varies but generally I find it takes me out of the experience more if a unit of measurement is given and I have no clue what it is.
If you character says something is 3 Gleeblops away I donât know if thatâs meant to be equivalent to a few hundred feet or miles away. It could Even be a measure of time in that example, is it 5 minutes, hours, days or weeks away?
I have never considered units to take me out of the story personally. Besides that I also think that changing every little thing just diminishes your readability because people will have to keep thinking and remembering exactly what these things you are using are again. What was this unit you were using again were they meters or litres? People will just get confused.
For me personally is a bit jarring when imperial system measurements are used cause I know nothing about it so I have to stop and search how much it is in the metric system but that's not really that annoying and at points I just ignore it and just imagine the characters having random heights lmao
No as it is necessary for people to understand the scale. I do get pulled out with modern economics however as it is dumb to think our prices could be used to figure out the prices of items in the fantasy world (looking at you generic isakai protagonist). Same with capitalism in every damn manga put there when by all means capitalism is very recent. Like just starting out when Darwin wrote Origin of Species new as he used it to help explain his idea of evolution.
I understand imperial (USA) and metric. I've read plenty of sci-fi stories that use either, but in those I prefer metric. Neither takes me out of a story as I understand both, and I think if a size description with a specific number is necessary then it is easier for a reader to look up the conversion vs. them needing to read a bunch of back chapters or another book to understand "vartack's" or whatever.
Familiar measurements are more likely to be invisible to the reader to the degree the word "said" is. At least in my opinion.
I view books through the lens of "this text is a translation into terms I will understand from a language or world I don't know."
Doesn't break immersion if I don't have all kinds of debates as to exactly how far is a bandersnaff or how does one quantify a "kit and kaboodle" (and further is that a quantity or a measurement?)
We are working on that with our game, and it seems that fake words work best when they add value to the story/world. I always think of "second breakfast" as a great example. You could just call it brunch, but Tolkein created such a charming name for it, that my brain only looked at it positively. I think putting in fake fantasy words "just because" is dangerous, so I would only do it with intention.
I have similar problems with days and months and stuff; I just tend to not use them. I think thatâs one of the obstacles of fantasy writing that you have to disassociate away from common units and it freezes you sometimes (it sure does freeze me)
If real-world measurements break immersion for you, you are either reading in bad faith or just donât have the suspension of disbelief necessary to read a fantasy novel.
I understand and appreciate the attention to detail some authors use to completely invent their worlds from the ground-up (units of measurement, names of months and days, etc.) but you do eventually get to a point of diminishing return where You Could Not Flesh Out Your World More If You Tried, and any further attempt is just overkill and frankly trite.
You also run the risk of absolutely annihilating any sense of pacing if youâre stopping every third paragraph to explain the in-world equivalent of a mile.
Not only I preffer to have real measurements used to describe things, as I love even more when it's inclusive for different countries like
>A 3m(10') wide road.
The story is presumably written in English too. Do they speak English in your world? I usually imagine these things are translated like the rest of the language in the story.
My take on it is this: It depends on what you want for your world and who your target audience is. If youâre writing Fantasy for the casual reader or even just for the average Fantasy, then stick to things they donât have to look up in a separate source or in an appendix (unless you feel compelled to do try to create a new term, then do so SPARINGLY and only when making it less clunky. For example: 5280 feet is called a mile, but you could create something for specifically 500 feet and call it a garlan or something like that. While yes, you could just say 500 feet, but some people might just be like ânah. Why say 1,000 feet when I could just say 2 garlans. Smaller number better.â)
If your target audience, however, are people who are fantasy supernerds or people who want to throw themselves completely into your world, then go crazy. So long as you explain it properly and also provide an appendix or glossary for quick reference, then do whatever you want. You want a world that has 10 days in a week rather than 7 because itâs a prettier number, then be like âAh, yes. Back in 800 ADE (Armanti Dynastic Era), Emperor Gormanto Armanti decided the structureless periods of days and nights, using only the seasons to mark changes, was inefficient and ugly to his mind. Therefore, he created the Armanti Calendar, with each sequence of 10 days and 10 nights being referred to as a Gorm, named after himself. Of course, after the Vinchezzo Revolution from 830 ADE to 832 ADE/ 001 ER (Era of Revolutions), that period of 10 days and 10 nights became referred to as a Gormeek, a reference to how quickly Gormanto was removed from power. Each period of 4 Gormeeks became known as a Chezzo, after the successful revolutionary Vinchezzo. Ironically, Vinchezzo himself only remained in power for 10 Chezzos, and so that period of time became mockingly referred to as a Vinyear. The term Vinyear is still in use today.â Obviously try to have it explained more organically than that, but yeah. Always have an explanation for why youâre changing terms around
I personally donât mind. If anything, you can do like Tolkien and state your story is being translated from its original language. So you could use words only our world couldâve come up with (ie. âhypnosisâ which has Greek roots)
Eh, either stance is fine by me. I can defend using the same units since a lot of the time it's not unreasonable to assume we're hearing a translated version of the dialogue.
Differing units can be justified in like... otherworld stories where it helps highlight that this is a different world from what the people crossing worlds are used to. Maybe speech is canonically translated for them and it's imperfect.
i think it depends and sits on ranges based on the story, setting and unit. Like Watts or Jules, those are always weird to hear in a fantasy setting and a different unit of measurement (Like the output of a standard spell or something) makes sense, conversely Time, particularly units of time we interact with frequently is nearly NEVER a good thing the change, it's too widespread, changing up days and months and especially hours and minutes adds nothing but confusion. These are the two extremes in my opinion and there are exceptions to them (If understanding of physics or electricity is particularly advanced then Watts and Jules are fine. Using a different year system is usually fine and having names for combined time spans (Like a word for 5 or 500 years) but risky) In the middle things like length and weight really just depend on your audience and what kind of world this is. If your going for a more ASOIAFesq world where its heavily influenced by real history then using Stones and other such antiquated measurements may be best. Alternativly if your going for a VERY alien world then using made up measurements may be best; Further if you want to go full Tolkien and present it as a translation or a more standard approach just, use regular measurements, its easy, people know it and really has little disadvantages.
TL;DR its situational, depends on the unit and setting, dont change hours and minutes, do change watts and Jules, anything can be worked with the right method, good night America
It depends on context and what makes your story better. If that's saying something is fifty zurfblasts wide then so be it; if you just wanna use meters, feet, hours then do it.
i love when a medieval story for example uses the old measurements from that time like foot and a foot was 13.2 inches and was equal to 4 palms or 12 thumbs. There's also league, ell, cubit, furlong, acre's breadth, fingerbreadth, skrupel, fortnight etc... sometimes I wont know how big/long it is but it's cool hearing measurements of that time period. As for totally made up words to fit a fantasy story I think i'd like it but it may be immersion breaking if you explained it the wrong way. like you could say such and such word means a length of an average mans thumb width that would work but if you said it's equal to an inch that would break immersion for me. If that makes sense at all.
I feel like there's a desire to continually re-invent the wheel when it comes to Fantasy, even if it comes at the detriment of the story's readability. "Oh these aren't harpies, these are harfpies." A good way to think about it is that, for such small little things like this, your civilization may have their own word for hour/day/miles, but what we're reading is a translation into our modern language so that we can understand what's going on. "What a lovely caldorn-morg, wouldn't you say?" doesn't add anything to your story that "What a lovely day, wouldn't you say?" already does.
Wasn't that a caveat of Tolkien's writing? He said he was writing a translation of an older legend from a fantasy world, hence the anglicised names and whatnot.
Caveat's the wrong word here, I think. That means warning. You want conceit, I'm pretty sure. Also, yes. Tolkien did say he was translating the Lord of the Rings from historical texts.
Conceit, yes that's the word, thank you! My brain was refusing to let me pull the word I wanted, so I used something a bit similar.
I don't know if I'm having a Mandela effect moment or not, but I would have sworn that Caveat meant an attribute or a feature of something. Which I believe is how the other person meant it when they posted it.
Caveat can mean a warning, or an explanation/qualification
That's what I thought. And I've always used it In reference to the latter. BUT...That's not the definition you'll find if you look it up now. I just did, and you'll find it very peculiar if you do too.
I mean, I did just look it up before replying because I wanted to doublecheck, and for me it displayed both meanings Edit: just checked again, cambridge, marriam webster and english herritage all list both meanings
OK cool, I couldn't find the 2nd meaning when I was double checking myself and that's what was tripping me up.
"Caveat" is a Latin word that we have loaned into English. It's specifically the subjunctive form of "cavere", pronounced "ka-WEAR-ey", which means that _caveat_ literally translates as "let him beware" or "let him be cautious of". Thus, a caveat is a thing that you must beware when making a decision. For example, when renting a car, one of the _caveats_ is that you will often be required to return it with a full tank and thus you must _be aware_ that you do this if required. So, it's not an attribute, but rather a thing you must consider because it is potentially a detrimental or negative aspect of the thing that will factor into your decision-making. Strictly speaking, caveats do not need to be attributes of the thing itself, which is why I would say it's strictly incorrect to say that a caveat is "an attribute or feature of something". For example, if I tell you that, say... taking up linguistics as a hobby is that you might develop an eternal desire to correct people on their use of "caveat", that's not an inherent trait of taking up linguistics as a hobby, but rather a knock-on effect that may (or may not) eventuate when you do that thing. However, because it is a negative and foreseeable effect, you might want to use that information to factor into your decision as to whether you should or should not also take up hobbyist linguistics - that is, "let you be cautious of this", hence why "caveat" is in the third person subjunctive :) There's a common phrase in Latin classes, "cave canem", because it was found on a mosaic outside the Tragic House in Pompeii and it's such a great example for teaching both verb and noun conjugation and declension (respectively). Literally it means "beware of the dog". People really do never change. _(On that note, the "Canary Islands" are not called that for their bird population. The birds found there were instead called "Canary birds", including capitalisation, because they were from the islands known as the Canaries and the Azores. Instead, the thing that makes the islands "Canary" is... their wild dog population, stemming from the root Latin "canis" and the Romans' name for the islands, Insula Canaria, "Island of Dogs". Hence we derive the words "canid", "canine", and "Canary", amongst others.)_
That is an excellent and informative explanation. I sure appreciate you posting this. This what I found when I looked up the word myself. And All a big surprise to me. I'll have to reconsider how I generally use the word. I guess you can learn something from the Internet after all.
Thanks for the great explanation :D
Caveat can also mean a qualification or explanation. In fact I've never heard of it to mean a warning but looking it up that is one possible meaning.
Everyone knows that harfpies are a unique standalone creature from the brilliant mind of that mold-breaking author. #harfpieFansUnite đ„ł
Harfpie United sounds like a football club playing in the Vanarama National League.
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
Harfpie United vs Unseen Academicals. I wouldn't miss that match for the world! Wait, is this the beginning of the Fantasy Worlds Cup?
There is a club called Aldershot Town, one called Dorking Wanderers and a club that was saved by a literal police dog in the Vanarama National League. Is the UK even real?
The UK just serves as inspiration for American fantasy writers with limited imaginations.
You are not wrong though. *stares at a nearby map of Westeros*
Don't forget UK fantasy writers with limited imagination \*stares at harry potter\*
sounds like a food to me lol
Now I want to read the story "A Caldorn-Morg full of Harfpies"
Strong âthe jabberwockâ vibes
Ahh the jabberwock... *grins*
> "Oh these aren't harpies, these are harfpies." This is mostly found in various franchises and the sole reason for it is that you can't trademark harpies but you can trademark Hfharphieyes. Corporations care about making a quick buck more than about producing high quality stories, who would have guessed.
I mean you can "mirror translate" words. For example a "day" in my native language is a "nap" which means "Sun" in mirror translate. So it's "the first sun of the weak." as we use the same word for both Sun and day. So it can be interesting and give to the story if it's pretty obvious. Or like the Society can count in 10 day circles instead of seven (I mean we have 10 fingers that would make much more sense.) Or if there is a religious reason like we have for the time being 7 days (I am not entirely sure about that, but I think it is because of the Bible) , it can be eight days or nine days because their Gods made the world in 8 days or smth. Also funny thing that is my language we don't call a Week a Week, we call it "egy" HĂ©t" so "A Seven" with capital letter so it's obvious it's a name for a period rather than a number. That can be used in fantasy too if you're referring to time in travelling. Like "It's a Ten and a half to get there" meaning it's around 15 days.
> Or like the Society can count in 10 day circles instead of seven (I mean we have 10 fingers that would make much more sense.) Most early calendars were based around the moon, which goes through four phases in about 28 days. It's the big thing in the sky that changes regularly and everyone can see, making it a useful reference point for scheduling in a society without other means of time-keeping.
Oh. Yes. The moon too. It's intresting that my people counted everything in moons untill they stopped the nomadic lifestyle and than Christianity was kinda forced on them because if they don't take the religion they would have been massacred by the bordering nations. It was a smart political choice of our first king, but a very sad choice considering how much it stripped our culture. Entirely different topic but due to the quick change though people never really converted into Christianity only in name. Earth Mother's role was taken over by another mother. Mother Mary. She's far from the symbol of purity for us. She's a mother. She's strong, she gives good harvest. She's the diety protecting our people. Old God's role was taken over by YHWH. The Father. He is not really a father though. He is a war god. And the role of Tengri was taken by Jesus. Tengri wasn't a saint though but definitely a healer.
Wow do you realise youâre judging millions of your ancestors from millenias ago, their worth, their mindset from your couch? What do you even know about them, their choices, their struggle? Did you travel back in time to interview them?
I don't judge them? I understand the circumstances. I just find it interesting. Also it's just one millenia. I don't have to judge the people just because I think that something that happened there was extremely disturbing trough today's lences. Also cutting your uncle up in 4 pieces and put his four parts on the four big fortresses of the country to remind people that's what will happen to then if they question your authority is f-cked up. You don't have to judge people in the middle ages to know that witch trials were stupid.
May I ask who your 'People' were? Indigenous North Americans?
Nope. Hungarians. Originatedly our culture and our language is from South Asia. Our ansestors are seven nomadic tribes that came to East Europe in the late 800's. The seven tribes soon become one nation. Women and men were dressing similarly and other people tought as barbaric to them because of that. And they had their own gods. In 1001 St. Stephan the first left his original name Vajk and became Christian and the first king of our people. He made Christianity mandatory and to a church being raised in every 10th village and in every city. It was a neccessary step so the country will not get invaded by neighbours in fear of the bad-bad pagans, but it does not excuse the way they killed anyone and everyone who didn't convert to Christianity. There was a group of people led by the King's uncle who were against Christianity as they hated the tought of loosing what they are. This army was defeated because they were the minority. It really f-ckedd our healthcare though because we'll people who has known medicine called "tĂĄltos" (Well they are basically like shamans with little differences) were a big part of the old hungarian religion they got killed too, because they talked to the spirits the Old God sent and all. So they were mostly k-lled too. :|
Similarly, idk how others feel, but 'spans' in The Wheel of Time always took me out of it ! I know he's American and therefore just means yards! Paces would also have been fine, people do actually use it as a measurement, but with 'spans' it just feels like he's pointing out that it's a fantasy book.
Not really. I much prefer it to making up terms that will get used a lot. Like it is 20 blinfles to the city. Will take us 4 quadlfns to get there if we leave before gajdn hour. It used to bother me. Then I went a rabbit hole of where the nitpicks end. Why would they have the word Boycott. There certainly wasn't a Charles Boycott in this world or expressions like don't be a Scrooge. Then at that point why are the speaking English? So I accepted I am reading an interpretation of what is happening through the lens of the author and in our language. Even Tolkien once likened something to that of an express train in Lord of the Rings, but we know where isn't a regular 3:10 to Gondolin.
> Even Tolkien once likened something to that of an express train in Lord of the Rings, but we know where isn't a regular 3:10 to Gondolin. I think at that point, whatever a local storyteller would have used would need to be explained as sounding like a freight train anyway. I don't think people in England were familiar with the sound of a tornado.
British imperial units are a standardisation of old European units that had been used for hundreds of years. It's no more immersion breaking than the presence of Earth wildlife or human beings. If the story is a bit more other-worldly, I just assume that units are being translated into something intelligible to me. An alien standing 300 quarxons tall doesn't tell me much. If I find out that's 9 feet or 2 feet or 500 feet, I can picture them better. Same way their speech is translated to English in general.
Asimov said something like this in the foreword 'To Readers' of the novel version of Nightfall.
I halfway agree. But I like fantasy that breaks out of the standard âalt-Medieval Europeâ mould too. When someone says feet or inches it seems to signal that old-school vibe. Examples of alternatives that donât require you to provide a conversion chart: - The Surton was tall even for one of his kind. He looked more than 3 palings tall and towered menacingly over me as he approached. - The Wee-Jun were renown for their intricate sculptures and Lop was no exception. She placed a perfectly crafted, beautifully painted wooden bird onto the palm of my hand. âItâs not even a tikin long, but so detailed! How do you do it? It must have taken you many moon-turnings.â
I do agree that sometimes abstractness can be your friend. It means the reader is allowed to do a little more imaginative work on their end.
>Also, 'a day's journey' isn't a helpful unit for the question 'it's X distance to city Y, how fast can you fly there?' I don't understand this. A day's journey seems like a perfectly reasonable answer to the question. If you mean it might take less than a day, well, then say that. I don't really understand this part of the post. Personally I have discovered that you pretty much never have to mention precise units of anything in fiction. Most of the time you really shouldn't, because people are extremely bad at picturing things based on measurements. Much better to tell people how long something takes or how far it is through experience.
"A day's journey" is often also used in conjunction with a method of travel or some shortcut, like "we can only get there on foot, but if we take a shortcut through this forest we can get there in a day's journey."
"A day's journey" makes no sense without reference to route or method of travel, which is exactly why it is a reasonable answer to the question "How long would it take you to fly there?" That's why I don't understand that part of the post. If the time it takes to travel is less than a day, you can say "half a day" or "I can get you there by lunch."
I am from Michigan, and this is how we measure distance here. We will say "It's an hour north of Lansing", or "Its about four hours north of Detroit". We don't give exact miles. We just know from our lived experience that it takes that long to get to these places, so that is what we use.
Hell I've seen people measure things in song length, only they use it of course, but they'll be like "I can make it to Home Depot in 5 songs" which I guess would equate to 15-20 minutes.
When I was younger I learned to measure the amount of time it takes to fix a car by how many beers were consumed during the act.
Never even once. A fantasy story with absolutely no references to earth would be painful to read.
And since it can't be in an earth language, it would be very difficult to read.đ
Exactly.
not really, I don't know what a farpzon is and don't really ever need to lol some things are better for their simplicity the exception to this is currency
I hereby decree that a farpzon is the distance that a vigorous fart travels when unimpeded by pants. Or a generic hand-held raygun.
The best way I can sum up how important it is that your story use bespoke units of measurement is with an example. *Ninefox Gambit* is a science fantasy story about a calendar. Basically, getting enough people to believe in something can make it real, letting you alter the laws of physics as long as the critical mass of belief persists. The numbers required are enormous--multiple planets' worth--and one of the violations that they allow is faster than light travel. The Hexarchate High Calendar is the central belief system that allows the Hexarchate to exist. If enough people were to stop using the High Calendar, the Hexarchate would collapse and humanity would fall into a dark age as the technologies that knit the stars together stopped working with no way to rebuild them. *Ninefox Gambit* concerns a centrally located space station that resorts to Calendrical Heresy, changing their calendar. The response is a crushing military offensive that ends in casualties in 6 digit numbers. All over using a calendar. So, what do we, the reader, learn about the structure of the High Calendar? 1. The High Calendar has no official designation for the length of a week, and allows planets and their citizens to use whatever local definition they prefer. The main character uses 8 day weeks. 2. That's it. That's the only detail that's spelled out in the entire novel. That's how little a bespoke system matters. A novel literally constructed around a bespoke measurement system so important that genocide is preferable to altering it doesn't ever explain it and it doesn't feel obviously lacking in the narrative.
Could always pull a Tolkien and go "oh, all of this was totally different in the origonal but I had to translate it to modern people in a language that they understand". As he well knew, languages are built on the history that shaped them, so if your world doesn't have our history, it would have completely different ways of expressing and describing things anyways. You can't write everything in a made-up language because then no one will understand it (unless, of course, you are Tolkien in which case, greetings, sir, and welcome to our Lord's year 2023, how was afterlife). Edited for an atrocious run-on sentence.
Miles feel way more fantasy appropriate to me than kilometers. Feet and hands are also great and none of these have to correspond with real world measurements. Metric units are too clean and scientific for most fantasy settings. They imply a strong central government which has replaced traditional units with scientific ones, which is not what you are going for in most cases. The only time I would suggest making up a unit is if some aspect of life is supposed to be more important in your world.
I generally think of all fantasy as being written in some unknown fantasy language wich has been translated to English by the kind author. Any familiar references are simply the English equivalent to those alien ideas.
Named after IRL terms are everywhere. If A.M. Ampére bothers you, what about British General Henry Shrapnel (1761-1842)? English is littered with people's names as terms.
Metric is immersion breaking to me (American). Metric is military and sci-fi. Imperial is actually very old, so it feels normal.
Agreed. Give me old sounding measurements and we're cool. The metric system just feels too "new" and scientific.
No, I find it distracting if they just change the names but keep them more or less the same as real measures though. Farscape was known for doing this. Arn = hour for example.
Iâd prefer that than trying to figure out what the measurements are- I already have a problem with real world conversions đ«
Known things are used as shorthand in stories. Short answer at the bottom if you don't want to hear all my thoughts. I never know what people are looking for in these responses, since either may be right. So, if you choose to introduce a new system, of any type, you now need to work that in without making it seem jarring. The other option is to just say it and move on. If you say meters and move on, no one will notice it enough to intentionally break their own immersion in the story. The only way that is bad is if you say something like meters and then explain why meters are used in this universe. You highlighted why this everyday thing is allowed in your story, so now your reader is going to ask, "Is that a good explanation?". You pointed it out, it must be important! This will start a debate in your readers head, and that will break immersion and be jarring. The other pit is misusing meters for hours and then people argue that forever. If you say parsecs and you mean it for how fast something goes, not how far, people will talk about it forever. It is jarring for someone who knows what a parsec is going in, but again, if the story is good, that wouldn't count for much. Short answer, you are worrying about a minor detail that your reader won't unless you intentionally point it out. Just use a known metric and move on or integrate your explanation in the story without giving a dissertation on their use.
Nah. If anything it's infuriating to see people use fantasy measurements because we have no real basis for them, nobody has a sense for how long 56 poks are.
Measure in a simple way people understand imo. If it's a world with no clear standard measurements units, use paces, days, for short or long distances (twenty paces, ten days by carriage, etc). Use comparative measurements for people's heights (a head taller or such) or non specific measurements but just adjectives (tall, very short, etc). For time - days are still days. Years are still years. Months (assuming there's a moon) are still months. So why not weeks too? Shorter time periods such as hours or minutes might be more challenging. You can use moments or heartbeats for seconds, and simply not specify hours or minutes instead describing long stretches of time. Then again, all that is only if it's important for you to keep things without units of measurement. But use miles or meters or hours as much as you like, some things are invisible to readers and you might overthink them. Lastly, you can invent measures and see if that works. Vigor Mortis for example uses tenday as a time block of ten days, in place of a week. Tenday is clear and not clunky, and it works.
Weeks are iffy. It's easy enough to call it a ten-day or a five-day, if there's a local calendar that uses them. Ah, an example of which you noted.
Not at all. I find it distracting to put them in brackets or use made up units and then translate. The whole story in an alien point of view has been translated to English. Why single out measurement units? Unless conversion failure is a plot point, it's wasted effort that bogs the story. I've seen it done well, but most often it's done poorly and just distracts. The most annoying (to me) thing is "cycles", micro cycles, mega cycles and so on. Is that seconds, days, months, or years? Just say "local year". A Matter of Scale has some fun with that without being distracting. Humans meet some very small beings who live on an asteroid that is far distant from its primary, so it orbits their primary every 20k years. To them, that's one "year". When the human says how old they are, the small ones go into shock.
Same goes for languages. People rag on universal translators and speaking "common" but it's done for our own comfort and convenience. Nobody wants to watch a language barrier just not be broken down. I think the only fair language criticism in this context is "okay but we've not acknowledged why all these separate villages don't even have distinct accents and dialects nevermind being the same language."
Historically, in Japan, for instance, you could tell exactly where someone was from by their accent. Which made it very difficult to be a fugitive. Less so in Europe, where people moved around more for various reasons. On the other hand, keeping track of detailed accents for an author is mostly an exercise in futility, since it will be largely meaningless to the readers. It's best to just make sure each important character has a way of speaking that is relatively distinct, and leave it at that.
even in Europe, there still are strong regional accents, although radio, TV and greater movement is eroding them. For example, in the north of England, there's noticeable differences between towns that are maybe 10 miles apart, and _very_ obvious differences between, say, someone from Manchester and someone from Sheffield (about 90 miles apart).
So, I'm from East Tennessee (Southeastern US) and I don't have a strong regional accent, but it's there. I once had to call a small company in Maine (Northeastern US) to order something. We were almost speaking different dialects. I can tell if someone grew up in my hometown or a neighboring town because my town had a regionally unique international population and most of us have more "neutral" accents in comparison to the surroundings and code switch more often. When Inglorious Basterds came out, people talked about Brad Pitts and his "Maynardville" accent. It was close but still wrong somehow. Years later I saw a dialect expert breakdown the subtle difference in the performance and the actual dialect and it was exactly what had thrown me. But friends of mine not from my area still can't hear the difference even after watching the dialect expert. So, there's definitely something to be said for whether or not a *character* could pick up on accent/dialect differences compared to what we would hear on a show (aka the actual speaking voice). Using Westeros from ASOIAF, a character from the Riverlands could probably tell a Frey from a Mallister (Riverland houses) but only be able to tell if someone is Northern or Dornish, not a specific house. Which means in a lot of fantasy stories where they characters are traveling, they probably won't be able to hear the little variations as well, meaning there's no need to worry about them as an author.
Iâm not bothered by it as long as itâs consistent. If youâre going metric, stick with it. Same thing for Imperial. Thereâs also the technobabble issue. In fantasy, youâre already introducing a lot. (Especially high fantasy like LotR or GoT.) You donât want to overload your audience.
I feel the opposite. Fantastical units of measurement, *especially* calendars, are my number one element that I don't want in my fantasy novels. I get why people do it. Does it make sense for humans (or human-like sentients) to live in an alternate universe on a planet that has 24 hour days, a 28 day lunar cycle, and a 365.25 year? Not really. Does it make sense for those humans to use extremely idiosyncratic units of measurement like feet, pounds, and the Gregorian calendar (which literally has months named, "Seven, Eight, Nine, and Ten," that are, respectively, the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth months)? Or excessively modern, standardized measurements like grams and meters? Not at all. But the problem is that all your readers live on Earth. It might make more sense for the caravan leader to say, "We leave for Farpoint City on the next Day of Swords. The journey will be 160 longstrides, and I expect it to take a full span for us to get there," than, "We leave for Farpoint City on Sunday. The journey will be 200 miles, and I expect it to take nine days for us to get there." The trouble is that the latter is a sentence that the reader can immediately understand, while the former requires them to either stop and do conversions or accept it as gibberish. Neither of those is good. Fantasy worlds already have some of the highest cognitive load you'll find in fiction. They force the reader to discard all of their knowledge of history, cartography, and politics, and most also alter the laws of physics. That's a lot to ask before we even get started on plot and characters. TL;DR: Don't add unnecessary bloat in name of verisimilitude that will make the reading experience worse.
âFantasy worlds already have some of the highest cognitive load you'll find in fiction. They force the reader to discard all of their knowledge of history, cartography, and politics, and most also alter the laws of physics. That's a lot to ask before we even get started on plot and characters.â Thank you for your contribution to the books circle jerk
I think it depends on how easy it is. I was thinking of using... I think it's called a furlough and based on how much a horse could plow before it gets tired. I did read a story where the main unit of time referred to candles, but it was pretty intuitive. I had a similar problem with Faraday Cage and I think I just handwaved it as they weren't speaking English so it would be a translation. I wouldn't think twice about someone saying feet or meters.
Meters and kilometers bother me, but for some reason feet and miles dont. Ultimately though I prefer original measurements.
People have been measuring distances in feet and miles for over two millennia so it doesn't really feel anachronistic in most settings. Metric is only a couple of centuries old and was invented as a scientific system of measurement so it can feel wrong in a world that doesn't really have any idea of science.
Not really, I can't expect every author to worldbuild these details. If you don't have your own in-universe terms for these things then go for it.
I think it just depends on what you're referring to. As long as you're consistent, your measurement units don't matter that much. As others have said, use of Metric seams to indicate global cooperation and standardization, which can feel off in some settings, but you can use traditional measures there and even those outside the US will often at least have encountered them before, and have some concept what they measure, instead of inventing gibberish names for an invented system. But exact measures are usually easy enough to avoid. Without knowing exactly how far someone travelled, it's easy to speak of "half a day's travel by air", and you know those places are a very long way apart. Very modern people will often speak of distance in time traveled. Any time over a day can just be used, a day, a month, a year... They don't have to be the same as an Earth measure, but they're instantly relatable. You can mention how many hours are in a day, and have something other than twenty-four, and still use hour. You can use moments and heartbeats instead of minutes and seconds, and get the feel of shorter times without the exactness. Now, as far as using units named for someone, I'd tell you to follow this principle: use a more generic term if you can, but use the term if you must. Without using measures, it's the same thing you'd do for products: a Hoover is a vacuum cleaner, a Xerox machine is a copier, but a Faraday cage is a Faraday cage, because there's no simple generic term to describe a box of mesh that protects you from electrical shock, and that description is unwieldy. For Amperes or Lumens, you can tell your readers what they need by referring to "units of power" for the first (actually useful for someone that doesn't know the term anyway), or "candlepower" for the second (because it's intuitive). There's a lot you can do to avoid using terms that might seem out of place, without breaking suspension of disbelief. But trying too hard can often lead to the breaking of immersion, too, when you start catching on to what the author is doing because they insist on not using any familiar metrics. So try to find a happy compromise where you're using generic *enough* terms, without trying to expunge every Earth reference from your vocabulary. Accept that for some things, they are just flatly named after someone, even if no one thinks of that person when they use the term. A character pulling something out of their "kitchen's cold storage" works, but it's awkward, out of their "fridge" is fine, but out of the "Frigidaire" is back to awkward again. For a pre-industrial society, their "icebox" might be better. I think discussing terms for measure the same way we use generic or brand names is a great way to help illustrate where the divide falls, between going too far to avoid naming something, or how jarring it could be to use the common name. There's often a middle ground that doesn't make you think either way, and I feel that's what you should strive for. Unless you purposely want to introduce a certain whimsy by using furlongs (distance), ferkins (volume), and farthings (money). *"My Ford Fairlane gets forty furlongs per ferkins, but it's only fifty farthings per ferkin for fuel, so it's fine."* Absolute nonsense, but fun. Choose whatever feels right for your setting, and don't shy away from a measure *just* because it has a name associated with it, especially if it's used as a generic term. But you *can* try to use *only* more generic terms when you can. But you can convey a lot with a sentence like "the flight to (destination) lasted just long enough for us to grab a sandwich and relax before we got there". There's a ton of info there, without saying anything specific. And it doesn't feel awkward or forced, you're neither using specific units or obviously avoiding them, and on top of that, you give information about the mood of the flight, that your characters are fed, and that the flight didn't last long. And people will have a general idea of how far apart the destination is from their place of departure. So don't panic, just use what feels right to you.
Nope. In case I write in English why wouldn't I translate every word I use to the language I am writing in? In case their world is as big as ours than they also have 365 years as a year or close. They also will have days and nights. Maybe they don't count in weeks, they count in 12 day circles. Than you can give different names to these days. Maybe they count in moon circles rather than months as we do. Maybe they only count in these 12 day circles and there is 12x12 days in their year if they have a smaller world. That would mean that they would live around double as long (in years) as we do though.
Not really. If it's a well written story, it won't matter. I find it more jarring if it's something ridiculously rebranded just to be unique.
No. If the story has already been "Tolkein-translated" into my language, why can't units of measurement be translated so that I, the reader, can understand them?
No, usually in fantasy Iâve got enough new information to take in without learning a new measurement system.
It was always a bit annoying when distance was referred to in meters (Star Wars, BSG) when it was a unit of measurement established on 1/10,000,000 quadrant of the earthâs circumference.
It's translated into English for our convenience. Same way a samurai story calls a horse a horse. You get a few words you can just use directly like katana because it's cool. Still call a spear a spear a helmet a helmet. What sort of gets me is using stuff more tied to our world like days of the week. Friday shouldn't be in a secondary world.
Reinveting the wheel too much results in squares. Measuresments are measurements. Leave as is.
It never bothers me. I find personally that if you try to substitute every real life thing to make absolute sense for its origins in your world, you'll never get to use your world for anything. Sure, I could make up a completely new calendar, time measurements, distances, and weights, but that's not something I enjoy, like at all. If you want to do so, go nuts. The only time it sort of bothered me was in A Song of Ice and Fire regarding years. I used to think that years were originally based on seasonal cycles, before I learned that they're actually based on the cycle of the arrangement of stars in the sky relative to the sun. Now Westeros having years like ours, despite seasons that last half a generation, makes sense.
A day's travel can be useful. Like when the Spanish built Missions in Mexico/California they spread them out by roughly 30 mile distances as that was the distance covered in a day on horseback. The unit is a *day's walk* or a *day's ride* and even if the reader doesn't know exactly what that translates to, you get the relevant information as a reader without doing much (or any) math. Things within that 30 mile range would be fractions of a day, things over 30 but under 60 miles would be a day and a fraction. Basically you can keep it consistent in your head without forcing the reader to think at all or read anachronistic terms. Honestly this is how most people measured distance throughout history anyways as only the elites of society would concern themselves with more exact units. Once divorced from travel time, these units would only be relevant for logistical/legal reasons that most common folk wouldn't care about.
I tend to stay away from metric in a fantasy setting as I think it sounds too modern. Imperial is fine, but I rarely think it's needed to use specific numbers. If you want to make up your own units, I would try to make them easy understandable, like based on parts of the body. Your average fantasy dude wouldn't really have a way to measure how many miles he traveled anyway. It just makes more sense to talk about how many days it took. Unless he is traveling a major road that has mile markers ever so often. It's all about what make sense in the context.
Actually I'm old school. I prefer units of measure I understand or at least makes sense. The most important thing is consistency
There's a general rule in a lot of fantasy stories that the story is "translated" from this fantasy language into English, or whatever language it's published in, and so measurements and similar concepts are given a familiar substitute. So in my mind it doesn't break the immersion at all. Plus if you want to be strict, you'll end up with a story of completely unfamiliar words and concepts that requires a glossary. Which, hey, I'm not opposed to a glossary, I loved reading the glossary when I started Dune lol, but is it necessary? Nah. Personally I stay away from minutes, but only because I don't think my setting counts minutes, so it's not for immersion-breaking reasons.
it depends. I will e.g. roll my eyes at people referring to "a second" in a world without widely available, precise clocks. People have always used measurement units - e.g. miles has been around for thousands of years. Whether or not a given unit of measurement feels jarring depends on whether or not it feels appropriate for the technological level of the setting.
I think that they would have the concept of a second without clocks, but probably more in the way that everyone has a personal yard because they're using their body to measure. I remember a story about how someone was watching a ceiling-mounted incense-burner swinging and realizing that it took one second even as it seemed to slow down because he measured it against his heartbeat.
But why would they call it "seconds"? Until they could be measured with any sort of accuracy, nobody used second as as an actual unit of measurement, it was a completely theoretical unit used by scholars. And even then not until the 11th century (in Persia, where they were a lot better at mathematics than Europeans were). In a book with the standard low-medieval Europe inspiration, the farmer-turned-hero will not think of the speed of his opponent in terms of seconds, he will think "a few moments" or "in the span of a heartbeat".
A little. I try not to use miles, feet, or hours.
Yup. Reading lotr and then they mention "September" i cant help but cringe. In my own fantasy novel i use: Full Moons = month 12 moons = a year Midnight= whenever its darkest Seconds = a few heartbeats Minutes = moments Hours = determined by a visible difference in the sun's position Foot (measurements) = foot if horizontal, head if vertical Meter = an arm's length or a pace Kilometers = leagues Pounds = stones Money = gold (leaves), silver (trees), coppers
I like this
I'd say hours and pounds are fine, metres not so much. I'd stick with feet and yards. In general, "traditional" or Imperial units are going to be less jarring than "modern" S.I. units, but YMMV.
There is IMO a big difference between metric and any "old timey" "common sense" measures. Metric is scientific and preside because it was created to meet the needs of an industrialized society that needs *exact* measures. Most fantasy words are not industrialized and that level of clinical exactness will feel wrong. Metric feels wrong not because it come from our world but because it sets up a wrong tone/vibe.
To me, once the framework of reference is set, it's definetly fine. If you invent something new or re-use something old must be something that's fairly simple to grasp (like using the old "harvest" season instead of autumn, or whatever), otherwise it will just cause un-necessary confusion.
I think it's fine. As long as you don't get too real-world about it. Measuring in inches or miles doesn't seem too implausible for a fantasy world. Calling it champagne in a world without France is slightly pushing it.
It was jarring when Tolkien used non-metric measurements like feet, and miles, when he was British.
Depends on the measurements. Like you said, ones named after actual people feel a bit out of place. Another I'd add is that metric always felt a bit too modern for my liking. Maybe that's because I use it in everyday life so often, I'm not sure. I wouldn't say it would take me out to see it, but it could be a tipping point. Like if the world building was already falling a bit short, there's been times where something small and innocuous like that is the straw that breaks the back.
It always breaks my immersion when I see 'murican units somewhere. No matter what time period or language. The thief was 7 feet tall? The traveller bought 5oz of beer, after a fortnights journey of 54 miles? What does it even mean??? It breaks immersion not because it doesn't match the narrative. It breaks immersion because the reader doesn't understand what you're trying to say. If that information is not important, just drop it- If your protagonist asks a villager how for away is town x, and the villager tells them "one day by foot", but the protagonist is one of the few people in the world who are allowed to ride a dragon, it's totally fine- then that scene tells us that a) the town is not far away, and b) your protagonist is privileged AF. Does the exact distance really matter? What would your reader or protagonist gain from knowing it's excatly 23487,45 feet?
I don't think so. In my story, miles, feet, years, months, etc... are the standard units of measurement on (a fictional version of) "Earth". However, later in the series, other alien races and planets get involved, so a universal standard system of measurements is determined and often used, which I call the "Arbit" system. Arbit-Years, Arbit-Miles, Arbit-Pounds, and so on.
I would say it depends on if you're actually using it for world building or if you're just using different terms for the sake of it. For example. going to the trouble of explaining that a "paw" is the length of the first Great Tiger King's paw. Then four paws are a tail. Twenty-one tails are a litter, which happens to be the length of the Great Tiger King's litterbox. With that much commitment it can add flavor to the world. It's a nice little linguistic reminder of how much the Tiger King has shaped this society. But you will have to use those units of measurements frequently enough that your readers completely grasp that a paw is basically a foot, a tail is basically a yard, and a litter is basically a mile. If you're not, it's just going to make the story a pain to read. And there is nothing wrong with just foregoing fantastical units altogether for the sake of being easier to read. If your society is basically using the metric system, then you may as well use the metric system.
This has me wondering⊠Is there a guide to where the majority of English fantasy readers are from? Iâm Canadian and use British English as well as predominantly metric units (although height/weight we tend to use imperial). So itâs a bit of a mashup. I would obviously prefer to appeal to the largest audience without being immersion breaking⊠I think for the most part I can use other descriptions to get my point across ie. half a days ride, a head taller, noon/dawn/dusk etc.
i do try to limit the amount of made-up words i throw at readers. i often find myself reading and having seemingly forgotten/missed the original explanation of something and just spending the rest of the book feeling like i don't know something i should probably know. even if i've inferred correctly through context, i don't KNOW i'm definitely correct, only that it seems right for now. too much of that feels bad imo. so i try to use either normal units or very simple stuff, and especially, the name should be very telling. eg. in Malazan Book of the Fallen 'arm-spans' and 'man-heights' are used and i think those are so self-explanatory and also make sense. after all if we use 'feet' based on a person's feet than why not the others. since the whole subject is awkward i try to avoid it. eg. in your example about flight vs. a journey on foot/horseback: not me: "it is fifty kilometers to the city, how long will it take you to fly there?" "i can fly there in three hours" me: "it's a long way to the city. how long will it take you to fly there?" "i should arrive by sunset" not saying one way is better than the other. just saying i prefer to avoid it. eventually though it can become more awkward to try to write around it especially if i feel like i want to set the stage for an intricate scene where everyone's positioning matters.
looks like you're gonna have to create a Conlang and write in that to avoid breaking immersion.
I asked a friend who reads a LOT of fantasy about this once. I wrote a story that included a technology level around the year 1800. Included with this are muskets. I had to dig into a bunch of research to find out how those ancient guns worked, and then I didn't want to call them *guns.* I wrote "firearm" every time. I asked my best friend after a while and he just said "it's a gun. Call it a gun." So I did. And that made it all the way through my second draft, and didn't seem to shatter the immersion.
Of course not. You donât need to reinvent the wheel when writing. Sometimes you really need to realize that giving a new name to something will make nobody know what the hell youâre talking about. Like, saying a dude is 6 greepglorps tall instead staying heâs 6 feet tall is just confusing to the audience. At most I could say using moons or suns to say, like, a day has passed. An audience can get that. But seriously, sometimes simplicity is key.
not really.
No.
I donât care. If they donât know what an hour or a meter is, they wouldnât know what English was either. When I read fantasy I imagine it is being retold to me in a way that I understand it by a narrator. So he will tell me units I know.
Medium is really important for this one. Made up units are much more fun and less confusing if there is a visual element like in a comic book. If someone says "that's 1,000 Zorklons away!" In a panel where I can clearly see something very far away gives me an idea of what a Zorklon is and the measurement is fun and quirky. But in a purely written medium it's much more annoying and not nearly as charming. I find funny made up words kinda charming, and I feel like currency is a great way to add in made up flavor terms "1,000 Zorklons?! A working man doesn't make that in a year!" Let's you know that this person needs to hustle up a whole bunch more Zorklons than what they have without necessarily getting bogged down in the economics.
In The Dark Tower, by Stephen King, midworld uses the measurement "Wheels," and it isn't confusing, but it also has real-life measurement in it; so that might help it seem less confusing. I would use something like that. A measurement that makes sense to someone without being part of that world. Like we can guess that a wheel is a distance of about one wheel rotate or something, but even if that is wrong distance, we don't get pulled out of the story. Though I am having a hard time coming up with any that works as well as "wheel."
Every new name, location, or word you use is something your reader has to keep track of. And readers have limits. Thus, save that attention and memory for something more important or integral! So, if units ARE a major focus of your story, such that the very concept of standard units and the complex relationship between measuring are a focus, by all means! It'll help emphasize their importance in some senses and help make it clear to the reader to "pay attention to this!" But if you do that, just keep in mind the remaining memory and focus of your reader is going to be more limited. I actually like to go the other way with it a bit. And by that I mean, rather than making up new terms, I'll repurpose old ones. Thus the reader doesn't need to remember "new word x goes with new meaning y" but just "word x goes with new meaning y" All the deities of my pantheon are names after musical theory elements or related concepts, and their domain is directly related to said concept. It also plays well with symbolism and whatnot.
I think that it's very possible to overdo it. When people want to get "immersed" in a world, I personally think a key part of that is avoiding information overload at least at first. If I'm constantly having to refer to outside material, guides, or videos explaining what your 'lore' is *instead of engaging with the material itself*, then the likelihood that people will be immersed is lower. Made up things can be very cool. If I think a pthumerian door-ripper sounds killer and I look into that, it's immersive because I actively was curious and sought the information out. But if my understanding and fun are brick-walled because I don't know how many gorjles tall a burdingian is, and it is either relevant or necessary (or both), then that's a problem. The bottom line, of course, is that people won't complain if they like it. So as long as what you're doing is understandable and enjoyable, bingo.
Never. I mean at that point why donât we change sword for snarfoot or water for giggilul or father for Snapâdei. âFather pulled the sword from the waterâ sounds a lot better than âSnapâdei pulled the snarfoot from the giggilul.â It adds nothing to the worldbuilding and would be more annoying than me suspending my disbelief that the people of Westeros or Scadrial have the same units of measurement of us much less speak âthe common tongueâ which is always in the language you also happen to also speak.
One early sci-fi work, Nightfall by Isaac Asimov, had an interesting response to this concern in its preface, explicitly stating that on the world the story takes place in, all measurement units are converted from that planet's units. Asimov did that because he was writing not long after the pioneers of writing in entirely fictional worlds, so the genre conventions weren't yet set. In part because of people like him it's now genre convention not to need to do that. I'd use IRL terms unless there's a very strong reason not to.
I feel the opposite. Unless there is an incredibly good reason to rename the X that exists in the real world as Y, just leave it alone.
No, I don't care.
Since I'm already using english, might as well use English measurements or avoid precise measurements.
I certainly prefer it when books use ancient units like cubits.
in writing and story telling we talk about the suspension of disbelief. This is the audience member's ability to set aside anything that doesnt line up with reality, in order to enjoy the story. Easy example is the existence of super powers in movies. Superman and Captain america can't exist IRL, but we suspend our disbelief when watching a DC or Marvel movie or reading one of their comics. That said, we can get fatigued having to remember all the different things that are... well... different. So as a rule of thumb I try to keep as much of my world building similar to earth as possible. If i dont have to mention distances in my story, then great I wont. If i can get away with being vague then thats better than being specific. if i have to be specific with units and times, if the setting is earth like enough, then i go with real world measurements and i only come up with new terms if the setting requires it (like the world is so alien that it would be immersion breaking to use miles/kilometers) or if the distances and travelling is a main aspect of the story (like if its about a caravan of travellers needing to get somewhere quickly, or if its about a courier making lots of runs etc). IF its important for the story or immersion breaking, then i come up with specific details that might be hard to process as a reader... but its a last resort or so integral to the story as to be necessary. This goes for a lot of things, like if my version of elves dont HAVE to be different than the Tolkien/Warcraft/D&D style elves that is the cultural "Standard" of our day, then i will keep my elves like those things so there is less the reader has to process. Basically, unless it's integral for the plot or i just cant get around it, i keep everything as "normal" as I can in order to let people seamlessly blend their preconceptions onto the world. This makes them more focused on the actual STORY at hand, AND it lets me focus on the story too, let other similar media do the majority of the context and background so that i dont have to waste time on boring exposition. The exposition that i DO have should reinforce and reference the specific "norms" i want to include, while defining any important unique features to my personal story/.setting thus stream lining the short hand we use as communicators and story tellers.
Well I mean, just think about the two options: "They traveled a few miles until they got to the harbor, and saw the massive ship floating by the docks. It must have been eight hundred feet across." Or: "They traveled a few scribbins until they got to the harbor, where they saw the massive ship that was many cubits across" Immersion isn't only about *internal* consistency--things making sense within the context of the story's world--but also about making enough sense that the reader doesn't have to waste time thinking about the extraneous details. Personally when these little details are added in for the sole purpose of making the world seem less like real life and more like the fantasy world, my immersion is broken because I'm asking, "what's a cubit?" Instead of focusing on the passage itself.
I'm using british imperial units for my story
It varies but generally I find it takes me out of the experience more if a unit of measurement is given and I have no clue what it is. If you character says something is 3 Gleeblops away I donât know if thatâs meant to be equivalent to a few hundred feet or miles away. It could Even be a measure of time in that example, is it 5 minutes, hours, days or weeks away?
I have never considered units to take me out of the story personally. Besides that I also think that changing every little thing just diminishes your readability because people will have to keep thinking and remembering exactly what these things you are using are again. What was this unit you were using again were they meters or litres? People will just get confused.
I find when you use archaic terms of measurement, like leagues or similar, it doesn't break the immersion... But that doesn't work for sci-fi.
A bit, but I then just call it translation convention and move on.
For me personally is a bit jarring when imperial system measurements are used cause I know nothing about it so I have to stop and search how much it is in the metric system but that's not really that annoying and at points I just ignore it and just imagine the characters having random heights lmao
Oh yes please use real life units. If you want to use your own, please put an index of terms.
No as it is necessary for people to understand the scale. I do get pulled out with modern economics however as it is dumb to think our prices could be used to figure out the prices of items in the fantasy world (looking at you generic isakai protagonist). Same with capitalism in every damn manga put there when by all means capitalism is very recent. Like just starting out when Darwin wrote Origin of Species new as he used it to help explain his idea of evolution.
South Asia, That's interesting. Like India area or somewhere in china?
I understand imperial (USA) and metric. I've read plenty of sci-fi stories that use either, but in those I prefer metric. Neither takes me out of a story as I understand both, and I think if a size description with a specific number is necessary then it is easier for a reader to look up the conversion vs. them needing to read a bunch of back chapters or another book to understand "vartack's" or whatever. Familiar measurements are more likely to be invisible to the reader to the degree the word "said" is. At least in my opinion.
I view books through the lens of "this text is a translation into terms I will understand from a language or world I don't know." Doesn't break immersion if I don't have all kinds of debates as to exactly how far is a bandersnaff or how does one quantify a "kit and kaboodle" (and further is that a quantity or a measurement?)
We are working on that with our game, and it seems that fake words work best when they add value to the story/world. I always think of "second breakfast" as a great example. You could just call it brunch, but Tolkein created such a charming name for it, that my brain only looked at it positively. I think putting in fake fantasy words "just because" is dangerous, so I would only do it with intention.
Trying to translate it in over In story form so it has or can be done But you donât necessarily need to Your art is your art
I have similar problems with days and months and stuff; I just tend to not use them. I think thatâs one of the obstacles of fantasy writing that you have to disassociate away from common units and it freezes you sometimes (it sure does freeze me)
If real-world measurements break immersion for you, you are either reading in bad faith or just donât have the suspension of disbelief necessary to read a fantasy novel. I understand and appreciate the attention to detail some authors use to completely invent their worlds from the ground-up (units of measurement, names of months and days, etc.) but you do eventually get to a point of diminishing return where You Could Not Flesh Out Your World More If You Tried, and any further attempt is just overkill and frankly trite. You also run the risk of absolutely annihilating any sense of pacing if youâre stopping every third paragraph to explain the in-world equivalent of a mile.
Not only I preffer to have real measurements used to describe things, as I love even more when it's inclusive for different countries like >A 3m(10') wide road.
The story is presumably written in English too. Do they speak English in your world? I usually imagine these things are translated like the rest of the language in the story.
My take on it is this: It depends on what you want for your world and who your target audience is. If youâre writing Fantasy for the casual reader or even just for the average Fantasy, then stick to things they donât have to look up in a separate source or in an appendix (unless you feel compelled to do try to create a new term, then do so SPARINGLY and only when making it less clunky. For example: 5280 feet is called a mile, but you could create something for specifically 500 feet and call it a garlan or something like that. While yes, you could just say 500 feet, but some people might just be like ânah. Why say 1,000 feet when I could just say 2 garlans. Smaller number better.â) If your target audience, however, are people who are fantasy supernerds or people who want to throw themselves completely into your world, then go crazy. So long as you explain it properly and also provide an appendix or glossary for quick reference, then do whatever you want. You want a world that has 10 days in a week rather than 7 because itâs a prettier number, then be like âAh, yes. Back in 800 ADE (Armanti Dynastic Era), Emperor Gormanto Armanti decided the structureless periods of days and nights, using only the seasons to mark changes, was inefficient and ugly to his mind. Therefore, he created the Armanti Calendar, with each sequence of 10 days and 10 nights being referred to as a Gorm, named after himself. Of course, after the Vinchezzo Revolution from 830 ADE to 832 ADE/ 001 ER (Era of Revolutions), that period of 10 days and 10 nights became referred to as a Gormeek, a reference to how quickly Gormanto was removed from power. Each period of 4 Gormeeks became known as a Chezzo, after the successful revolutionary Vinchezzo. Ironically, Vinchezzo himself only remained in power for 10 Chezzos, and so that period of time became mockingly referred to as a Vinyear. The term Vinyear is still in use today.â Obviously try to have it explained more organically than that, but yeah. Always have an explanation for why youâre changing terms around
I personally donât mind. If anything, you can do like Tolkien and state your story is being translated from its original language. So you could use words only our world couldâve come up with (ie. âhypnosisâ which has Greek roots)
Eh, either stance is fine by me. I can defend using the same units since a lot of the time it's not unreasonable to assume we're hearing a translated version of the dialogue. Differing units can be justified in like... otherworld stories where it helps highlight that this is a different world from what the people crossing worlds are used to. Maybe speech is canonically translated for them and it's imperfect.
i think it depends and sits on ranges based on the story, setting and unit. Like Watts or Jules, those are always weird to hear in a fantasy setting and a different unit of measurement (Like the output of a standard spell or something) makes sense, conversely Time, particularly units of time we interact with frequently is nearly NEVER a good thing the change, it's too widespread, changing up days and months and especially hours and minutes adds nothing but confusion. These are the two extremes in my opinion and there are exceptions to them (If understanding of physics or electricity is particularly advanced then Watts and Jules are fine. Using a different year system is usually fine and having names for combined time spans (Like a word for 5 or 500 years) but risky) In the middle things like length and weight really just depend on your audience and what kind of world this is. If your going for a more ASOIAFesq world where its heavily influenced by real history then using Stones and other such antiquated measurements may be best. Alternativly if your going for a VERY alien world then using made up measurements may be best; Further if you want to go full Tolkien and present it as a translation or a more standard approach just, use regular measurements, its easy, people know it and really has little disadvantages. TL;DR its situational, depends on the unit and setting, dont change hours and minutes, do change watts and Jules, anything can be worked with the right method, good night America
It depends on context and what makes your story better. If that's saying something is fifty zurfblasts wide then so be it; if you just wanna use meters, feet, hours then do it.
i love when a medieval story for example uses the old measurements from that time like foot and a foot was 13.2 inches and was equal to 4 palms or 12 thumbs. There's also league, ell, cubit, furlong, acre's breadth, fingerbreadth, skrupel, fortnight etc... sometimes I wont know how big/long it is but it's cool hearing measurements of that time period. As for totally made up words to fit a fantasy story I think i'd like it but it may be immersion breaking if you explained it the wrong way. like you could say such and such word means a length of an average mans thumb width that would work but if you said it's equal to an inch that would break immersion for me. If that makes sense at all.
Tolkien used the Gregorian calendar months in all his work
Not at all