As you put your world together, ask yourself how your people divide themselves up. Is it by town? By side of town (other side of the tracks, etc.)? Is it by larger geographical region? Is it by profession? By upper and lower class?
So what is Pragmatics? Basically, it deals with those areas of meaning which aren’t really meaning. What does that mean? It deals with implications (in the lingo, “implicature”), and with presuppositions, and with using language to do things rather than just send messages.
Morphology is a fantasy and science fiction writer’s best friend. Seriously. Why? Because everyone uses it, and I mean everyone, whether they know it or not. Every story that makes up a name for a group of people and then pluralizes it is using morphology. Every story that takes a nice-sounding made-up word and then adds on a suffix to make the name of a country or city is using it too.
Articulatory phonetics deals with how the human vocal tract creates sounds.
Knowing the principles of how the vocal tract works can help science fiction and fantasy writers to create languages that follow naturalistic patterns of pronunciation, thus making created languages that seem more natural.
This sequence of “How ____ can help you!” pieces concerns various areas of linguistics. These aren’t intended to be technical, or even introductory discussions of linguistics itself. They are short, practical pieces which relate linguistics topics to the use of created languages in science fiction and fantasy.
The second volume in the Aurora Award-winning and World Fantasy Award-nominated Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction series offers readers the essential collection of
outstanding works by Canadians from the past year.
S.B. Divya is a lover of science, math, fiction, and the Oxford comma. She is the Hugo and Nebula nominated author of Meru and Machinehood. Her stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and she is a former editor of Escape Pod.
