Fantasy counterpart culture

[dr_whom]

A common trope in fantasy literature is the Fantasy Counterpart Culture—the fictional nation in a fictional world that's obviously based on the culture of some real-world nation. A few examples are basically indistinguishable culturally, politically, and even geographically from their real-world counterparts, except for having the names changed: e.g., Galen Beckett's Altania and swan_tower's Scirland are both England; Guy Gavriel Kay's Sarantium is Constantinople and his Kitai is China.

Though the names are changed, though, they're usually not changed very much—e.g., characters in Altania and Scirland have English-sounding names like Ivy Lockwell and Isabella Camherst, while characters in Kitai are called Ren Daiyan and Lin Shan. And this is quite sensible, in serving to give the counterpart culture a consistent and familiar sound. But it's not necessary, of course—and I'd kind of like to see the opposite sometime. I think it'd be amusing to see how long it would take a reader to realize that a story's setting was based on China if the characters were called things like Godfrey and Erica Phipps (or that it was based on England if their names were Tang Weixing and Song Huan).

Comments

[thekinginyellow.livejournal.com]

[I am writing this from an expensive shipboard Internet connection, which means that I'm not going to do Google research in order to fill in factual gaps. Apologies. I'm sure most of the relevant data is easily acquired.]

Fun Fact:

In its earliest instantiation, one of the classic respectable translations of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms -- the one with an introduction by Rafe de Crespigny -- replaced all the characters' names with absurd, foppish, hyphenated British aristocratic-sounding names. I think there was a preface explaining that Westerners bounced off the book primarily because of the hundreds of characters with foreign-sounding often-similar Chinese names, and Thank God We've Fixed That.

It was...unfortunate. Cao Cao, if I remember correctly, was "Murphy-Shackley." Lu Bu was "Bullard-Lunmark." Zhuge Liang was "Orchard-Lafayette."

(I read this in early high school. I've tried to find it several times since, and always failed; I've come across the same translation many times, it's one of the standards, but always with regular transliterated names. I think the Weird British Edition was pretty much buried in shame.)

[striderhlc.livejournal.com]

I can kind of understand the desire- too many names in foreign phonics eventually become alphabet soup to me, too- but I can't help but feel that there must have been a better way to address the issue. :/

- HC

[theevilgenius.livejournal.com]

I suspect this is the kind of thing that comes off better if you have both cultures in the story and can demonstrate that it was on purpose. Otherwise the wrong message might be sent...

[dr_whom]

Yes, probably true.

[qnmark.livejournal.com]

One of my conworlds (http://qnmark.livejournal.com/14013.html) does this: the culture is more or less based on Song China, and while I do use material from other parts of the world I try to avoid Western elements, but the language is phonologically very similar to English. It is not syntactically like English, but the phonotactics looks like English, and the names largely look like someone tried spelling English phonemically. Some of the names have similar meanings to common Chinese names... but instead of Li you get Hiins (/hi:ns/), instead of Zhang you get Bunkler (/ˈbʊnk.ləɹ/), instead of Jin you get Freid (/fɹeɪd/), etc.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine did something like this in a story we critiqued; it didn't exactly work. Not only did he give the characters Latinate names, but he avoided all the obvious "China" signifiers (like chopsticks and so on) -- and the result was that none of us picked up on the fact that he was using China as his basis in the first place. The connections were all buried so deeply, they certainly weren't recognizable to anybody not deeply steeped in Chinese history, and for all I know not to anybody other than the author himself. It read pretty much like Eurofantasy.