Heap Many Moons - The Way Primitive Peoples Don't Really Talk

We've all encountered old-fashioned idea of how "primitive" peoples speak: "Heap many moons we hunt buffalo," or some such nonsense.  After all, primitive people must speak a primitive language, right?

Of course not.  Even setting aside the question of how primitive the cultures in question are, there's really no such thing as a primitive language.*  Every language expresses precisely what its speakers need to express.  A language spoken by a nomadic tribe of herders and hunters might not have technical words for scientific or sociological concepts, but it'll have vocabulary that enables people to talk about a whole range of concepts, emotions and relationships that are important to them — many which can't be clearly expressed in English or other majority western languages.

The "heap many moons" style of speech is a very simple example of pidgin, a type of language that arises when people from different cultures need to communicate on a basic level.  It's usually for trade, but pidgins can be heard whenever Britons or Americans abroad are trying to make themselves understood to "foreigners who have the nerve not to speak English".

Where the contact is regular and long term, a pidgin can develop regular rules and vocabulary, and eventually, given the right circumstances, children might start growing up speaking nothing else.  At that point, it goes through a metamorphosis into a creole, a language that's flexible and rich enough for its speakers to say whatever they need to.  There are creolised languages from the Caribbean to the Pacific, and many are elegant and expressive.

All languages intended as the primary means of expression for a people are tailored exactly to what that people needs.  Whether or not the Inuit really have fifty words for snow,** they can certainly talk about snow in a lot more detail than a people whose language has evolved on the equator.

What a language does or doesn't have inevitably reflects what matters to the society.  Many of the Australian Aboriginal languages didn't have counting systems at the time Europeans first arrived.  This wasn't stupidity — if you rarely see more than a handful of any given object, including people, why would you need to count?  As soon as the concept was introduced to them, it took a remarkably short time for this gap to be filled.

On the other hand, many of them have degrees of sophistication in their grammar that European languages can't match.  English, for instance, has one way of expressing the first person plural pronoun — we (with the variants us, our and ours).  Some languages, though, (including Old English) distinguish between whether you're saying I and you or I and they.

This might seem strange to those of us whose languages have done without it, but it's actually a distinction between two very different concepts.  If you tell someone "We're meeting at eight o'clock," you might mean "We're meeting — you can make it, right?" or "Us lot — we're meeting up.  Just saying."  In English, we have to rely on tone and context to make it clear which we're saying, but it can be a useful distinction to make.

On the other hand, in many of those Aboriginal languages that didn't have counting systems there might be up to a dozen different ways of saying we, depending on exactly who the other person is, whether they're related to the speaker, whether or not they have the same Dreaming.  In these societies, it's vitally important to clarify these issues, and the languages have developed incredibly complex grammar to accommodate that need.

A similar, though simpler, concept that occurs in many European languages is the distinction between the familiar and formal versions of the second person pronoun.  This will be known to anyone who's learnt French, German or Spanish.  In French, for instance, you'd address a close friend or family member as tu and a more casual acquaintance or stranger as vous, while  German has equivalents for both the singular and plural forms.

English used to make this distinction, too, using thou and you, but thou has died out, except in a few dialects.  There are various theories for why this should have happened, but the effect (if not the reason) is that English-speakers don't have any of the complex social niceties needed to use this particular grammatical form.

The history of language is littered with abandoned grammar that once expressed vital concepts.  Early forms of the Indo-European language family, which includes almost all European languages,*** had not only a singular and plural, but also a dual number.  This may originally have been used to express any two things, though by the time it reached classical Greek it was only used for specific pairs: the eyes, the ears, egg and bacon, Simon and Garfunkel and so on.

On the other hand, the abandonment of the dual may reflect a fundamental change in how we view the relationships between things.  For us, there's an obvious difference between one and all other numbers, and that forms an essential part of the patterning of our minds.  There's a mathematical justification, of course, since one really does behave in ways that are different from every other number.  On the other hand, two is also a unique number, the only even prime, and viewing doubleness as a thing apart in the same way as singleness may have been integral to how those societies saw the world.  Perhaps it explains why triple deities are so common, if three was the first plural number.

What a language does or doesn't include can have an enormous effect on a society.  To return to classical Greek, there was a simple but far-reaching linguistic habit among the Greeks.  The language had two little words (men and de) that could each be slipped in as the second word of a clause to set it up in opposition to another clause or sentence.  You could roughly translate men as "on the one hand" and de as "on the other hand", but such little words could be used without the clunkiness of the English phrases.

It's unlikely to be a coincidence that the language which adopted this structure was spoken by a people who essentially introduced philosophy and logic to the west.****  Whether the structure nurtured a logical frame of mind or the impulse for logic created the structure (or a bit of both), a naturally dialectical language was perfectly adapted for Socrates, Plato and the rest to debate philosophy.

From subtle relationships to logic to high-tech (or even talking about snow), all languages are rich and expressive in the concepts their speakers care about — and, as long as they're human, that will certainly include a full suite of emotions and imagination.

If the hero(ine) in your story meets a primitive tribe, by all means show communication difficulties between them, but don't make the mistake of believing that really is how they speak or think, any more than your hero does.  They're probably too busy gossiping about the stranger who doesn't know the first thing about their way of life to bother with all those heap many moons.

 

* Not among any known human society, at least.  Various species of animals may have very simple languages — prairie dogs, for instance, appear to have a vocabulary of a few dozen words to tell each other about food and danger — and these would qualify as primitive languages.

** I'm fairly sure I've come across a debunking of that, but I'm not certain.

*** Except for Finnish, Estonian, Lappish, Hungarian, Turkish, Maltese, Basque and some minority languages in Russia.

**** It's often said that the Greeks "invented" philosophy.  Of course, the Chinese and Indians also "invented" it, and no doubt other cultures did too, but however dubious that claim might be, the Greeks certainly originated the western tradition of philosophy.

We'll Have a Yabba-Dabba-Dystopia

Today marks the publication of the latest edition of PlasmaFrequency, including my "flintpunk" story The Petrologic Engine.

Flintpunk? Well, let me explain how this story came to be. As you probably know, the "punk" genres have really taken off in recent years. It started with cyberpunk, but it was steampunk which really set the pattern, with its concept of retro-future science and technology — steam-powered spaceships, clockwork robots and the like. The range has varied from mannerpunk to dieselpunk — I'm just waiting for someone to come up with "punkpunk".*

A while ago, I took part in a writing challenge to write a story in one of the punk genres. Since I don't believe in doing things by halves, I came up with my own: flintpunk, retro-futurism set in the Neolithic age.

So what do I mean by flintpunk? Well, I have been known to describe it as "a serious, dystopian version of the Flintstones". Imagine if the Neolithic age had progressed to modern-level technology and social structures, but without ceasing to be Neolithic. Megavillages instead of cities; multi-storey roundhouses instead of skyscrapers; shardcasters instead of guns. And megafauna operating machinery, but no dinosaurs, of course. Cavemen and dinosaurs side by side only really work in the context of a kids' cartoon**.

It's not a good society, though, and I think that makes sense too. Creating a modern-style society out of Neolithic resources isn't going to be as easy as making one out of the resources we have, and it's going to need a very strong, centralised government. Strong, centralised governments have a way of getting paranoid and deciding that the ends justify the means.

And the Petrologic Engine of the title? Sorry, you're going to have to read the story to find out what that is.

I thought I was being very clever inventing flintpunk, till I discovered that there's already a recognised genre called stonepunk. On the face of it, they're much the same thing, but not entirely. Most of the works I've seen cited as examples of stonepunk don't seem to have the retro-future aspect, but are simply fantasies or semi-fantasies set in a stone age society, such as Jean M. Auel's Earth's Children series.

The Flintstones have also been cited. As we've seen, they have retro-future technology, but a cosy family setting hardly qualifies for the "punk" aspect. Though I'd certainly watch a version where Bedrock is a police state, and the Flintstones and Rubbles are members of the resistance. Perhaps Pebbles and Bam-Bam have been brainwashed at school into spying on their parents. Perhaps Dino is really a government agent. The possibilities are endless.

But that's another story. I'm pleased with the way The Petrologic Engine turned out, and especially that a magazine I respect seems to agree. Maybe I'll return to the megavillage sometime for more flintpunk, though only if a good enough story comes to me. Maybe flintpunk will come to be acknowledged as the name of a genre — the same as I'm still hoping for flintlock & sorcery, which I coined for The Treason of Memory. I seem to like flint, don't I?

 

* And I'm sure one of you is going to tell me that someone already has.

** Or in the context where no-one's looking at anything except Raquel Welch's fur bikini.

Plasma Frequency Issue 14 is on sale from today in print, Kindle, ePub or PDF format. Besides The Petrologic Engine, it features work from Jes Rausch, Andrew Knighton, DeAnna Knippling, Damien Krsteski, Jamie Lackey, Sylvia Anna Hivén, Nicole Tanquary, John Zaharick, Steve Coate and Frances Silversmith, with a beautiful cover by Jon Orr.
 

Nation or Tribe?

A hundred years ago, it all seemed very simple.  Europe had always had civilised nations, and the this description was grudgingly extended to a few other cultures — China, India, the Middle East — where it couldn't sensibly be denied.  Everywhere else, especially sub-Saharan Africa and pre-Columbian America, had primitive tribes, and that was that.

This view of the world has been largely eroded among historians and lay-people informed enough to seek out the better kind of historical documentary*, but it's still a common enough belief, and it's alive and well in the worlds fantasy writers create.  You have your civilised, sophisticated nations menaced by your primitive tribes. Nations have cities, tribes have settlements; natives have kings (if they're not republics), tribes have chiefs; nations have laws, tribes have customs; nations have religions, tribes have superstitious rituals.

But that's a gross oversimplification, caused partly by cultural bias and partly by misunderstanding about what's genuinely necessary for civilisation.

History is written by the winners, and so is the definition of civilisation.  From Rome to the Conquistadors to the colonial powers of the 19th and 20th centuries, conquerors have essentially said "The definition of civilisation is anything exactly like us.  These people aren't like us, so they can't be civilised."

Except that they also ignore or make excuses for all evidence to the contrary.  A good example of this is the ruins of Great Zimbabwe (right) in the modern country of the same name.  Until relatively recently, it was generally accepted that this must have been an Arabic outpost.  There was absolutely no evidence to support the idea, except that "Africans couldn't build structures like this, therefore it couldn't have been African in origin."

Which, of course, is nonsense.  There were highly developed ancient civilisations from the upper Nile to West Africa, not to mention the Egyptians, who were at least as much an African civilisation as a Mediterranean one.  It's become increasingly clear that the civilisation who built Great Zimbabwe spread widely through south-eastern Africa, including a major Indian Ocean trading port, and was completely local in origin.

This process of marginalising other cultures has been repeated throughout the world, sometimes cynically and deliberately, sometimes from genuine lack of understanding about what is and isn't necessary for a society to be called a civilisation.

Fundamentally (and linguistically) civilisation means a society that's at least partly urbanised, and urbanisation has to start with a food surplus.  A society that can afford to feed people not directly involved in food-production can begin producing specialists: artisans, traders, artists, soldiers, priests, nobility, royalty.  Urban life also requires a level of organisation impossible under "tribal chiefs" or "tribal elders".

There have to be centres of concentrated population, but these don't have to look exactly like a modern city, or even the modern concept of an ancient city.  There's a tendency to put an undue emphasis on stone or brick buildings, for the simple reason that they leave the most obvious remains.  The traces left by wooden or mud structures are hard to detect, but these can actually be just as effective building techniques for their time and place and don't in any way indicate a "lower" level of society.

The way history has always been taught, for example, says that the "barbarian"** peoples of Gaul, Britain and Germany had no cities before the Romans "civilised" them, partly because the Romans said they didn't and partly because no impressive stone buildings have been found.  What they did have were "hill-forts" like Maiden Castle (left) in Dorset.  These are often thought of as purely defensive structures, but Maiden Castle, for instance, was an area of around 47 acres, surrounded by a palisade and earthworks containing within it homes, workshops and numerous other specialist buildings.  It's believed to have been the seat of a powerful ruler who dominated the countryside all around.

In other words, a king in his city.

In much the same way, our comparisons of social institutions between traditionally civilised and traditionally uncivilised societies tend to be skewed by our preconceptions.  Many cultures, for instance, believe that disease is caused by spirits or demons, and it's easy to smile at the naivety.  Consider, though: they believe the cause of disease is invisible entities invading the body.  So do we.  They use the words spirt and demon, we use the words virus and bacteria, but they're all just labels put on things most of us have never actually seen.

Of course, I'm not implying these cultures have a sophisticated microbiology of their spirits and demons, and I'd certainly rather be in the hands of a modern hospital than of a shaman.  Then again, I wouldn't be that thrilled about being treated by a western doctor from the 1950s, either.  The point is that the assumptions we make about the relative value of beliefs are rarely disinterested.

Or take military forces.  The Zulus who faced the British army in South Africa are often characterised as just a horde of warriors — of course, what else could African natives be?  In fact, the Zulus had one of the best organised and disciplined armies in history, which developed out of a highly sophisticated civilisation.  It just didn't look like a European civilisation or a European army.

Human civilisation is far more common than is often assumed.  It's found all over Asia and Africa, and not just in the admitted-by-necessity areas.  The Cambodian city of Angkor***, which flourished during the European middle ages, is now believed to have been as extensive as modern New York City, while pottery dating evidence suggests that civilisation may have arisen in West Africa even earlier than in its traditional cradle, the Middle East.

The Americas were full of civilisation.  Everyone knows about the Aztecs, Maya and Incas, who are allowed the status of bizarre, barbaric civilisation, but they were the tip of the iceberg.  There was a swathe of civilised cultures from Bolivia up to the Mississippi, rising and falling, interacting and replacing one another.  The Mississippi culture, whose capital was in roughly the same location as St Louis, was one that took sophisticated archaeological techniques to find because it built in wood and earth rather than stone, but it had every hallmark of civilisation.

It wasn't the only one north of the Rio Grande.  It's no accident that many of the Native peoples refer to themselves as nations.  Many, such as the Iroquois, were anything but primitive in their organisation.  I've also read that the east coast of what became the USA was not only heavily populated before the smallpox epidemic devastated it, but its people left many intact towns and villages, which the settlers merely moved into.  I haven't been able to confirm this from an authoritative source, but I'd be intrigued to know more about it.

There are societies, of course, who fit the description of "tribes", and this isn't necessarily a bad thing.  Cultural success, like evolutionary success, can involve either adapting the environment to your needs or adapting yourself to the environment.  Many peoples have had no need for civilisation, because they're perfectly adapted to live in their surroundings.

Still, next time you're tempted to dismiss a culture as primitive because it's nothing like your own, try walking around and looking at it from all angles.  You might be surprised how civilised it really is.

 

* I can heartily recommend the BBC series Lost Kingdoms of Africa, Lost Kingdoms of South America and Lost Kingdoms of Central America.

** The word barbarian is simply the anglicised version of the Greek word for foreigner, which didn't necessarily imply lack of civilisation.  The Romans used it rather liberally considering that they, according to the original meaning, were barbarians themselves.

*** The best-known part of the city, the stunning temple of Angkor Wat, was only its centrepiece, like the Vatican within Rome.

Interview with Barbara A. Barnett

My guest today is another contributor to the Unburied Treasures anthology, writer and musician Barbara A. Barnett.

Many thanks for agreeing to appear on my blog. Can you tell us something about yourself? Who is Barbara when she's not writing?

Thanks for having me!

Non-writing Barbara can probably best be summed up thusly: orchestra librarian, singer, theater nerd, mediocre pianist, mediocre clarinet player, coffee addict, wine lover, bad movie mocker, obsessive organizer, and all-around geek.

Well, that'll do to be going on with. So how long have you been writing, and what kinds of things do you like writing best?

I've been writing since I was a kid. When I was about 8 years old, I wanted my mom to come watch an adventure I had concocted for my stuffed animals to act out, but she was busy and told me to go write it down. So I did. After that, writing down every nutty idea that popped into my head seemed the natural thing to do. But it wasn't until about a decade ago that I got truly serious about it and started writing on a regular basis.

Most of my work falls under the speculative fiction umbrella—fantasy and horror and a smattering of science fiction. The occasional quirky mainstream piece has been known to sneak in there as well. That's what I love about writing short fiction: from piece to piece, I can jump all over the place in regards to genre, tone, topic, and style.

Your mother sounds like a wise woman. I wonder if she knew what she was starting.
Your story in the Unburied Treasures anthology, 7:74 pm, is certainly an example of jumping all over the place: a strange tale, part SF and part surrealism. What inspired you to write it?

"7:74 p.m." grew out of a writing exercise where the prompt was to come up with a story inspired by what seemed to be a rather nonsensical bit of text included in a piece of spam mail:

"The visitor was no longer alone in the bedroom. The second armchair was now occupied by the creature who had materialised in the hall. He was now to be seen quite plainly–feathery moustache, one lens of his pince-nez glittering, the other missing. But worst of all was the third invader because they’re completely incompetent. Pulling the wool over the boss’s eyes, that’s what they’ve been doing!’ ‘Drives around in a free car!’ said the cat slanderously, chewing a mushroom. Then occurred the fourth and last phenomenon at which Stepa collapsed entirely, his weakened hand scraping down the doorpost as he slid to pttsumtspkssusufshrurmrurnnqririss."

After some Googling, I discovered that the spam mail text actually consists of two excerpts from an English translation of The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. But when you take two excerpts out-of-context, mash them together mid-sentence, and add a string of random letters at the end ("pttsumtspkssusufshrurmrurnnqririss" is definitely not Bulgakov), the result doesn’t make a heck of a lot sense—and fittingly, neither did my first draft of "7:74 p.m." The challenge in revisions was to create an actual story out of the weirdness the FrankenExcerpt inspired.

An entirely new genre, perhaps — nonsense-spam fiction.

Your stories have appeared in several publications that turn me green with envy. Can you tell us something about your publications and what's coming up?

I have a flash story called "Dream Logic" that will be appearing in Daily Science Fiction sometime in the near future (exact publication date TBA). And last month my story "The Girl Who Welcomed Death to Svalgearyen" was published as part of The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine, Year Five, which I'm thrilled about since BCS is one of my favorite fantasy mags.

Absolutely. I'm curious about your select writers' group Star-Dusted Sirens is intriguing. How did that come to be, and what's its mission (apart from domination of the universe, of course)?

A friend of mine wanted to start a small critique group, so she asked me and two other Philadelphia-area writer friends, and thus the Star-Dusted Sirens were born. We meet once a month to critique each other’s work, talk shop, offer each other support, and engage in silly shenanigans. And somewhere along the line we decided to start a blog where we could babble about the writing topics that interest us, from diversity in fiction, to the craft of writing, to poop. Because yes, I wrote about poop. I’m classy like that.

Well, I'm sure it was classy poop.

And, speaking of class (not poop), I see from your bio in Unburied Treasures that you've attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop. That must have been awesome. Can you tell us something about it?

Odyssey was intense, amazing, exhausting, intimidating, invigorating, loads of fun, and and one of the best things I could have done for myself as a writer. I applied because I felt like I had hit a peak in my writing and needed some serious dig-to-the-guts feedback in order to up my game. What I learned about the craft and my strengths and weaknesses as a writer was exactly the kind of experience I was after. And as a bonus, I came away with some great friendships and continue to make more as I meet Odyssey graduates from other years of the program.

What are you writing at the moment (besides this blog, obviously)?

Right now I've got a few short story revisions on my plate: a fantasy story inspired by a NOVA special I watched on Iron Age bog bodies found in Ireland and elsewhere, a horror story involving a puppet farm, and a surreal magical realism sort of thing that keeps threatening to break my brain. I also have a major novel rewrite that I keep threatening to get back to. But short story ideas keep distracting me, because they're shiny and pretty and I like to play with them.

I know the feeling. Many thanks for talking about yourself and you work on my blog.

If you want to find out more about Barbara and her writing, you can read all about her on her website, as well as on the aforementioned Star-Dusted Sirens.

Details of where you can buy a copy of Unburied Treasures can be found on this page.

Ten Dilemmas Where Your Spellchecker Won't Help

A spellchecker is a great tool — as long as it's used in conjunction with a human brain. It's main shortcoming, of course, is that it can't read your mind. It doesn't know what you meant to say; it can only tell you whether the word you've used exists. Even if it's completely the wrong word.

The problem is that a great many people — including many writers — appear oblivious to this and seem to put complete faith in their spellchecker. The result is that inexcusable typos abound now, even in publications that should know better.*

Here are a few of the most notorious. I haven't included any where the error is actually a widespread misunderstanding about the right word to use (such as lie/lay). These are all mere laziness.

It's/its: One of the two most notorious examples. For the record, it's is short for it is or it has, while its is the possessive form (like my or his) — It's broken loose from its chains. Part of the confusion here is that we tend to expect a possessive to have an apostrophe-s, but remember that other possessive pronouns, such as his, hers or yours, don't have an apostrophe.

There/their/they're: The other of the two. There is used either for a direction or simply to indicate something — There is a man over there. Their is the possessive, just like its — They prepared for their departure. They're is short for they are — They're going to regret their decision to go there.

Lose/loose: This typo is strangely widespread, since the words have not only different meanings but different pronunciations. I'm afraid I'll lose my life. This strap is too loose. Simple. If you find yourself using the wrong one, just stop and think a moment each time you write either.

Bear/bare: One means carry, endure or (with no connection) a large mammal. The other means naked. Someone determined to accept their hardships stoically might talk about how they'd bear everything. If they were intending to bare everything, they might get arrested — at least if they did it in public.

Where/wear/were: Where can be used in various ways, but always indicating place. Where is it? This is where it is. The place where we started. Etc. Wear is either what you do with clothes or it indicates deterioration. The clothes you're wearing show a good deal of wear and tear. Were (which isn't even pronounced the same in most accents) is the past tense plural of the verb to be. Where are the clothes you were wearing?

Hoard/horde: Particularly relevant in fantasy. Dragons have a hoard of treasure; barbarians attack in hordes. A piece of trivia: horde derives from a Turkic word for army, which is also the source of the language name Urdu, originally the lingua franca of the army in India.

Wary/weary: I'm not sure if this is simply a typo, as I've fairly often heard these mixed up in speech. Wary means cautious; weary means tired. There's no connection between them.

Reign/rein/rain: Reign is what a king or queen does; rein is what guides a horse; rain is what falls from the sky whenever you arrange an outdoor event. One case where I often see a confusion here is when people write the phrase giving free reign. It's actually giving free rein — in other words, slackening off the reins to allow the horse to choose its own route.**

Lead/led: This is one that even the BBC's website gets wrong. You lead a horse to water (pronounced leed), but if you did it yesterday, you led a horse to water. However, the metal that's pronounced exactly the same as led is spelt lead. Confused? So are the hordes (not hoards) of people who think the past tense of lead is spelt identically. Incidentally, bear (not bare) in mind that Led Zeppelin may have been one of the greatest bands in the world, but they couldn't spell for toffee.

Effect/affect: There's some justification for getting confused about these words. In the most common meaning, the noun is effect (cause and effect) while the verb is affect (How does this affect the matter?). However, affect can also be a noun meaning an emotion, while it's possible to effect an escape. You really just have to learn these, or else look them up every time.

These are just a few of the multitude of typos your spellchecker won't pick up. The answer? Have a good dictionary*** with you whenever you're writing, whether it's a book or a computer program, and use it if you have any doubt at all.

Not that I'm saying you shouldn't use a spellchecker. As I said at the start, it's a great tool, but it can't do your work for you. A hammer's a great tool as well, but you don't expect it to hammer in nails by itself. A tool is something to be used, not relied on.

 

* If there are any apparently careless typos in this piece, they're simply deliberate mistakes for you to spot. Honest. Really.

** It's been pointed out that the other spelling actually makes sense, which I don't dispute, but it's not actually the same sense as the original phrase.

*** And I mean a good one. There are plenty of questionable dictionaries out there, especially on line. You're best sticking with an edition of the Oxford Dictionary, although Collins and Chambers also publish good ones. The only good one I know in the US is Merriam Webster, though I'm sure there are others.

Etymology, Folk Etymology & Blind Guesses

Some years ago, I went on one of those tourist-trap boats on the Thames. The guide kept up the usual cheery chatter, and one of the pieces of "information" he gave us was that the word wharf is actually an acronym, standing for Ware House At River Front. I was immediately dubious about that, and sure enough, when I checked, I found that it actually comes from the Anglo-Saxon word hwearf, meaning much the same as the modern word.

It's possible that the acronym began as a mnemonic (it's not an easy word to remember how to spell) but somewhere along the line that was forgotten and it got taken as the word's origin. That's unlikely anyway, since using acronyms as words is a relatively modern phenomenon.

Folk etymology is everywhere, though, and people will insist on telling you completely invented origins for words which they believe implicitly. Another often claimed to be an acronym is news, for North East West South (presumably because the more common order would result in the word nsew). In fact, it's more prosaic than that. The word quite literally means "new things", as when we ask someone "What's new?"

It's very easy, too, to make assumptions about words that seem similar, especially when the meanings are compatible too, but that doesn't always prove a connection. The number of possible sound-combinations isn't infinite, and some will appear in languages all over the world. The problem is, they've often come to that point by very different routes.

A while ago, someone on an online forum claimed that the word devil is (not might be, but is) related to the Sanskrit word devi, meaning a lesser god. On the face of it, that's entirely possible: it wouldn't be the only time the gods of one religion have been turned into the devils of another.

Except that it isn't true. A brief look at the history of devil shows that it comes from the Old English deofol, and that derives from the Latin diabolus and the Greek diabolos, from which we get diabolic (trust me: b and f really are closely related sounds). The original word means an accuser or slanderer, and clearly has no connection with the Sanskrit word.

This kind of thing even happens within the same language. It can produce good puns: for instance, if we think of rock music as something to do with stones (as Dylan said, everybody — especially rock musicians — must get stoned). However, where rock as in stone comes from French roche and Latin rocca, rock meaning sway (which is how the music got its name) is a Germanic word, roccian in Old English. No connection whatsoever.

On the other hand, the opposite can sometimes happen, and the most bizarre links can exist between apparently unconnected versions of the same letter-jumble. One of my favourites is check. This has numerous different meanings: to make sure something's OK, to stop something's progress, a pattern of squares or (spelt cheque here in Britain) a bank's promissory note, as well as several others.

Which makes it more surprising that they all derive from exactly the same source: the Persian word for king, usually rendered as shah. It entered the English language via its use in chess — when you call out check, you're essentially saying "look to your king", while checkmate means "the king is dead". All the other meanings are ultimately references to or metaphors for some aspect of chess or of putting the king in check.

This happened because words change their meanings through the centuries, sometimes causing confusion. We all know, and usually accept without thought, the saying "the exception that proves the rule", without considering that it's absurd. After all, an exception to a rule challenges the rule, rather than confirms it.

But that's precisely what the saying really means. The word prove used to mean test (it's still found in that sense in military proving grounds) and the expression means that an exception tests whether a rule is still valid — not a confirmation, but still a valuable scientific process.

For example, we have a rule that says "An object will fall to the ground when it's suspended in mid-air." "Ah," someone objects, "but when I threw a stone, it went up, not down." You then explain at length the precise difference between suspending and throwing, possibly demonstrating both with the objector. The rule is neither tested nor affected.

"Ah," says someone else, "but I suspended (not threw) a balloon in the air, and that floated up."

This is a much more valid objection, and we actually have to rephrase the rule to say "An object that's heavier than air will fall to the ground when it's suspended in mid-air." The original rule has been proved in the old sense, but definitely not proved in the new sense.

Ultimately, of course, it's not a big deal if someone misunderstands the origin of a word. The problem is the internet. The flip-side of having all the information we might need at our fingertips is that it's not all true, and once something's been stated as fact online, it can be incredibly difficult to convince people that they shouldn't believe it.

There's a very simple answer to this: get a good dictionary, whether it's on your bookshelf or on your computer. And I mean a GOOD dictionary, not joebloggsonlinedikshonary.com. Something like the Oxford or Collins Dictionaries (or I imagine Merriam Webster if you're in America) will give the source of each word, as far as it's known, at the end of the entry. Five minutes with the Concise Oxford Dictionary would have told you everything I've put in this article, and a great deal more.

You too can be an etymologist, instead of a folk etymologist.

Writers Who Made Me What I Am

Some time ago, I wrote a blog on Ten Authors Who've Changed My World, looking at a few of the authors who've had most effect on me over the years. For this post, though, I thought I'd have a more inclusive look at my early influences. Nothing precise, but I don't think I'll be including anything that I discovered past my mid-twenties.

It's not comprehensive, obviously. As Bob Dylan put it, Open up yer eyes an' ears an' yer influenced an' there's nothing you can do about it. I've probably forgotten some of the authors who had some specific effect on me, and there may be one or two I'd be reluctant to admit to, but these are the main ones. I'll go through them in (roughly) chronological order, rather than trying to work out the order I met them in.

Homer. No, not the yellow guy, the Greek epic poet. I read Homer (in translation) in my teens, as well as retellings of the stories, and I think he helped to encourage my sense of the grand and epic. Battle scenes, questing, encounters with wonders and monsters: it's all there in Homer.

Thomas Mallory. From quite a young age, I was reading retellings of the Arthurian legends that Mallory collected and framed in the way we know them today, and I later read the original. It made me passionate about everything concerning knights, real or romantic, and the episodes in the Arthurian cycle have influenced me in more ways than I can count.

William Shakespeare. Well, why wouldn't I be influenced by arguably the greatest writer ever? Everyone else is, whether they're aware of it or not. Besides his wonderful use of language, perhaps the two specific aspects of Shakespeare's writing I'd pick out as major influences are his characterisation and the sense of pacing in his scenes. I also borrowed from Henry V for a crucial scene in At An Uncertain Hour.

William Blake. Poet and artist, Blake has been described as a hero of the imagination. I think one of the big things I took from Blake is that he was possibly the first author who deliberately created a mythology with a modern(ish) sensibility. Blake's mythological figures are allegories of various aspects of the human psyche, but they also work convincingly as people in their own right.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Barring Shakespeare, my absolute favourite poet, and his Rime of the Ancient Mariner is my favourite poem — I could once recite it by heart, though I think too many neurons have died off since then. The Ancient Mariner is a key influence on the Traveller (who even uses an albatross as his banner) though the contrasts are as significant as the similarities. The title At An Uncertain Hour is a quote from the poem, while another Traveller story, Ancestral Voices, has its title taken from Coleridge's Kubla Khan.

William Butler Yeats. Another favourite poet, Yeats was the writer who got me fascinated in Irish mythology and the whole of the Celtic Twilight. Any wistful, magical aspect to my writing almost certainly has a flavour of Yeats in there somewhere.

William Morris. Arguably (or arguably not) the first fantasy writer to set his work in an invented world for its own sake. I first read Morris's fantasies in my late teens and was enchanted by the mixture of mediaeval exoticism and earthy reality. He was also an important socialist thinker, and a surprising amount of that creeps into his tales of knights and damsels — actually, his heroines are usually of peasant stock and far stronger than the heroes.

Lord Dunsany. Largely responsible for bringing the exotic for its own sake into fantasy, and a master of evocative naming, Dunsany created impossible palaces, the wonders of Elfland and houses built on the edge of the world. When I write of far-off, wonderful lands with resonant names, I'm almost certainly channelling Dunsany.

James Branch Cabell. Cabell, I have to admit, is something of a "take what you need and leave the rest" author. He was of his time and place (1910s and 20s in Virginia) and some of his attitudes are rather unpalatable today. If you can look beyond that, though, he was almost unique in writing fantasy that seamlessly combines comedy and romance. Perhaps his biggest influence on me, though, was the way he wove a connection between apparently unconnected books, creating a vast web of story, something I've attempted to do.

A. A. Milne. I suppose my first favourite author. I was having the Winnie the Pooh stories and poems read to me before I can remember — and I should emphasise that I'm talking about the real stories, before Disney got his hands on them. Milne was brilliant at showing characters at a stroke. One of my all-time favourite bits of characterisation is Rabbit, who never let things come to him but always went and fetched them… He's probably, more than anyone, the reason I first started writing stories.

H. P. Lovecraft. I read Lovecraft first for his Dunsany-inspired fantasy stories, but then I went on and read the Cthulhu Mythos ones too. Horror isn't my primary interest, but there are certainly dark things in many of my stories, and I learnt a lot about darkness from Lovecraft.

E. R. Eddison. Not all great influences need to be flawless. Eddison has many faults, but he was the first modern writer to create epic fantasy as we know it. The genre got diverted into elves and dark lords, but Eddison approached it politically, much as Martin does (and I do at times), and wove a Machiavellian strand into his epics.

Robert E. Howard. Now, I have been known to make fun of the stereotypical Giant Barbarian Hero (Ug the Barbarian, I call him) but Conan as originally written by Howard still stands up well. In any case, he's one of the great fantasy archetypes, and I've certainly learnt a lot about writing exciting adventure from reading Howard.

Fritz Leiber. I never read much of Leiber's SF, but his stories of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser made a huge impression on me. There's a lot that I could pick out as influences, particularly the mixture of light hearted and adventurous, but I think what he mostly taught me was how to write a story with two equal main characters. Sometimes it seems as if the real main character in those stories isn't either Fafhrd or the Mouser, but the interaction between them. I've tried to emulate that when I'm writing similar kinds of story.

Jack Vance. Again, I've neglected Vance's reputedly excellent SF and concentrated on his hugely influential Dying Earth tales. I've picked the odd idea from his magical system for some stories, but perhaps the biggest single thing that I stoleborrowed is his word Overworld. Vance's Overworld and mine are radically different concepts, but that was where the inspiration came from.

Mervyn Peake. Peake and Howard probably stand at opposite ends of some spectrum or other in fantasy, but both have influenced me in different ways. The weight and gravity of Gormenghast, its slow oppressiveness, are feelings I've occasionally tried to emulate.

C. S. Lewis. The Chronicles of Narnia were among the first fantasy works I read, along with the Arthurian legends and E. Nesbit, and they've soaked too far into me to have a hope of assessing. One influence I can't deny, though: my decision at fifteen to create an enemy in The Winter Legend who makes endless winter was almost certainly inspired by the White Witch.

J. R. R. Tolkien. I read Lord of the Rings at fifteen, and the world changed. I'm well aware of his faults now, and I don't actually want to write like him, but my ultimate ambition as a writer is to create something as great as Tolkien did. He's still my idol.

Geoffrey Trease. A children's historical fiction writer, not a very well-known author these days and has distinct faults (including his insistence on shoehorning a boy and girl into all periods, however implausible) but he got me into reading historical fiction. It makes a natural companion to fantasy, and it was reading Trease and others (certainly not school lessons) that really sparked my love of history.

Rosemary Sutcliff. Having read Trease, I got into Sutcliff, a much classier YA author of historical fiction. She wrote about a range of periods but mostly Roman Britain and mediaeval England. Among many things I learnt from her books was portraying friendship, with all its ups and downs.

Mary Renault. Sutcliff remained a favourite, but my growing love of Greece led me to possibly the best historical novelist I've read. Renault covered Greece from Theseus to Alexander the Great, and I've been told parts of At An Uncertain Hour show a strong influence from her. It wasn't deliberate, but not surprising either.

Andre Norton. Norton's Witch World series is perhaps most important for introducing a style of epic fantasy more based on people and relationships than headlong action, which has influenced many more recent authors. One very specific inspiration for me, though, was her way of writing unrelated stories set on different continents of the same world, which I've followed to an even greater extent.

Michael Moorcock. Moorcock's written so many books in so many different genres that it's difficult to narrow it down to a single influence. His Eternal Champion mega-series (which includes Elric, perhaps his best-known character) goes even further than Cabell in showing how so many different stories can be connected.

Ursula Le Guin. Earthsea is one of the key classic fantasy series, and there's a great many reasons for this. Perhaps the big influence on me was Le Guin's matter-of-fact racial mix, replacing the inevitable Eurocentric approach with a series where the main character is more like Native American.  I have a whole world to play with, and I routinely have non-caucasian main characters, such as Eltava who (if she came from our world) would be half Chinese, half Native American.

Doctor Who. OK, not a single author, but Doctor Who as a whole is one of my most important influences. I watched the first episode in 1963, and I've been hooked ever since, but it wasn't till someone pointed it out a few years back that I realised how much of the Doctor there is in the Traveller: a long-lived wanderer travelling in a miraculous ship, sometimes with companions, and getting caught up in causes by his devotion to justice.

Bob Dylan. Like Tolkien and Doctor Who, Dylan has been one of the overwhelming facts in the life of my imagination. His influence is more obvious on my poetry than my fiction, but he's certainly had a lot of effect on my ways of thinking and my habits of phrasing.

Karl Edward Wagner. He doesn't get a lot of mention these days, but Wagner had an intriguing habit of writing fairly standard sword & sorcery plots in an almost expressionistic way, giving them a strange and eerie feeling. Most of all, though, it was his immortal, nomadic Kane who gave me the idea that I could have a hero wandering through history, against the backdrop of different countries and civilisations in each story. It's served me well with the Traveller.

Well, it turned out to be a longer list than I expected when I started, but these are the most important authors who formed the writer I am now. There were plenty more, of course, and a lot of authors, from Mary Shelley to James Joyce to Poul Anderson, whom I enjoyed but can't pick out any specific influences.

It carries on, too, both with classic authors I didn't read till later (Chrétien de Troyes and George MacDonald, for instance) and newer influences. I've learnt a huge amount from reading both Mary Gentle and Iain Banks, but that's a refinement of the authors listed above, who formed the unformed in me.