Inheritance Advent Calendar: Days 5-8 [Part 2]
(See Part 1 for details)
In order to keep AS from getting really cluttered, I've decided to do this series in parts, clumping 4 days together at a time. With three chapters per day and 4 days per post, that's 12 chapters per post, which is very respectable. Today being August 13th, we are now on Day 5 of the countdown to Inheritance. I'll try to be ( Read more... )
While having overly modern slang would be annoying, I don't really think there's anything wrong with saying "it's okay". Would you really want to read a novel with dialogue that is written in Middle English? Everyone would come off as pompous asses in my opinion, and most readers wouldn't be able to understand anything the characters were saying.
I look at it as being like a "Modern English translation" of what they would actually be saying in the novel's setting. Obviously they wouldn't be speaking English in Alagaesia, or if they did, they wouldn't speak a dialect that is spoken today. Eragon, being from a teeny village of farmers/hunters, wouldn't speak what would be considered a "high-class dialect", so saying "It's okay" is like our equivalent of whatever layman slang he would be using in his own language. I wouldn't want to see the characters saying "like, totally" or something as ridiculous as that, but I have no problem with "It's okay", as long as it is consistent with the character's dialect. In Paolini's case, however, each characters' dialogue is rarely consistent, so I guess what I am saying really applies to other novels.
....And the word "okay" has been in use for well over a century. While it may not have been used in the middle ages, it is by no means a neologism.
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Leave a comment