Titles
Here’s a question: what’s the appropriate honorific title for a middle class female in a semi-matriarchal fantasy society?
Miss and Mrs. have an unfortunate baggage of patriarchal associations. I think you could make an argument that changing titles on marriage doesn’t have to be patriarchal, as it’s awfully useful to know at once whether your new acquaintance is married, but if you do you have to have similar a similar change for men, as their marital status will be just as important.
Which means you’ll either need to revive the use of “Master” to refer to young men, which will be confusing given that fantasies tend to use master in the guild master, master mage, old-man-with-awesome-skills sense, or invent a new term, and it would really be less confusing to have just one title for females instead of two titles for both males and females.
Unfortunately Ms. is right out. It’s too modern for a fantasy, even a quasi-Victorian one.
The Russians use first name + patronymic as their formal mode of address. Patronymics won't work, of course, but following the Russian example by eschewing titles altogether is a possibility-although I don’t think it sounds formal enough to English-speakers.
The other possibility is to use “Miss” as the catch-all title, which does have historical antecedents in the American South. It may confuse people (that’s probably unavoidable no matter what I do, though) and it might not sound respectful enough, which is a bigger problem.
Miss and Mrs. have an unfortunate baggage of patriarchal associations. I think you could make an argument that changing titles on marriage doesn’t have to be patriarchal, as it’s awfully useful to know at once whether your new acquaintance is married, but if you do you have to have similar a similar change for men, as their marital status will be just as important.
Which means you’ll either need to revive the use of “Master” to refer to young men, which will be confusing given that fantasies tend to use master in the guild master, master mage, old-man-with-awesome-skills sense, or invent a new term, and it would really be less confusing to have just one title for females instead of two titles for both males and females.
Unfortunately Ms. is right out. It’s too modern for a fantasy, even a quasi-Victorian one.
The Russians use first name + patronymic as their formal mode of address. Patronymics won't work, of course, but following the Russian example by eschewing titles altogether is a possibility-although I don’t think it sounds formal enough to English-speakers.
The other possibility is to use “Miss” as the catch-all title, which does have historical antecedents in the American South. It may confuse people (that’s probably unavoidable no matter what I do, though) and it might not sound respectful enough, which is a bigger problem.