One of those requests -- d'you know any Slavic or other Eastern European languages?
I don't need this right away but sometime in the next three months I would like to have a word with somebody who can help me make my fictional vaguely-Slavic personal and place names be not stupid. I am envisioning a place where there's a lot of small ethnic groups living close together, so I don't need everything to be extremely consistent. What I need is a feels-real chaos of linguistic miscegenation, and what I wanmt to avoid is stupid hodgepodge that fails to capture the feel of the way this stuff happens in the world. Since the way it happens in the world is capable of producing really dumb combinations and extremely awkward expressions, you can see how it would be easy to fall into a trap and make bad choices in this.
I'm definitely not trying to: replicate real-world languages, or invent a language for the book (for one thing I'd have to invent at least seven! And I'm not going to). What I am trying to do is to create a linguistic landscape that you could walk around in and feel that it is a richly observed world and not a felt-marker-drawn backdrop for a puppet play (not that such a thing couldn't be perfectly fine in its time and place, anyway).
Ideal, of course, would be someone who has a bit of familiarity with more than one from the real-world region. I don't mind too much whether it's Eastern, Western, or Southern SLavic, or Old Slavonic, and I would be tickled pink if the person also knew some other non-Slavic regional language or two or three, like Romanian or Hungarian or some weird dialect of German.
What I'd be asking the person to do is to read the draft when it's ready, or if that's too much, to read excerpts, and to mark where the names and so on seem rightish or wrongish and hopefully to meditate on why they seem that way and what might make them better.
I'm definitely not trying to: replicate real-world languages, or invent a language for the book (for one thing I'd have to invent at least seven! And I'm not going to). What I am trying to do is to create a linguistic landscape that you could walk around in and feel that it is a richly observed world and not a felt-marker-drawn backdrop for a puppet play (not that such a thing couldn't be perfectly fine in its time and place, anyway).
Ideal, of course, would be someone who has a bit of familiarity with more than one from the real-world region. I don't mind too much whether it's Eastern, Western, or Southern SLavic, or Old Slavonic, and I would be tickled pink if the person also knew some other non-Slavic regional language or two or three, like Romanian or Hungarian or some weird dialect of German.
What I'd be asking the person to do is to read the draft when it's ready, or if that's too much, to read excerpts, and to mark where the names and so on seem rightish or wrongish and hopefully to meditate on why they seem that way and what might make them better.