Comment by Kiri

...Huh. Has Sev used "hella" as an adjective before? Is there a hell in this general belief system? I don't know why that struck me as a super weird word for Sev to use. :OO

ALSO SEV, WHAT IF JONAN MAKES ALL YOUR SCARY STORIES COME TRUE IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT.

Reply by Shazzbaa

he hasn't used "hella" before, though he has used "hell!" But no, their general belief system doesn't quite have a hell. There's a general notion of karma and the vague promise of an afterlife, so I could definitely see someone deciding that something that looks like hell must exist, but they only know "hell" as a word to describe something hellish (e.g., "look like hell," "going through hell,") rather than referencing a specific place.

Reply by Kiri

Hmm, okay, interesting. It's difficult for me to imagine (? grasp? understand?!) 'hell' with a separate meaning from the place, or without specifically referencing back to the place, since even those phrases suggest it as a thing to "go through" or to compare to. I'm only guessing that hell-related words all stemmed out of Hell and not the other way around though; I don't actually know. :O Hmm.

Reply by MagpieM

This is a ymmv suggestion, (because I seem to read a lot of fantasy stories written in mostly current English/American vernacular even if the setting is very much Not Our World) but I tend to assume that fantasy worlds have their own languages so what we are reading is actually a translation and that the "translator" is doing their best to use words and phrases that most accurately convey the right sense of meaning and tone rather than trying to stick to straight word for word translation (which, as far as I understand it, is how translators really do work! Swear words and idioms are often very hard to translate, for example.).

But, uh, yeah this another of those topics in Fantasy Writing I have thought waaaay too much about.

Reply by Jade

Next question: what reason would Sev have to describe the place as "haunted", as opposed to "creepy"? Like...are there ghosts in this universe? Do angry spirits linger? Are there ghost stories?

Reply by Kiri

Sev mentions ghost stories in the voting incentive, so there must be some belief, whether or not they actually exist in canon. (If zombies are a thing, would ghosts be?)

Reply by Jade

Wellll, here, zombies are loosely defined as "reanimated corpses." In most cases, they're puppets for the necromancer to use. For example, those zombie servants seemed to be 'programmed' to do his bidding. They don't need a spirit to function - Jonan's spells do that for them. So zombies don't necessarily mean ghosts.

I think Necropony might actually be an exception. It seems to do things without Jonan's constant input. It has characteristics that Jonan didn't intend it to have. It could have its 'soul', 'spirit', 'psyche', or what-have-you completely intact.

Reply by Kiri

Yeah! This is something I think about a fair bit too, since so much of our casual language is entrenched in the terminology of the popular belief system, such that even people who don't subscribe to those beliefs use them extensively. The translation thing does make sense though, since we do know that the RW cast isn't speaking English.

It still makes me wonder what sort of words they're actually using though -- would it be a term more closely related to their belief system, or something else? A lot of foreign curse words are just sort of like "garbage" or "trash" and get used to become every single part of speech (adjective, adverb, verb, etc), but they're still relatively secular in origin, so maybe it's something like that here. HMMM. I love fantasy linguistics...