Indeed... - Edit 1
Before modification by DomA at 25/01/2013 03:16:02 AM
He got Nynaeve able to tell stalagmite from stalactite yet he would have us believe the Queen of Andor has never heard what an eclipse is.
One might say all sort of things about Jordan's style, but he was manically consistent with his language usage rules through the series. His blunders in the vein of arabesque, spartan etc. are very few and far between. That often meant heavy prose and the long way around: a big stone teeth coming out of the ground etc., but it didn't throw you out of the world.
Brandon is surprisingly careless with this, for a world builder. He constantly used modern and often fairly technical terms. It's a bit Harriet's fault too, or rather her decision. She said in Q&A she was very light handed with language not to denaturate Brandon's style. But I'm not quite sure it was the right decision. There's a difference between trying to mimic Jordan's prose and following simple constraints like not using words, expressions, turns of phrase and metaphor too out of place in an pre-industrial setting. If it's too much an hinderance while writing, this can easily have been fixed in editing/rewrites.
The funniest thing is that recently Brandon invoked his "many advanced courses" in linguistics to justify some of his decisions, for instance to suddenly shorten established WOT expressions. He decided for e.g. Mat shortened "Blood and Ashes" to "Bloody Ashes" and this trend spread. Over but a few months, through a whole continent, before mass media. Pathetic. "advanced courses in linguistics" indeed!
One might say all sort of things about Jordan's style, but he was manically consistent with his language usage rules through the series. His blunders in the vein of arabesque, spartan etc. are very few and far between. That often meant heavy prose and the long way around: a big stone teeth coming out of the ground etc., but it didn't throw you out of the world.
Brandon is surprisingly careless with this, for a world builder. He constantly used modern and often fairly technical terms. It's a bit Harriet's fault too, or rather her decision. She said in Q&A she was very light handed with language not to denaturate Brandon's style. But I'm not quite sure it was the right decision. There's a difference between trying to mimic Jordan's prose and following simple constraints like not using words, expressions, turns of phrase and metaphor too out of place in an pre-industrial setting. If it's too much an hinderance while writing, this can easily have been fixed in editing/rewrites.
The funniest thing is that recently Brandon invoked his "many advanced courses" in linguistics to justify some of his decisions, for instance to suddenly shorten established WOT expressions. He decided for e.g. Mat shortened "Blood and Ashes" to "Bloody Ashes" and this trend spread. Over but a few months, through a whole continent, before mass media. Pathetic. "advanced courses in linguistics" indeed!