A Question of Expression

I don't see any value in renaming a snake. Your characters are speaking English, even if they don't call it English, so randomly replacing common words seems more distracting than it's worth. If you replace snake, why not shoes? Hair? Feet? Hands? Hat? Road? Where does it end?

Now, words that have an obvious tie to some real-world thing would be a problem. Wattage, for example--your world doesn't have a James Watt. (Though if it stems from Earth, that word might still be used even if nobody remembers who James Watt was.) Hamburgers. Champagne. Parmesan cheese. Yeah, I seem to be focusing on foods named after regions, but you get the general idea. And there will no doubt be edge cases, where the average reader has no idea of the link between Earth history and the word.

 

I knew I had forgotten to tag someone!
I was sort of leaning with you on this one but learning public opinion is a good thing.

So, what do you think about the post world war 3 china concept?

 

This calls to mind Linda Lay Shuler's horrible books, where all of the ancestral puebloens refer to their penises as "baby makers". No other word is translated thus. Hands are not called "thing grabbers", eyes are not called "boob perceivers," etc. Aside from everything else that was wrong with the books, that stood out as completely insipid.

But you can always take a page out of Star Trek's playbook, and name the snake a "gellegian scale snake," or similar naming convention.

 

I wasn't actually looking for a snake name. A bit more the concept of if writers should change little details like that.
Like is calling a snake a (Random word) clever? Or is really just wasting the readers time?
Or is not calling the snake a random word actually lazy?

 

You misunderstand completely. In Star Trek whenever someone wanted to allude to an alien sub-fauna they use the name of the planet it is from and then the animal it is most like. Hence "tinebrian bats" and "ceti eels".

Denebrian slime devil still counts in this model, despite there being no slime devils on earth.

 

Oh I see. I thought star trek was about like a energy sword fight against a orphans true dad? Shows how much I know. Lol.

Not sure how I feel a bout the star trek way. Is that what you do?

 

You are thinking of Star Wars and it makes me want to break something valuable.

 

Oh. Sorry. I haven't seen either.
Why does it make you want to break something?

Wait then what is star trek about?

 

USS Enterprise. Kirk. Spock. That one.

 

I have no idea what your talking about.

 

I'm not touching the Star Wars/Trek conversation, but personally, when I'm reading a book, I don't want to have to think that hard about it. Calling it a snake makes your audience understand what you're talking about. For instance, saying It was a fibberlagoo (bear with me, here), a long, slick animal that slithered on its belly with scales. VS saying It was a green snake with purple stripes. I would be insanely frustrated that I'd read the longer description, trying to figure it out, then coming up with something that does NOT look like a 'fibberlagoo', only to find out that it was just a snake and I could have saved myself the headache. (Does this make sense?)

 

I still think it depends on what it looks like. What's your snake look like, Wynn? If it's legless, flightless, and slithers, I think it's okay to call it a snake, even if it has feathers or cute little fluffy ears. Like ChickenFreak said, if your world is based on earth things, then changing one name and not another would be confusing.

But! If your snake has wings and human teeth and eyes like a snail, that would be a completely different animal and would be best called something else. Like a dragail... Or.. a... snagon. Oh please call it a snagon!

 

That seems to be the general opinion actually and I agree.

I did reference a real written scene with a snake but heck I didn't describe it first. The exact scene has a woman falling through a roof and landing on her bum. As she shakes it off and looks around she notices she wasn't the only thing that fell. So I went pretty much something like.

"The didn't harm her. The danger in this situation was what fell with her; a snake."

Come to think of it. I didn't describe it at all except claiming she recognized that it was a venomous snake. I didn't even point out how she knew that. Do I fail?

 

No, though I might suggest throwing in just a few words to explain how she knew. Maybe it's something like a rattler, maybe she knows that in this region the odds of it NOT being venomous aren't good, maybe in your fictional world all snakes are venomous.

Referring to my own previous post and the "edge cases" for words that have specific origins in Earth history, I thought of one: Salary. It's often claimed that this word came from either an allowance given to Roman soldiers to buy salt, or salt given to Roman soldiers as part of their wages. Even if we replace Rome with something else, keeping that origin would, at a minimum, require a world where salt was once valuable.

But how many people are aware of the origin, at a level so close to the surface that the word would break their suspension of disbelief? It's probably an OK word to use, but since there's the perfectly good alternative "wages", which doesn't seem to have a similar history-tied origin, I'd probably use wages.

 

I guess everyone must hate Tolkien's books then, because he doesn't call new creatures by English names. I guess I'm just in the minority here. It happens often.

 

Your Star Trek idea doesn't fit the same way because you are talking about people who are already educated on earth things naming new creatures for their own use.

The OP is talking about a chick that is an alien and is reflecting back on stuff from her own planet.

 

Actually I don't think that is exactly accurate of my situation either but then again it isn't the point. The question is much more general. When is it good to do this, when is it not? How do you feel about it? What have you done? Why?
I presented a concept more to show what I was talking about then asking for a fix

 

I'm confused. I didn't think that snakes were new creatures--that is, new to the characters--in the example we're discussing. Are you saying that this character and her society grew up without ever seeing anything that resembled a snake, and suddenly they see one? Where did I miss that?

 

If you call a snake a rake (I don't care if there's an apostrophe involved, it's pronounced the same) what do you call a rake? A cake?
Why don't you use your imagination to describe your serpentine construct and call it something else entirely?

Edited to add: didn't mean to quote you @Lewdog, rather it was the OP. I'm posting from my phone (evidently with limited success).

 

I don't think Wynn is inventing a new creature here. I think what he's trying to say is that, it's a snake. It's not any different from the snakes on earth. But since it's on a different planet, should he come up with something else to call it?

My answer, simply, is no.

 

In that case, I agree.

 

The MC is from another planet, so unless there is a zillion to one chance, they wouldn't have called it a snake.

 

I'm still not following you. Are you saying that the other planet does not have any creatures that look like snakes?

 

But what's the chance people from another planet named them snakes just like people from Earth did?

 

I assumed that the situation that we were talking about was a character from Planet X, who speaks Language Y, and who remains on Planet X for the story, and uses the word that Language Y uses for a snake.

If we're translating that person's words to English so that people can read the novel, why would we choose not to translate the word "snake" to English? If we make up a word for snake, surely we have to make up words for everything else, and in fact have the character speak in another, completely fictional, language.