This is a problem I've had in a couple places, but I'm going to stick to one for clarity: My novel is fantasy/western, in a setting inspired by Westernd and cowboy films, but including magic, swordfights, and other fantastical elements. I want one of my characters to pack Pemmican as travel food. Pemmican is a native american dish made of dried meat and rendered fat, which kept for a long time and was calorie-dense. Problem is... My setting doesn't have native americans. 'Pemmican' is a word with distinctly native american name. I'm worried that the inclusion of the name, sans any context or reason, will be jarring, but if I exclude the name or make up my own name, that's just leaning on a fantasy cliche where writers make up silly names for perfectly normal things, and also might be equally jarring since nothing else has any made up names. Thoughts? Help?
I think it's like calling something a French braid in a setting with no France. It doesn't make much sense. On the other hand, you can take it to a logical extreme and say ... can I use the word 'platonic' in a setting with no Plato? Just have to use your own best judgement, I suppose. Personally, I wouldn't know what Pemmican is or where it's from. You could tell me it was a made up fantasy thing and I'd buy it. But that's just me (an idiot ). Maybe the word is rare enough that you could get away with the anachronism - or in other cases, maybe it's so ubiquitous that you can, like with 'platonic'. If you definitely want to avoid the issue, I'd go with just briefly describing the item in question. Reader who know will go "oh, it's Pemmican, but Vague Fantasy Brand(tm)" and I'll go "oh, it's dried meat and rendered fat". Everyone's happy.
It's literally the best part of a good rubaboo. I agree, though. Literally all of the English language wouldn't be possible in most fantasy settings, but no one ever calls out characters for speaking it. If you're world has a food that's exactly the same as pemmican, there's no harm in calling it pemmican regardless of its origin. Imagine reading a book that constantly called bread something like 'frodoop,' or a sword a 'swachink' because they had a different origin story than their real world analog.
Why there is no point in reinventing the wheel, there could be a creative opportunity by putting your own twist on a real world item. Would the people in your world make exactly the same food? How would they name it? There might be some fun to be had there.
Yeah, I've wondered about this sort of thing. I wondered about platonic, and puritan, and I kept the first and dumped the second--just as two examples. I'm assuming that when I finish a first draft, one of my later-draft passes will be to decide which words to keep and which to lose. Googling, I see from the Wikipedia page that 'British polar expeditions fed a type of pemmican to their dogs as "sledging rations"'--you could use that term, or make up some other origin. Or you could alter the spelling ("Word origin: from Cree pimikân, from pimii fat, grease"). Or... Does your setting have anyone like Native Americans?
[ No analogues at the moment, and I'm hesitant to write any for fear of making a crappy caricature since I'm not well versed in native american history. I feel like any 'Copy' I try and make will just seem fake and bad.
