We love seeing the grand technological anachronisms in science fabrication novels go down in the past , such as Victorian or Edwardian - geological era steampunk or overdone Renaissance automata . But what if you require to keep the language in your diachronic novel accurate for the period?Here ’s a uncomplicated trick historic fancy novelist Mary Robinette Kowal concoctedto check that the Scripture that tumbled from her reference ’ lips were appropriate for the early nineteenth 100 .
When we speak to the Milk and Honey author about her modish novel , Glamour in Glass , which is set in 1815 , she told us that she composed a draft of her novel without a limited word list in mind , but afterward edited it to dispatch any anachronistic mental lexicon . While she was still working on Glamour in Glass , however , she explain on her blog her system for flagging words that might not have existed during that time period :
https://gizmodo.com/mary-robinette-kowal-explains-why-working-within-constr-5896850
I ’ve create a inclination of all the Word of God that are in the collected works of Jane Austen to use for my spellcheck dictionary . It will swag any Holy Scripture that she did n’t employ and I can then seem those up to see if it was in use in 1815 . It also includes some of Miss Austen ’s specific spellings like “ shew ” and “ chuse . ”
It wo n’t be perfect . For instance it wo n’t slacken off words whose meaning have changed , like “ check ” or “ staid ” but it will be an improvement .
Kowal shares her Austen word liston her blog , and commenters over atWondermarkadd thatGoogle ’s Ngram Viewershows the relative frequency of words over time based on all the books Google Books has compiled .
The Jane Austen Word List[Mary Robinette Kowal viaWondermark ]
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