I generally like George R.R. Martin’s works, but sometimes his quirky English gets a bit too contrived.
Examples:
“Ser” instead of “Sir” for knights- for no particular reason (why call them knights instead of Naights?)
“Mislike”- consistently used instead of dislike
“Nuncle”- what everybody with an uncle calls their uncle
And his names can become a bit odd as well. He uses names like Robert, Jon, and I believe there’s a Richard, but otherwise he’ll give them a twist: Catelyn instead of Caitlin or Catherine, Arya instead of Aria, etc… Sometimes he’s clearly influenced by medieval history, such as Melisandre (a close tweak of Melisande, the name of several prominent French noblewomen in France and the French held Holy Land) or Brienne (as in John of Brienne). Some are contrived though: Jaime and Kevan instead of Jamie and Kevin, or Robett instead of Robert.
Any love or hate or neutrality for Martin’s tweaking of English words and given names?
He didn’t make up the spelling he uses for Catelyn: it’s an English surname. This Catelyn was a member of the House of Commons back during the 1500s.
Anyway, I don’t care one way or another about how he spells the names, so mark me neutral. You expect fantasy series to contain unfamiliar names, and he could have given the characters much stranger names (example: what the hell is a “Drizzt”? Sounds like a bug zapper) than he did.
Yes, the names are okay. It’s not Europe. Or Earth, for that matter. The naming conventions will be at least slightly different, and, as has been noted, there are whole legions of much worse fantasy naming conventions out there. And I do still stumble over “Ser” (I keep wanting to pronounce it “sayr”), but I think it’s just different enough without being TOO different to convey the idea that Westeros’s knights aren’t QUITE the shiny-armored martial saints that the concept conveys in our world.
Yes, I think it’s just to give the world an otherworldly, fantasy feel, and it works nicely. I really like the names. Well, except Jaime, which I keep wanting to pronounce like the Spanish name. Or like James without the ‘s’, which according to the show is incorrect.
I think ‘nuncle’ is a contraction of ‘mine uncle’ and IIRC was used in Shakespeare. As for ‘Ser’, well, I figured he was just trying to be different with that one but maybe he got it from Spanish (to be)? Or it could just be trying to spell it like it’s being said in Westros. Mislike is certainly a real word and I guess like the other it’s supposed to give an old world/other worldly feel to the stories, sort of that psudo-old English air…or, in other places a hint of Scotch/Gaelic flair.
If you haven’t listened to the unabridged audio books of the story I highly recommend them…I think the guy reading them (Roy Dotrice) is by far the best reader since the guy who did the Harry Potter unabridged audio, and when you hear it the language is definitely not stilted or affected but really flows. IMHO and FWIW and all that.
If you’ve ever been to a Ren Faire, you’ve heard roughly the same pronunciation he’s trying to convey with Ser. Alternately, you could consider it a divergent variation from the same root; the title Sir is from sire.
Yes. (Or, perhaps, ‘an uncle’, which is what Mirriam-Webster’s online dictionary claims.) This is a fairly common phenomenon, actually. It is, to connect this to ASoIaF in a different way, a likely origin for the name ‘Ned’ - people talking about their son, brother, or husband Edward or Edgar (or Eddard!) refer to him as ‘Mine Ed’, which gets reinterpreted as ‘My Ned’, and a new nickname (another word which has its origin in this process) is born.
My biggest pet peeve was “gaoler” instead of “jailer.” He’s an american author, writing about a not-Britain place. I understand he may be using it for source material, but it struck me as pure pretentiousness. Drove me nuts. (And I think at one point he may have written the word “jail” but used “gaoler” in the same general section. May be wrong about that though.)
I never minded “ser” or “maester” or any of the others. I’m fine with the names, too, which as has been pointed out, are actually very tame for fantasy.
I get the other two, but I know people named “Jaime”, pronounced just like GoT Jaime. Doesn’t seem contrived to me, just an alternate spelling.
Other than that, I don’t mind the spelling differences. It adds a little flare to the book.
Now, if he’d taken the route of not using quotes or other punctuation, as other authors have done, I’d’ve never been able to read them. I hate that stuff. Especially the no-quotes thing, it always sounds like everyone’s whispering to me.
The nuncle thing really annoys me because he didn’t start using it until Feast for Crows. Up til then everyone uses uncle, so it was jarring for me - I thought at first that my copy was full of typos.