Does using real-world month and day names invalidate the believability of a world that never had those cultures?

Question

In a world that does not share our history or cultures, it seems false to use words like Tuesday or September, yet by that standard, every word is in question and I am not trying to go full Tolkien and write another language. How distracting would it be to readers to see the days of the week and months they know? Conversely, is having to reference a legend every time they see an alternate word even more distracting?

Answer 1

The question is about the audience. What would jar them? You want to avoid obvious inconsistencies and not go down rabbit holes chasing down that your jovial innkeeper would not know about Jove. Months and days are pushing the obvious inconsistency range.

You also want to avoid forcing the reader to keep track of strange information irrelevant to the plot, so a seven-day week (which is atypical) and a twelve-month year (which is not universal) are probably wise.

And how often do you think that Tuesday is Tyr's Day because the interpretatio romana identified him with Mars, and the days of the week were identified with the planets?

If your civilization is parallel to those for whom the month names have taken on a life of their own (not the Wolf Moon but perhaps the Wulven), you may want to generate names, probably in a pattern to make it easy to memorize for the readers. Skip any legend connected unless there is a plot reason, or you can artfully slip it in as a mnemonic for the reader's use.

Answer 2

Suspension of Disbelief

As an author you make a promise to the reader that you won't write something so anachronistic that it knocks them out of the story, but not every story is Tolkien high fantasy.

If Gandalf mentioned his favorite TV show at 9pm Tuesday Eastern Standard Time, that would be odd. But if Fred Flintstone says it we're expecting satire or parody. There isn't a hard rule, other than the rules you choose as an author.

Sometimes the best writing choice is NOT breaking the suspension of disbelief. Just write around it. Choose not to say 'Tuesday' if you can say '3 noons hence' instead. Don't pick anything so cryptic or so specific to THIS world the reader has to stop and calculate what you mean.

The original Battlestar Galactica had notoriously silly replacement words (Frak!), but the reboot series used a clever term for flight-distance: 'clicks' – as in "We're 30 clicks away and closing fast...." In context, the word feels like a natural (military?) abbreviation of some familiar measurement, and performs double-duty for hiding the actual space distances which are nonsensical.

Moving the story forward is more important than the 'accuracy' of specific words, sounds, or hand-gestures. It should feel natural and not draw attention. As long as readers aren't thrown out of the story, it's all good.

Culture Coding

In a worldbuild-y sense, yeah you want to make your own references in anyway that helps enrich your storytelling. Generic modern references tell us nothing about this world. They are a suburban homogeny. Again, with Fred Flintstone relatable is the goal since the whole premise is What if a caveman but just an average guy with a job and a mortgage?

But if you're crafting a unique world, and you want points for putting in the effort, you need to have some idea how this world functions, how the people view their world, how it's shaped them.

Most importantly you need to differentiate your cultures from each other:

• Those strict farmers mark time by seasonal changes because their survival revolves around the planting and harvest of food crops. The hours aren't so important, but there's emphasis on the workday because you can't farm in the dark.
• The river people have 3 seasons, the rainy flooding season when the river swells (some years more than others), followed by a fertile season in the flood plain, followed by a dry season when the water recedes and tributaries disappear. Life is up and down – food just happens by itself at the will of the river, and a flood can take everything away.
• Meanwhile mathematical astronomers divide the week among their pantheon based on the major celestial bodies: 2 days to celebrate both suns, and 3 days for each of the moons. Their 'months' are named for the other visible planets which no one else cares about. But everyone has adopted their naming system because those are the people in charge and that's how they calculate taxes.

Fleshing out the details of your cultures lets the reader know these societies are story-important, but also there is an entire world here. These are more than just some names scribbled on a fantasy map as placeholders for a derivative, paint-by-numbers plot with disposable action figures for characters. These people see themselves as fundamentally different to those people, hence they don't get along.

Worldbuilding Iceberg

Worldbuilding is meant to be subtext, not a wiki, not a prolog, not a prequel origins story.

You want to be able to drop a little bit of worldbuilding and NOT explain it. It's seasoning, not the meal.

Subtext is an intentional part of the story that is implied indirectly, and accumulates in the reader's head-cannon without the author explicitly spelling it all out.

Discovery writers should feel free to pepper in extra worldbuilding in the 1st draft, and wait for their 2nd and 3rd drafts to determine what stays. Plan-ahead writers may have the opposite problem and feel obliged to show their homework. Their job may be to simplify the worldbuilding where there are no natural scenes to explain it.

For storytelling, it's better to hint at the tone of something – what it means within THIS story – than to provide a full lore dump. The original Star Wars did not need a Darth Vader backstory, we understood what he represents just fine with the black cape and the skull mask and torturing people.

Readers are sophisticated. They just need the context for what's happening right now.

Does it matter to the story?

Sanderson’s First Law of Magics: An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic.

At one extreme, the reader needs to understand how many days are in the week, or specifically which day follows which, to solve an in-story mystery or follow the conflict.

At the other extreme, fantasy-sounding words are just proxies for things we are familiar with. It's a patina of style on something familiar. It's technobabble.

Another option is that these moments are a character-tell. A religious pilgrim makes references to parables and saints that none of the other characters know, making them an outsider among the group. Half-blood witch Hermione is insecure about her birthright and over-compensates by being an irritating know-it-all about witch lore.

An ensemble cast is (likely) a microcosm of the various cultures and attitudes within the world. Specific characters get to be important when they are in their element or area of expertise. Group internal conflicts can be representational of larger dynamics. You get to personalize big world ideas into a small number of people who have to work together.

The antithesis of justifying the worldbuilding as a necessary story element is to go full style, even celebrate it and draw attention to it. Certainly a genre fantasy has some obligation to fan service? Exoticism is promised on the tin.

Answer 3

tl;dr

Yes

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The understanding is that if your story is set in an alien world, you are translating dialogue, terms, and in fact the whole narration (if your viewpoint character is a native of that alien world and not a visitor from ours).

Will humans in a fantasy world or humanoid aliens in a scifi world have bread, dogs, Mondays, and so on? If course not! A few hundred years back we didn't even have rice or potatos in Europe, and an alien world, with a completely different flora and fauna, will not have anything that exists on Earth. But they will have corresponding items and concepts that serve a similar purpose. They will divide their year and name the divisions, they will have some staple foods, and they will have domesticated certain animals.

So, just as when you translate from German to English and use the English word bread although German bread is quite different from its English counterpart, you commonly use "Earth-words" to name objects (e.g. bread) and concepts (e.g. king) when you "translate" from an alien world to English. Because if you didn't, and invented a word for everything that must surely be different in an alien world, your readers wouldn't be able to comprehend your writing, because almost every noun and many verbs and adjectives would be in a foreign language.

But while most fantasy worlds have horses and bread, what is often invented are:

• systems of measurement (of time, length, weight, money etc.) and the names for their units
• titles for nobles and functionaries
• religions
• personal names

That is, especially those concepts where we are very aware of the fact that they are quite different between different cultures on Earth, too. We grow up knowing about meters and yards, pounds and kilograms, weeks beginning on Monday and on Sunday, weeks being seven or eight or five days long, this current year being 2024 and 2564 and 1945, one country being ruled by a monarch another by a parliament, one religion having Lamas another shamans, and so on and so forth.

Science fiction often uses Earth terms for these when the assumption is that the story takes place in Earth's future. Otherwise it invents these, too.

The literary function of inventing these concepts and terms is to signal to the reader that the story takes place in a foreign world as well as to take the reader there and immerse them in that foreign culture.

So the question that you first have to answer is: How different is your world from ours? The more similar it is, the less terms you have to invent.

Alternate history? Same words. Medieval fantasy world? Medieval terms. A world unlike ours? Everything that is different needs to be named differently.

Answer 4

If a show like Star Trek: The Next Generation can hand-wave the entire logistics of speech and language between alien species (or whether aliens even have an audible language or vocal cords), by just having everyone speak english while still being remembered fondly as one of the best science-fiction shows of all time: I don't see anyone holding week-day names against you.

So: I don't feel strongly either way but: if you're insecure about it, you can always go a middle-route where you keep the same names but give them an alternate spelling like: Tuesde or Satirday. That way both the audience knows what you mean but you also address them being used in a fictional setting.

Answer 5

I remember¹ a footnote by Tracy Hickman on Dragons of Winter Night addressing a similar topic. A character was looking at the East on the sunrise, and on the footnote he was a mentioning that they could have made the sun rise from somewhere else on that world, but that would have been an unnecessary change in their world that the reader would need to remember.

As mentioned by Ben, you are "translating" from the language of that world into one the suitable to the earthlings holding your book.

The Interpretive Theory of Translation considers that the translation must convey the sense. There are many cases in languages spoken on Earth where the translation needs to say something different, or even has to use words whose literal meaning would be exactly the opposite, in order to convey the intended meaning. An English author may write that it is raining cats and dogs, but it gets translated differently to other languages.

I think it would be perfectly fine to use "Monday" or "September", with no harm to be believability. You may include a footnote on the first instance noting that you have translated their weekdays into those of your audience, if you wish.

Nonetheless, if the culture is completely different, the actual month may not matter at all, since there is no intrinsic value attached to "September", and so just refer that something happened "6 months ago" instead of using either English nor made up month names.

And yes, this requires that in your world a "month" would still be roughly 30 days, even though there's no reason for them to group days that way. However, it would be very confusing for a reader that something is reported as happening "6 months ago", in a world where a "month" would be equivalent to a "decade" to us.

¹ Details are a bit fuzzy, but it I think it was Tracy and on that book. If someone finds the actual note, that would be welcome.

Answer 6

Seeing some elf talk about how on "the first tuesday in march" they will meet up with the heroes might be slightly jarring - but more likely, a reader will just accept it and move on. Maybe they'll nitpick about it on the internet, if you don't include Tolkien's disclaimer "I just translated this, so I'm using terms my readers are more familiar with", but that's it.

On the other hand, having your own, culturally relevant, weekday and month names is GREAT worldbuilding - and utterly jarring to the reader. Because if that same elf said they'd meet up on "the first eljarday in arrkon" - even if you explained the weekdays and months in an earlier chapter, the reader will have forgotten them by now. If they're in a glossary, the reader will be ripped out of the story flow to look them up.

Some authors get around that by having a very practical, shallow culture, where people meet up on "thirdday", in the month of "harvest" - that works, I can imagine that meaning the third day of the week, and harvest is late summer or early fall. Works for me, but it makes me think for a moment - so the gained "this is a culture different from ours" is paid for by the loss of "but the reader's flow is slightly interrupted". Whether that's worth it is for you to decide.

If you DO go with the super worldbuilding cultural names for weeks and months, maybe add a thought from the recipient or the author in to keep the reader informed as to what it actually means:

"Meet us here again on the first eljarday in arrkon", the elven leader said, "and we will have your answer". That would leave us three weeks to prepare for the journey, which might sound like a lot if not for the need to craft our own carts to carry the wounded.

or

"We will be back, no later than the first eljarday in arrkon" the elf promised. So we would meet them again in early spring, hopefully with more answers than questions.

Just make sure the reader doesn't have to remember whether eljarday is the second or third day of the week, and when exactly arrkon is. This allows you to sprinkle foreignness and worldbuilding in without confusing the reader.

Answer 7

You can do away with the common terms and use descriptive words.
Dragonriders of Pern uses "Sevendays" for week. I do not remember if the books had specific terms for days of week mentioned, but you could easily go with "firstday", "midweek", "restday" and so on. Call week "dozendays" if you need different duration for a reason. Weeks are artificial construct after all. Months depend on planet moons (if it has any), but if it has multiple, it is entirely plausible to have small moons and big moons as time periods. Years will be marked by passage of seasons, and can be any length again. Many fantasy works invent their own terms for months (as those are wildly different even between real life languages).
There is nothing bad in some creativity (as long as you don't expect reader to remember the order of the month names) - this can be used as a device for unspecified passage of time. On the other hand, if you want reader to follow the timeline closely, use common calendar system and treat it as a translation.

Answer 8

We actually have had cultures that were not familiar with the western calender right here on earth. And there already is a lot of literature set in such cultures to give you an idea of how using local contemporary vs. western calenders works on the reader.

E.g. for East Asian historical literature, non-fiction targeted at non-specialists tends to use western month names and western years. Fiction seems to prefer the calender in use at the time, possibly adding the (western) year if really important. I.e. stuff like "In the third month of the fifth year of the reign of Tang Kaiyuan, ...". You can also use stuff like "third winter month" if the season is important.

For a more unfamiliar calender system, you might want to look into literature set in countries that use the Arabic calender.

Of course if your story is set in a world without a prominent moon, or where the orbit of the moon takes much longer than on earth, using months might not be appropriate at all.

Answer 9

In most cases they'll be fine. Depends how much unlike ours your fictional world is in general. If you dedicate yourself to inventing an original flora and fauna, make your characters neither human nor any kind of beings from traditional mythology or folklore, even have your world run on different laws of physics (I'm thinking of Edge Chronicles here), then they'd stand out too much to fit. But most fantasy worlds derive from the familiar, and that can easily include the calendar, without being jarring.

You mentioned Tolkien. He actually uses English names for months and weekdays, and passes it as translation convention. With a few little quirks, like the 22nd of September always being a Thursday, because the calendar the hobbits use has a few holidays outside the weekdays counting, and a given date falls on the same day of the week every year. As you can see, an author can get away with a lot.

On the other hand, I don't think you need to be afraid of inventing your own terms. It can be one of the many little things that help with immersion in your world. But you definitely shouldn't mention a legend every time, any more than you go on a tangent about trading an eye for wisdom when you make an appointment for the next Wednesday or explain the whole history of conquests of Galia (including that one village that kept resisting) when you book a vacation in July. My suggestion, if you choose to do this (and as I said, chances are you don't strictly need to), is to make the names intuitive enough that your reader can follow the gist, and leave it at that. The names of months and weekdays are unremarkable, everyday stuff to your heroes, and should be the same to the narration.

And one more consideration, if you invent your own calendar, don't expect the reader to keep track of time by it, they won't remember how your terms relate to one another: How many days was it from a Starday to a Treesday again?

Answer 10

Although I used "North, South, East and West" in a fantasy novel (set on ancient Earth), I did not use the month names or days of the week, specifically because those are based on mythology that (in my world) had not happened yet.

Instead, I totally adopted Lunar calendar and seasons. "Two days past the quarter moon."

And of course, the "weeks" we use are based on quarters of a moon with a 28 day cycle; and "months" was originally the Old English "Mona" for Moon. So the number of days pretty much gave the weekday. And the culture I had didn't treat weekends any different than other days, so weekdays didn't really matter.

"That's three moons of travel. Three and a half! It will be Winter when get there."

Like old Earth, the year was measured in Seasons, often marked by specific Constellations.

It did not really matter, we were just conveying a sense of time for various things.

Even in a fantasy world, you can do a similar thing. Time is marked by regular natural events, as is our life. If your "orbit" is not exactly an Earth Year, no problem. Translate. If your orbit is about 3 Earth years, then childhood is 4 orbits (12 years), that is when puberty begins. It is another 2 orbits (6 years) to adulthood. The average lifespan is 23 (69 years).

On Earth, before all these day-of-week, month-names, etc came about, we know primitive people kept track of the time of year and days by changing stellar Constellations, and by phases of the moon.

That seems the natural starting place for any fantasy world as well.

Answer 11

Yes, it would be weird.

Anyway, you have to invent the world map, countries, languages, politics, religions, counting system, measures, time units, climate, landscape.

Calendar is nothing.

There is a way to deal with it. Use alternate Earth. Let's say your events happen around 2024. It's a word from multiverse with bifurcation point 50-100-200-whatever you feel like years ago.

So, there is still France in place where we have it, but it can be different. Commie France. There is still Versailles there though if you need it.

You can save reader a lot of time by not reinventing hundreds of well known established concepts, people and places you may want to use.

"the women revolt against the male dominated religions and monarchies" - that would be a very brief rebellion, but good luck.