So i made this post last night about how in most fantasy, we should implicitly assume that the characters aren't speaking English or whatever Earth language you're reading in, they're speaking they're own unrelated fantasy language and we assume by convention the text is a translation.

This has different levels of being spelled out; sometimes you have an appendix talking about your conlang, sometimes you have a translator's note in the text talking about how this sentence specifies different amounts of information than the translation conveys, sometimes you give it a fancy fantasy name, sometimes you have people with multiple unintelligible languages all having their meaning represented as English in each of their PoV chapters, etc, etc.

And sometimes you fail at it; I have complained before that I find puns in fantasy very immersion-breaking, because wordplay is in general hard-to-impossible to translate.

But even when people do this, I work under the assumption that they are doing translation convention, they just don't think about it much or think giving up on puns entirely is not worth it. To which someone could reply: that's just your assumption, why are you forcing it?

For example: to the best of my knowledge, nothing breaks if you assume that ASoIaF never does translation convention when people are talking in the Westerosi Common Tongue, by some cosmic coincidence it just happens to be identical to English (as opposed to Dothraki or High Valyrian or whatever, which we know some handful of words from).

I don't like this, because it makes zero sense; it's postulating that the linguistic evolution process ran twice on different inputs and produced the same outcome. That just doesn't happen!

...on the other hand I am willing to grant that fantasyland has humans, which makes even less sense; if linguistic evolution doesn't work that way, much less so the evolution of life. On that I have no principled defence; I do not demand that writers acknowledge that their fantasy characters are actually nonhumans being translation-conventioned into a familiar form, even though that's totally a thing they could do. My fantasy characters don't speak English (or Spanish), but they are mostly biologically identical to Earth humans modulo magical powers and I don't plan to change that.

the temptation for me when worldbuilding a calendar is always to fix all the weird things that stand out from our calendar, but I think (this time at least) I should explicitly go the other direction and make it more clearly fucked up. leap days can be added at the end of any month according to political will, and this power is abused for obscure tax reasons. major religions have similarly-named high holy days based on the solstices but compute them differently and are competing for who gets to set the date for the official festivities. every once in a while they need to add or get rid of an entire month just so the seasons can even sort of line up. there's a calendar counting from the founding of the city and a different one that names ~10-20 year periods based on who was the seniormost noble in the council and one has 15 more years than the other. the historians are pretty sure that the terms of Ralai and Makasin overlapped but deciding who was actually in charge at that point is politically fraught and they can't publish the corrections, plus there's at least another three years unaccounted for anyway. the astronomers are crying.