: Re: Should I use the terms "people" "person" "man" and "woman" in fantasy setting? So I'm writing a story and the setting is that there are two worlds: the world of humans and the world of (insert
It's a translation.
Let's take this to the logical extreme. Your story is set in a different planet. Your story is likely not written in English. The people in your world who would have told this story would not have used any of the same words you're using, because they probably don't speak English, and even if they do, it's probably about as similar to our English as Old English is to the modern kind. (Which is to say, not at all.)
However, you're not publishing there. You're publishing here. And that means that whatever language these people use to talk about their experiences, you need to make understandable to readers today. In effect, you're publishing a translation of the original.
In the process of this "translation", you should use words and phrases that your readers are familiar with. If the aliens have three genders instead of two, or one gender, or engage in a weird practice called kemmer (see: The Left Hand of Darkness), then you might need to create words to describe these peculiarities. But to prevent from alienating your readers, you should attempt to "translate" as much as possible.
Ancillary Justice does a pretty good job at presenting the spoken language as non-English, and it's the only example I can think of off-hand where non-humans are main characters. In The Summer Prince the characters just use non-translatable words as they are, and the readers figure it out as they go. The last example I'd use of books that use coined words is The Fifth Season, which only uses them to describe elements of the magic system that are unique to the book.
Note that these books use as many ordinary words as possible. Unless using a neologism is absolutely crucial, you should prefer the ordinary English translation. Don't just go for unique words to emphasize how unique your story is.
(XKCD Source) You don't want to risk losing your readers over nonessential neologisms. Save it for things that are crucial to the reader's understanding of the story.
Side Note
"But what's crucial?" you ask. "How do I tell?" I don't actually have an answer for that. It depends on your aliens, on the kind of story you're trying to tell, and on just how different the thing is from what we're used to. Even if the alien's telepathy is central to the plot, we already have a word for that: telepathy. There's very little good reason to go around calling it squillian.
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