Evgeni Kirilov asked Brent Weeks:

I really liked that you chose to go with "subred" and "superviolet" instead of "infrared" and "ultraviolet" in the Lightbringer series. But I am also curious, why drop the well-established Latin prefixes and prepend the English ones?

Brent Weeks Actually, you have this a little backwards. "Ultra-" and "infra-" are Greek prefixes, whereas "sub-" and "super-" are Latinate. But your point still stands. I had the option to go with something more familiar, or to do something that was still easily understandable, but less familiar. I chose to go with the latter to give a sense of parallax. That is, the science of the Seven Satrapies has been profoundly influenced by the magic of the Satrapies, and their understanding of certain scientific principles is out of sync with our own at a similar time in history, because of their magic. (Also, the dominant languages in this world have been dominant at different times than in our own world, leaving Latin where we have Greek, and Greek where we have Latin, even though the world is still very Mediterranean.) I felt that little touches like this helped to give a sense that while this world operates on similar principles and the same science as our world, there are still significant and important differences.

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