Subject: Language (was: Time) and the New Sun

From: C.E. Thompson <cet1 at cus.cam.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1992 21:57:28 +0000

dani at netcom.com (Dani Zweig) writes, apropos of TBOTNS:
> We also note that it was reasonable to expect a coin from Ymar's time to
> survive, badly corroded, in Severian's: There is reason to suspect that
> common words such as 'copper', 'stone', 'wood', often refer to far more
> durable materials than we associate with them.

Which gives me a peg to hang the following question on: what relationship
does the language spoken by Severian bear to English?

I offer the following two contrasting passages for your delectation:

1. In TSOTT, in Thecla's story, as retold by Severian to Agia in the
   Botanic Gardens, Father Inire is made to say to Domnina: "Yet even
   though light is so weightless we have given its name to that
   condition...". This pun only makes sense in English or *very* closely
   related languages, as far as I can trace the derivation of the words
   light (opposite of heavy) vs. light (opposite of dark).

2. In TCOTC, Thea says to Severian: "The dawn-men ... renamed it [Mars]
   Present. That was a jest in their tongue for the same word meant both
   _Now_ and _The Gift_. Or so one of my tutors once explained the matter
   to my sister and me, though I do not see how any language could endure
   such a confusion."

So how is one to reconcile the two passages? With any other SF author than
Gene Wolfe, I would attribute one or other to a momentary carelessness, but
I would be quite reluctant to assume that here.

Chris Thompson
cet1 at phx.cam.ac.uk

---

From: Dani Zweig <dani at netcom.com>
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1992 01:52:48 +0000

cet1 at cus.cam.ac.uk (C.E. Thompson):
>What relationship does the language spoken by Severian bear to English?

Essentially none.  What we see as English in the text is the language
spoken in the unthinkably remote future.  What we see as Latin is an
almost-as-remote language which, by Severian's time, is dead-but-respected
- - like Latin in ours.  (Did you notice that Valeria's translations from the
'Latin' are faulty?)

>Father Inire is made to say to Domnina: "Yet even though light is so
>weightless we have given its name to that condition...". This pun only
>makes sense in English or *very* closely related languages...

There will be people in the remote future who, like Wolfe and others today,
will have a love of language.  Should Wolfe avoid wordplay in his
characters' speech?  Or give us wordplay that fails completely, with a
footnote to the effect that it's brilliant in the original language?
There's no good answer for this.  Treating that language as if it were
English, and giving us derivations that work for English, seems a
legitimate decision, though not perfect.  We are being given the feel of
the character's speech, though it could be that in the 'actual' language,
the connection being made is between 'light' and 'freedom', to offer a
random example.

>"The dawn-men ... renamed it [Mars] Present. That was a jest in their
>tongue for the same word meant both _Now_ and _The Gift_. Or so one of my
>tutors once explained the matter to my sister and me, though I do not see
>how any language could endure such a confusion."
>
>So how is one to reconcile the two passages? 

Again, I don't see a problem.  The speech tells us about the speaker, not
about the language.  Besides, the language in question here is neither
English nor the language of Severian's time.  To which we add that the
speaker's philology (and her tutors') may well be suspect.

Dani Zweig