{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/1272", "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it. Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.", "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'" }, "archive": "whorl", "thread": { "id": 1272, "subject": "Linguige, cowinkydink, etsetteruh", "messages": 1, "voices": 1, "first": "2001-03-15T08:32:54+00:00", "last": "2001-03-15T08:32:54+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes", "address": "ddanehy at siebel.com" }, "date": "2001-03-15T08:32:54+00:00", "subject": "(whorl) Linguige, cowinkydink, etsetteruh", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "B-b-b-Borski done did wrote:\nCall me an ignoramus* by default, but I still do not\nunderstand how the Greater Scylla of Urth knows how to\nsummon the Mother of Blue _in any language._" }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Ummmm. Consider this: the oceanbound giants of Blue, Urth, and indeed all \nw[h]orl[d]s are in fact one spacegoing, perhaps even spacedwelling by \nnature, race. This is, I believe, implied at several points in tBotNS. \n_If_ we take this as a given, _then_ it is no mystery that they speak the \nsame language (as each other); given their longevity, it isn't even \nterribly surprising that they haven't wandered off into mutually-incom-\nprehensible dialects. \n\nRather more puzzling to me is that the folk of Urth in Severian's day,\nthe folk of the Whorl, and the folk of Urth in Typhon's day seem to\nspeak the same dialect, or at least dialects so similar that they can't\nbe distinguished in Mr Wolfe's texts -- modulo, of course, specialized\nwords like \"whorl.\" One could make a case for the Typhon-era Urthers\nand Whorl-inhabitants aby arguing that the constant influence of the\ngods (all of whom are native speakers of Typhon-era Urthish) might be a\nstabilizing influence on the language, but then you have to explain \naway the dialects of places like Dorp and, uh, wherever Pig comes from." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "We're all of us a little chagrined, I believe, by the use of coinicidences\nin Wolfe's fiction" }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Ummm: No, I'm not. But I also unashamedly like Dickens (as, I gather,\ndoes Mr Wolfe), whose plots positively _run_ on coincidence. But then\nit's also my experience that \"real\" life does in fact contain a fair \nnumber of extraordinarily long-odds coincidences; one of my most important\nfriendships (not one of my \"best\" friends, but one whose influence in my\nlife and those of others in my set has been very important) happened like\nthis:\n\nOne of my \"best\" friends picked a co-worker to bring to our weekly gaming \nsessions. He (call him JM) fit in and kept coming. Some months later, JM \nand I went out to pick up pizza for the group. On the way, he started\nnoting some landmarks from his past; these turned out to be landmarks\nfrom my own highschool years, so I asked him which school he went to. JM\nsaid, \"actually, I went to school in Los Angeles, but I used to date a\ngirl from --\" my high school. \"H'mmm. I wonder if I knew her?\" JM named a\nname; I said, \"Oh. I was the best man at her wedding last summer.\" \n-- But wait, there's more: After JM and this woman broke up, JM became \ninterested in another woman. Her job moved to the Bay Area and JM moved\nwith her: she worked for my employer. In the same building as me. Across\nthe corridor.\n\nAnd if I tell you that I have half a dozen stories like this (like the time \nin college I worked on a Finnegans Wake metaglossary with two professors: a \nCS prof named James Joyce and an English professor who turned out to have \ngone to high school with my father thirty years earlier, and...), you'll \nbegin to understand that I don't find coincidences terribly unrealistic in \nfiction.\n\nOf course, since I am not an agnostic, they're easy for me to explain as\n\"intended.\" (Remember Chad Mulligan? \"Coincidence (n): You weren't paying\nattention to the other half of what was going on.\")\n\nAt any rate, given the one-spaceborne-race-of-giants hypothesis, \nthere _is_ no coincidence involved in the Mother and Great Scylla \nspeaking the same language, or having similar habits." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "Is she, like the Scylla of Urth, plotting to take over Blue? " }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "I'd guess rather that she took it over some time ago." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "... certainly the Whorl colonists do not seem like any rich prize. " }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Those who like to rule seek to do so for its own sake and not because\nthe ruled are particularly valuable in themselves." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "... this seems to me a little bit like Star Trek, where everybody\nexcept the Klingons speak English. " }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Fussy Trekkish note: They don't; but there's some kind of magic\ndevice called a Universal Translator which works so well it's \ninvisible except when the plot calls for it not to work, or for\na being so alien it doesn't work right." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "And I don't really see any evidence for it." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Well, everyone on Tzadkiel's ship seems to speak Urthish, for\nwhat that's worth." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "*Any of you Christian scholars know who once claimed that \nignoramus was the Latin word for agnostic? I've forgotten." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "No, though it sounds like something Newman might have said in a\ngrumpy mood. I'll have to use it myself now 8*)\n\n\n*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun." } ] } ] }