lots of stuff

António Pedro Marques · 12 Jul 2010, 18:04 · from 2010-July.txt.gz

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From: entonio at gmail.com (=?UTF-8?B?QW50w7NuaW8gUGVkcm8gTWFycXVlcw==?=)
Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2010 19:04:09 +0100
Subject: (urth) lots of stuff
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James Wynn wrote (12-07-2010 18:23):
> What if "Father Inire" is a malformation of the actual name he gave...a
> name that was difficult for those whom he first encountered to pronounce
>  or even hear properly.

Quite possible, I just mentioned the same for Jonas.

> Typhon's name itself is stripped from Egyptian Sun mythology as the enemy
> of Osirus. That sets him as a foil against Severian. But then neither
> Osirus's nor Zeus's Typhon had two heads. So that's a kind of break with
> precedent as well since it associates him instead with certain Kabbalist
> figures and with two-faced Janus, the god of doorways (which sort of
> associates him with "Inire", doesn't it, since "inire" means "to
> enter").

The thing I don't like with the 'to enter' parsing is that it's an
infinitive, though I don't think that's an obstacle. I mean, I don't like it
because I'd rather not have Wolfe resort to an infinitive there, but that
has little import on its plausibility.

> Typhon's name in _The Book of the Long Sun_ is "Pas", claimed to be
> associated with a term for "father": tenuous in any _real_ sense, but (I
>  argue) intended to associate him with the god Pan.

And Pas was exactly the precendent (well, in fact a postcedent) I was
thinking of but couldn't put my finger on it. It's not an attested or
composite name, or at least nobody found it out yet, hence the tenative
connection to Pan (which I don't like because of the phonetics, but see above).

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