Hierogrammates, Briah and Yesod

DAVID STOCKHOFF · 12 Aug 2010, 17:25 · from 2010-August.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (DAVID STOCKHOFF)
Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2010 10:25:06 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) Hierogrammates, Briah and Yesod
In-Reply-To: <4C6402AB.6070502 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <551373.7582.qm at web84107.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

"When reading dialogue one must pay attention not only to what is said but to how it is expected to be said."

Exactly.

If the intent was "They were very like you, but with one major difference," then I would expect to read "They were very like you, but with one major difference...."

Also, I should add that "cognate" is itself an invitation to suspect identity. The term denotes a word or thing of identical or shared origin. Recall that the narrator is part-Translator. And who knows what the Men of
Urth actually call themselves?

A race of women would by definition be cognate to a race of men; a race of Green Men would be the same as a race of Men: one must be derived from the other. A race cognate to Homo sapiens might be Homo habilis. But it can't be something too different.

And yet it allows some doubt.

--- On Thu, 8/12/10, Ant?nio Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com> wrote:

From: Ant?nio Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Hierogrammates, Briah and Yesod
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Date: Thursday, August 12, 2010, 10:18 AM

David Stockhoff wrote (12-08-2010 13:33):
> On the use of the word "cognates":
> 
> I think this is a standard low-grade Wolfean riddle. If a Wolfe
> character says to a narrator, "I once met a man very like you, who had
> the same look and carried himself the same way, and held his cigarette
> just like that, but he called himself by a different name then," how
> would you interpret that?
> 
> "Once upon a time, there was a race of beings with two arms and two legs
> who called themselves Men. They were very like you, with the same hopes
> and dreams, but they lived far away from here, both in space and in
> time." How would you interpret that?
> 
> I read both as strong hints of the obvious, with a dash of doubt.

Can obviously be, but the text doesn't convey that feeling to me. If it were to do so, I think it would be written differently. In fact I'd expect it to have 'a race like your own' rather than 'your own race' (thus rendering the point unfalsifiable, I know). When reading dialogue one must pay attention not only to what is said but to how it is expected to be said. In some cases this results in having two equally possible readings which are wildly different (I don't feel it's the case here, but as I said I'm at a linguistic disadvantage - what may be perfectly normal for you may have quite different connotations to a foreigner or just a speaker of a different variety than your own*).

(*) FI I find the expression 'I think you should go now' unthinkably rude, but aiui it's more or less neutral, even if not not nice, for native speakers.
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