edh and thorn [Digest urth.v024.n024]

William H. Ansley · 01 Apr 1999, 00:03 · from urth-v0024.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: "William H. Ansley" <wansley at warwick.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) Re: edh and thorn [Digest urth.v024.n024]
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 00:03:34
Message-ID: <urth-v0024-0119 at digest.urth.net>
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>
>Dragging this back to Wolfe by main force, I note that we have
>evidence that Severian's alphabet is like ours: at one point we
>are told that "s" looks like a snake and "t" like a cross.  Are
>there any other hints?
>
>	-John Bishop, letting his long-ago linguistics degree
>                      take over for a minute or two.

This may not be reliable evidence of the letter shapes at all. Since Wolfe
"translated" TBotNS from a strange future tongue he probably had to make an
adjustment in this passage. For all we know the last two letters in the
actual word Severian used (which Wolfe translated as 'last') looked
entirely different. We could have had a hoop and a cup rather than a
serpent and a sword, just to pick two more objects at random that can
conceivably be thought to look like other letters in our alphabet. Which
letters? I'll leave that as an exercise for you.

William Ansley

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