Urth Net

← back to the conversation

This week in Google alerts; story with Gaiman:

David Stockhoff · 20 Feb 2011, 01:42 · from 2011-February.txt.gz

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: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2011 20:42:45 -0500
Subject: (urth) This week in Google alerts; story with Gaiman:
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTinkNx89XxjZMiSx1odXP4itTZ=D5Nq76dg8zHwY at mail.gmail.com>
References: <AANLkTinkNx89XxjZMiSx1odXP4itTZ=D5Nq76dg8zHwY at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4D607195.7030209 at verizon.net>

On 2/19/2011 5:21 PM, Andrew Mason wrote:
> Gerry Quinn wrote:
>
> . As you say, Latin and English would be nearly indistinguishable in
>> Severian's day. What I think is that the language represented as Latin in
>> BotNS is to the contemporary language of Severian's day as Latin is to the
>> English of today.  And I don't think the language Thea speaks of (which is
>> actually the English we speak)  holds that position.  It seems more distant.
>>
>> I other words I think:
>>
>> <Terminus Est>  :<Sev's language>  :: Latin : English
>> <language Thea mentions>  :<Sev's language>  ::<really ancient language>  :
>> English
>>
> I agree with all this. But another question is whether real Latin is
> being used in _Long Sun_ (in 'vox populi. vox Dei', for instance). It
> might be, because I take it that the Whorl cultures are deliberate
> reconstructions, inspired by memories of 'our' time (which, as Cyriaca
> explains, were restored to humans by computers at the end of the First
> Empire). On the other hand, one might wonder whether actual languages
> were among what was restored; the books in Ultan's library would seem
> not to be books handed down from 'our' time, but books written at the
> end of the First Empire, presumably in current languages, enshrining
> knowledge from an earlier time.
>
I agree with this.


---
avast! Antivirus: Outbound message clean.
Virus Database (VPS): 110219-2, 02/19/2011
Tested on: 2/19/2011 8:42:46 PM
avast! - copyright (c) 1988-2011 AVAST Software.
http://www.avast.com




An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net