This Week in Google Alerts: story with Gaiman

Jeff Wilson · 20 Feb 2011, 04:47 · 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: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2011 22:47:35 -0600
Subject: (urth) This Week in Google Alerts: story with Gaiman
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Message-ID: <4D609CE7.2080407 at io.com>

On 2/19/2011 7:52 PM, David Stockhoff wrote:
> On 2/19/2011 8:17 PM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
>> Incidentally, there seems to be a slight language inconsistency in
>> that Severian does not find Typhon's language archaic, or at least he
>> does not mention it. Yet Typhon lived something between 350 and 2000
>> years before Severian's time (depending on whether the Whorl travelled
>> at relativistic speeds or not). One would expect considerable changes,
>> even in a culturally fossilised society.
>>
> Perhaps a language that is used to rule several worlds lasts longer than
> Latin, which ruled only part of one. But yes, Severian or his translator
> appears to have glossed over that. Typhon should have had some
> unimaginable archaic accent.

I brought this up last year, particularly with Typhon failing to correct 
Sev on Autarch instead of Monarch.

However, given the vast numbers of speaking and listening devices 
apparently still functional in the House and the Citadel, it is possible 
that they create philological inertia; aristocratic accents command 
machinery, eclectic accents don't. In Severian's case, the apprentices 
sleep in the highest floors of the tower adjacent to the chattering 
computers and communicators, and likely stand watches there as well.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >

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