Monday 7 November 2016

In The Nest

The only other Avalonian city is Centauri at the mouth of the Sagittarius in the Gulf of Centaurs. In the Phoenix House, Tabitha/Hrill orders a catflower cocktail. She and Chris/Arinnian eat piscoid-and-tomato chowder, beef-and-shua pie, salad of clustergrain leaf and pears and drink coffee spiced with witchroot and a bottle of vintage dago. The Nest, a tavern for ornithoids, is the tallest building in Centauri with a gravshaft to its rooftop for humans who have not brought flying gear. It is unwalled, protected from rain by a vitryl canopy. Insectoids circle fluoroglobes and a service robot serves New African beer.
-copied from here. See also The Food Thread.

If the Time Patrol series were to be filmed, then some dialogue would have to be in Temporal, Exaltationist or historical languages with subtitles. In the Technic History, some dialogue would have to be in League Latin, Eriau or Planha. Anglic would be rendered as English. In fact, Poul Anderson tells us nothing or next to nothing about the sounds or vocabularies of these languages. Here is one short piece of dialogue in the Nest:

"'Hoy-ah! Vodan, ekh-hirr.'" (Rise Of The Terran Empire, p. 505) 

We are told that Arinnian continues in Planha although the omniscient narrator translates for us:

"Good flight to you,' Arinnian greeted in Planha..." (ibid.)

- but then he resorts to Anglic:

"'I didn't expect to find you here.'" (ibid.)

"Hoy-ah" sounds as if it might be Anglic? - whereas "...ekh-hirr..." is clearly Planha.

I probably commented on this instance of pathetic fallacy before:

"[Tabitha] considered [Arinnian] for a while that grew. Lightning moved closer on heavy gusts. His rage ebbed..." (p. 509)

Some men find male-female interactions easy; some find them difficult. One kind of man can phone several women acquaintances and arrange to meet one of them for sex whereas another kind of man does not know how to initiate a sexual liaison. Many male human choth members have contrived a way to be both kinds of man simultaneously:

"'...promiscuous as kakkelaks provided they don't much respect their partners, but hardly able to touch birds of the opposite sex.'" (ibid.)

A double standard. However, human beings lived by double standards long before they migrated to Avalon: men who have sex with different women when single but insist that their own fiancees must be virgins. A guy I worked with swore regularly but commented, "F----in' foul-mouthed bitch!" when he heard a woman swearing.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

On a mixed race colony like Avalon I would expect both races to more or less unconsciously start adopting words or terms common to either species.

As for cussing, I find it very difficult to swear out loud! My late mother was a true lady and she hated vulgar and coarse language. So, I very, very seldom cuss out loud!

Sean