lasers;
artificial positive and negative gravity fields;
the quantum hyperjump.
Vance Hall, commenting on the Philosophy of Noah Arkwright, cites these four technological achievements as examples of phenomena that were supposed to be impossible until they happened. Since two of them have already happened, this generates the impression that Hall is merely living at a later stage of the same history as the readers of Poul Anderson's Technic History.
Hall's remarks are inexplicably presented as an Introduction to "The Three-Cornered Wheel," which then begins:
"'No!'"
-Poul Anderson,"The Three-Cornered Wheel" IN Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (Riverdale, NY, 2009), pp. 199-261 AT I, p. 201.
The speaker is "Rebo Legnor's-Child, Marchwarden of Gilrigor..." (ibid.), on the planet Ivanhoe, springing back while addressing apprentice David Falkayn.
In the following volume, "Day of Burning" begins with two and a half pages of the omniscient narrator informing the reader about a supernova. After a double gap between paragraphs:
"'No.'"
-Poul Anderson, "Day of Burning" IN Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 209-272 AT p. 213.
The speaker is "Morruchan Long-Ax, the Hand of the Vach Dathyr..." (ibid.), on the planet Merseia, addressing Master Merchant David Falkayn who steps backward in startlement.
We notice that:
Falkayn has advanced in his career (indeed, I have skipped over two intermediate stages);
both of these stories begin with a misunderstanding, which would be all too frequent in negotiations between members of different rational species.
We will stay with Falkayn on Ivanhoe for a while. Nicholas van Rijn has been introduced in an earlier story but there is as yet no connection between Falkayn and van Rijn.
9 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
We have uranium fission and lasers, next comes artificial positive and negative gravity fields and the hyperjump/drive. SOON, I hope!!!
The first "no" was because Falkayn had drawn a symbol holy to Marchwarden Rebo. The second "no" was due to changes in the Eriau language. A bit like "A Tragedy of Errors" at least a millennium later.
Sean
The transition in Eriau was particularly nicely done because it's fairly equivalent to the Great Vowel Shift in English, which transformed the -sound- of the language between the late Medieval and early Modern period.
It was still going on in Shakespeare's time, and you can see it in the differences between the way Henry VIII wrote English and the way his daughter Elizabeth did.
Chaucer's Middle English is fairly modern in its grammar -- the loss of inflection and the shift to analytical word order is nearly complete -- but it -sounded- very different from modern English; the vowels were still handled more the way Dutch does now, sounds like initial "kn" and final "ought" were still fully voiced, and so forth.
Whereas Shakespeare's sounds were more than 3/4 of the way to ours.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I did have the Shakespearean analogy in mind the times I read "Day of Burning."
Sean
"...sounds like initial "kn" and final "ought" were still fully voiced..."
Meaning the "Frenchman" in Monty Python and the Holy Grail was right: "Silly English k'niggh'ts!"
Kaor, DAVID!
And I thought the CURRENT pronunciation of words like "knights" is "nights." No attempt to sound out "kn." Which leads me to think we still use "k" in spelling "knight" to distinguish it from "night."
Sean
David: yup. Roughly, a "k" as in Katherine, with the "n" sort of crowding into the tail of it, and the "ight" as in Scottish "nicht" ("Bra bricht moonlit nicht"). There's a guttural rough breathing sound.
Lallans isn't identical to the Middle English sound system, but it's much closer than modern English.
Sean: we pronounce "knight" and "night" as "nite", pretty much. In Middle English, they both had the guttural word-final "ghhh-ht" sound, and were distinguished only by the initial "kn" in knight.
Incidentally, the word ancestral to "knight" originally meant "servant" in the sense of "retainer, follower" in all the Germanic languages. In English it came to mean "armed retainer" and then our modern sense of the word "knight".
In most of the Continental Germanic languages, it changed to mean "servant" in general (as in Dutch "knecht") while the word for knight derives from a word meaning "rider" or "cavalryman" -- Ritter and the like.
Likewise, the pronunciation of "sword" went from "s-word" (originally "sweord") to "sord". But you can still hear the ghost of the "w" in a lot of people's pronunciation, particularly in British dialects. In recordings from a century ago, it's a little more noticeable.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Many thanks for your very interesting explanations! Btw, I have a peculiarity of my own: I have some difficulty pronouncing "great" as "grate." I tend to say it, if I'm not careful, as "gwate."
And I did know the German word for our "knight" is "ritter."
Sean
Post a Comment