Manse Everard, with languages imprinted, can jump instantly from New York, 1969, to Jerusalem, 33 A.D., whereas Havig must:
fly from New York to Israel;
walk from his hotel along the Jericho Road, carrying a handbag;
hide in an orange grove;
travel back to the previous midnight;
don an Arab costume bought from a tourist shop;
carry, among other necessities, a phrase book compiled by a grad student, Roman period coins, an ingot and his specially designed "chronolog";
breathe slowly to oxygenate his blood, then breathe in a lungful;
time travel pastward;
stop for air in the late nineteenth century;
continue traveling and stopping, more frequently with distance, for breath;
stop when a red light on his "chronolog" shows that it has detected the stellar positions corresponding to Passover 33 A.D.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
But wasn't the language of the Maurai Federation, centered as it was in New Zealand, an evolved or changed form of English?
And one Jack Havig could travel more easily thru time would be to breathe air from an oxygen tank. Cut down on the number of stops he would otherwise need to do.
Sean
Sean,
Re language, see THERE WILL BE TIME, V, p. 55.
Havig's group do use small oxygen tanks later.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I looked that part of Chapter V of THERE WILL BE TIME where Jack Havig mentioned the lingua franca of the Maurai Federation--and no mention was made of what language/s it was descended from. If my memory is correct about what I read in both the Maurai short stories and ORION SHALL RISE, the dominant language of the Federation was an English descended language called, I think, "Inglis."
I want to get at least half way thru Fr. Fitzmyer's RESPONSES TO 101 QUESTIONS ON THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS, but I do plan on rereading THERE WILL BE TIME soon.
Sean
In Europe, French would be the most useful language if you were traveling into the past; English didn't become a rival there until quite recently. Modern French would probably be comprehensible back to about 1200, though with increasing difficulty; for English, you'd start running into problems before about 1600, particularly outside London and the East Midlands.
Arabic is actually a series of related languages that aren't mutually comprehensible; but the "classical" Koranic form serves as a standard, rather as Mandarin does for the various Chinese dialects.
I remember some time ago taking a train from Canada to the US; there was an elderly Chinese women on board who spoke no English, and the customs people were having difficulties. They found a bilingual Chinese-speaking young man, but he was baffled -- he spoke Mandarin, and her Cantonese dialect was absolutely incomprehensible to him.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I agree, a knowledge of French (along with Latin) would be more useful to time travelers than Middle or early Modern English.
And before the Arab Muslim invasions of the 600's Greek and Aramaic were the predominant languages of the Middle East outside Sassanian Persia.
And I have heard of how Chinese has many different and nearly incomprehensible dialects. The Peking regime has been trying to make the Mandarin dialect the standard form thru out China.
Sean
Kaor, Sean!
As I understand it (and please keep in mind that I’m a round-eye who does not speak Chinese) “Sinic languages” is more accurate than “dialects.” The languages spoken in different parts of China bear a family resemblance in that they’re analytic and tonal, and can be written with the same characters, since the characters represent ideas rather than sounds, but their vocabularies can be quite different, and, for example, Cantonese has more different tones than Mandarin.
Best Regards,
Nicholas
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