Sunday 9 December 2018

Ghostliness And The Milky Way

Poul Anderson, Vault Of The Ages, Chapter 3.

"In the moonless dark, the City was a place of looming shadows, streets like tunnels of night, a ghostly breeze and the tiny patter of a hurrying rat. A pair of bats swooped blackly against the dim glow of the Milky Way, and a wild dog howled far off in the woods. Ghostly, flitting through the enormous night silence and the small fearful noises below a wheeling sky, the four humans made their way to the forbidden place." (p. 39)

Comments
The Milky Way is always with us.
We met wild dogs before.
I always write "human beings," not "humans," because I heard that "human" was an adjective, not a noun. However, if enough people write "humans," then "human" becomes a noun.
Tribespeople believe that there are ghosts and devils in the City. No wonder, if the breeze and humans are described as "ghostly." Long before electric light, brave men feared the dark. See Niall In Combat.

5 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And that use of an adjective, "human," becoming the noun "human" would be an example of how languages change as time passes. As we see in "A Tragedy of Errors."

I suspect that in about another century the Elizabethan/Jacobean English of Shakespeare's plays will have become so archaic that they will need to be translated into whatever English has become by then.

That other classic of early Modern English, the Anglican Authorized Bible, will also become increasingly unreadable about the same time.

Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,
And Shakespeare is supposed to have had an input into the King James Bible.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

That I had not known, this hint that Shakespeare had a hand in translating the AV.

What I did think of was how the title page of the AV stated King James men consulted the Douai-Reims Bible on how best to render some passages into English.

Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,
I have emailed you a link to the suggestion that Shakespeare hid his name in Psalm 46.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Thanks! Something I will read with interest.

And it was the PREFACE of the 1611 AV which mentioned the Catholic Douai-Reims. Not the title page.

Sean