In Poul Anderson's The Devil's Game, Sunderland Haverner states on p. 232 that the game of Follow the Leader, which he has induced seven people to play, is "'...a testing to destruction.'" Earlier, he was dissatisfied because one contestant, Orestes Cruz, had merely been killed without being psychologically destroyed first! Nice guy, that Haverner!
Samael, Haverner's friendly demon (or whatever he is), says that the destruction "'...will probably come tomorrow.'" (ibid.) When Haverner regrets that he cannot get into the contestants' heads where the real action is, Samael replies:
"'I do not think...that tomorrow even you will want to go there.'" (p. 233)
So how much does Samael know in advance? And, of course, what is going to happen tomorrow? If you have read the book, don't say, "I already know." Remember what it was like to read the book for the first time when you did not know what each challenge was going to be until it appeared on the page.
Addendum: Second thoughts. More on this later.
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I was interested to learn that the older meaning of "wif"/wife meaning simply "woman" lingered in the NE of England at least till recent years. An example of a LINGUISTIC survival from very early times.
Samael does not necessarily have to be prescient in what he said to Haverner. For all we know, he could have studied many such testing to destruction experiment and could have simply inferred from past experience what was likely to happen.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Yes.
Paul.
The threefold linguistic distinction -- males in general, females in general, and people in general -- is very ancient, going back to Proto-Indo-European, which had precisely that distinction. So did most of its first and second-generation daughter language families -- Latin, for instance.
In colloquial American English, "woman" and "wife" were often used as synonyms -- "my old woman", for example, was instantly understandable as "my wife", ditto "old man".
Incidentally, "husband" derives from "husbandman" -- which meant simply "farmer" or by extension "head of household, typical adult male, ordinary man".
"Husbandry" still refers to agriculture.
"Lord" and "Lady" in English also derive from the terms "bread-giver" and "divider of bread".
In Esperanto:
"Lord" and "Lady" become "Lordo" and "Lordino";
"Father/Pater" and "Mother/Mater" become "Patro" and "Patrino";
"Right" and "left" become "Maldextra" and "Dextra."
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stirling: and I have read of how we can find similar roots in common with many words in the Sanskrit texts composed by the descendants of the Indo-Europeans who invaded and conquered the northern half of India around 2000 BC. I think these texts are the closest we have to proto-Indo-European.
Similarly, in some armies and navies, a commander is often called the "old man" (even if he's not old). We see Flandry being called the "old man" bye the crew of his escort destroyer in THE REBEL WORLDS.
Paul: I dunno, "lordo" and "lordino" looks too much like each other to be quickly understood as "lord" and "lady." And similarly to the other examples you listed.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: not quite. Sanskrit is closer to Indo-European because it's very -old-; only Hittite is comparable, and for various complex reasons Hittite is extremely eccentric compared to the other Indo-European languages.
But Sanskrit (and Indo-Aryan generally) were not in themselves very conservative language(s); they'd already changed a fair bit by then. The Hindu religious (and philological/linguistic) tradition just preserved them fairly intact from a very early stage.
In terms of distance from the original speech of say 3000 BCE, Lithuanian is actually about as close to it as Sanskrit is -- in fact, a Lithuanian I knew, without any training, could more-or-less puzzle out some short simple sentences and phrases from a Vedic text, and more individual words; it was about as comprehensible to him as written Dutch to an English-speaker.
(Lithuanian is a -very- conservative language, probably because it was extremely isolated and also because it was settled by Indo-European speakers early in the dispersal, and there was no agricultural people there before the Corded Ware/Battle Axe people arrived in the 3rd millenium BCE.)
In about 2000 BCE, you could probably have learned the language in Ireland and then walked all the way to Central Asia without encountering any form that wasn't more-or-less comprehensible with a little effort -- say about the difference between what's spoken in Dover and what's spoken in Glasgow today. (Except Hittite.)
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I sit corrected! I thought Sanskrit was as close as possible to proto-Indo/European. And I was interested to find out from you that Lithuanian was as close to the Indo/European of circa 2000 BC as Sanskrit.
I also knew the Lithuanians were the last major people or nation of Europe to convert to Christianity (Catholicism) in the late 1300's.
Ad astra!
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