(i) In Poul and Karen Anderson's The King Of Ys, a young man called Sucat is baptized as "Patricius" (God's patrician), and converts Ireland - St Patrick.
(ii) Also in The King Of Ys, the Roman centurion, Gaius Valerius Gratillonius, gradually becomes the legendary King Grallon, or Gradlon, of Ys.
(iii) The King Of Ys also refers to the origin of the Arthurian legend. See Camelot And Armorica.
(iv) In The Boat Of A Million Years, Hanno visited the court of a post-Roman British warlord called Artorius... (Scroll down.) (Were some of Hanno's fellow immortals also the sources of legends? See Starkad II.)
(v) In Anderson's The Golden Slave, Eodan gradually adopts the characteristics of Odin. See Origins II.
10 comments:
Incidentally, even without historical context, you could tell that the Irish name "Patrick" (or Padraig) is a loan from Latin, and that it happened fairly late.
That's because of the initial "p" sound. In Latin, Patricius is from a word meaning "having a noble father" and comes from 'pater', father, which in turn derives from a Proto-Indo-European word roughly *ph₂tḗr 'phater', father.
Irish gets its word for 'father' from the same source, but one of the characteristics of Proto-Celtic was loss of initial 'p' -- very much as some dialects of English drop initial 'h'.
So *ph₂tḗr gives Irish "athair". (In Germanic languages it gives "father" or "fader" or similar terms, because a Proto-Germanic marker is a shift of in initial "p" to "f".)
So Padraig can't be a native Irish name; and it must have been borrowed.fairly late, because it it had been borrowed before that sound shift it would have undergone it.
Incidentally, this is how you can tell that the PIE words for "wheel" are from the source vocabulary -- their reflexes in the daughter languages have undergone all the appropriate sound-shifts. Amusingly, both PIE words are reduplicated nominalized verbs/adverbs -- one means "the roundy-roundy thing" and the other "the twisty-turny thing".
I knew "pater," "athair" and "Padraig" but not that they were connected.
In about 2000 BCE you could have walked all the way from Ireland to Xinjiang (taking a boat across the Irish and English channels) and not met a single sharp linguistic boundary -- just a chain of related dialects merging into one another village by village, or encampment by encampment,. Ditto on a basic cultural level, things like gender roles and family patterns. The languages at the extreme ends would have been about as closely related as Spanish and Italian are today, or a little more so. That whole massive linguistic reformatting (and a very substantial genetic one, recent discoveries have shown) had taken place in about the previous 1000 years.
Our history is not what we (sometimes) think it is.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Your use of "Xinjiang" for "Sinkiang" reminded me of how much I dislike the Pinyin system for Romanizing Chinese names. I frankly prefer the older Wade/Giles system because its system of Romanizing Chinese names looks more natural and even elegant in English. "Beijing" and "Xinjiang," etc., simply doesn't look RIGHT. To say nothing of giving no satisfactory indication of how to PRONOUNCE them.
Ad astra and Happy New Year! Sean
Sean: you can't hope to pronounce Chinese properly without tones -- too many Chinese words are otherwise identical. There are Romanization systems which use superscripts to indicate tones, but for anyone who hasn't studied the language, they're pretty arbitrary.
Chinese is violently alien to someone who grew up on Indo-European grammar -- for example, time is indicated by qualifiers rather inflections like is/was/will be or walks/walked.
So a pidgin phrase like "he go long time" is actually a pretty direct transliteration of how Chinese actually works.
It's a very compact language.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I can't truly disagree with what you said, because you plainly more than I do. My negative reaction to Pinyin doesn't come down to anything better than an aesthetic dislike for "Beijing" when compared to "Peking."
Ad astra and Happy New Year! Sean
Sean: that particular one is regional dialect/time period. The southern dialects of Chinese -- actually separate languages -- are in many respects more archaic than the Mandarin "speech of officials".
In Nanking dialect, it's more or less "Peking". That's also fairly close to the Middle Chinese pronunciation. In modern Mandarin, it's Beijing.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I would argue that the Wade/Giles system for Romanizing Chinese names and words does SEEM to have the advantage of more clearly indicating to non-Chinese speakers how to pronounce words in that language. For example, "PeKING" seems more natural to a non-Chinese like me, instead of "Beijing", which does not seem to indicate how to say that name. And so on for many other Chinese cities and provinces, such as "Sinkiang" vis a vis "Xinkiang."
Ad astra! Sean
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