Sunday 12 July 2020

The Wealth Of GENESIS

The text of Poul Anderson's Genesis is so rich that I have several ideas for new posts which will be interrupted by going over to eat with Aileen and Yossi after months of isolation.

Laurinda Ashcroft greets Christian Brannock in the Inglay of her period:

"'Benveni, Capita Brannock.'"
-PART TWO, V, p. 147.

"Well come, Captain Brannock." That is future English? (The Italians have taken over! Their version is "Benvenuto, Capitano Brannock.")

The Little That We Know of History
More than a thousand years before Laurinda's time, an English church was built.
In the seventeenth century, Puritans destroyed images in the church.
Two hundred years before her time, Christian Brannock died.
He had been born in the Yukon Ethnate of the Bering Federation.

Can anyone suggest any approximate dates from that scant information?

5 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

One or two times I've tried my hand at writing out a bit of what I imagined the futuristic Anglic of Dominic Flandry's time was like. By then Anglic was so different from our English that Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem "A Musical Instrument" had to be translated into it.

Off the top of my head, I would guess that old Norman church was built, as the name suggests, during the reigns of William I and II. So, sometime around AD 1100.

Iconoclastic Puritans damaged that church during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, in the 1640's.

I would speculatively suggest Christian Brannock was born around AD 2050. Which means Laura Aschcroft was born around 2250.

Ad astra! Sean

S.M. Stirling said...

That sounds like English heavily influenced by Spanish.

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Spanish: "Bienvenido, Capitan..."

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Mixtures of European languages are called "Spanglish," "Franglais" or "Desperanto."

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!

It did have a Latinate/Spanish look to it!

Ad astra! Sean