I tried to write that previous post while listening to an on-line interview about current world changes and it became very confusing.
Brian O'Banion, an Irish former New York policeman, now speaks Unitary. In the current local Dukes Playhouse dramatization of The Wizard Of Oz, Dorothy has a language problem on first meeting the Munchkins. One of them asks her, "Kion lingvon vi parolas?" They soon establish that she speaks English and they switch to this although they continue to insert some Esperanto, like "Sekvu la flavan brikan vojon" for "Follow the yellow brick road." During the interval, I approached a Munchkin and said, "Cu vi parolas Esperanton? Gi estas tre facila lingvo," and left him with "Kaj al vi, kamarado!" (Which was about as much as I could manage.) I have gone off the point, haven't I?
O'Banion is an Observer, a role invented by Mendelbaum although probably soon to be adopted by the international government. Administrators need to know what people are thinking and saying so that they can then know what needs to be done. The feeble-minded need to be guided to their new colonies. Someone acting anonymously is buying or at least somehow acquiring scientific equipment and secreting it somewhere. This has to be investigated.
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
The most authentic source, of course, would be to read Baum's THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ to find out if Dorothy had that kind of language problem and how it was handled.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
She didn't! It wasn't!
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Then that play you watched perpetrated an uncanonical alteration of what Baum wrote--which I disapprove of.
Ad astra! Sean
Sure but stage and screen dramatizations do that all the time.
Kaor, Paul!
I know, but I don't like it. I'm esp. outraged by how Tolkien's THE HOBBIT and THE LORD OF THE RINGS were mauled, brutalized, mutilated, botched, etc., in the films.
Ad astra! Sean
Fiction involving travel usually skates around language issues. Frex, if you went back more than about 400 years, you'd have trouble understanding English, or being understood.
OTOH, a Lithuanian time-traveler wouldn't have problems for over 2000 years.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Tolkien handled that problem by feigning his Middle Earth "histories" were translated from Westron, the Adunaic derived everyday language of the Numenorean realms in exile. With plenty of snippets from his invented Elvish languages, Sindarin and Quenya.
Ad astra! Sean
Of course, nowadays you can go (almost) anywhere and use English -- every fourth or fifth adult human being speaks at least a little of it.
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