So did a guy in a dream that I had just before waking this morning. He said:
"The time is out of joint. O cursed spite.
"I have refused to stand against the night."
For the original, see Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5, lines 210-211.
I would have forgotten this if I had not written it down so I might as well write it here.
Returning to Poul Anderson, I am amazed at how much is to be drawn out of his texts by rereading them carefully and by comparing, e.g., his A Midsummer Tempest with his Time Patrol series and with Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: Worlds' End, to cite just these two examples. I will finish rereading the Old Phoenix chapters of A Midsummer Tempest before either returning to The Broken Sword or moving on to something else.
9 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
One thing that struck me when I looked up that Shakespeare link was seeing "porpentine," an obsolete version of "porcupine."
Ad astra! Sean
sean: A lot of English is loanwords or Latinate stuff... but we gradually make it our own!
What is the English for "yoga"? Yoga.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Absolutely! English absorbed many words from French and Latin after the Norman Conquest.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: and sometimes we borrowed the original Latin word -and- the French descendant... for different purposes.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And that does sound odd! But nobody has ever tried to officially control how English developed. There has never been an "English Academy" a la the French Academy decreeing what words would be accepted into the language. English has always gone its own merry, ad hoc, whimsically unchecked way.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: English has aspects of a 'contact language', too -- in its simplified grammer and reduction in inflections.
Afrikaans is even more that way.
For example, in its source language (Dutch) "I am" is inflected so:
Ik ben — I am
Jij/U bent — You are (informal/formal)
Hij/Zij/Het is — He/She/It is
Wij zijn — We are
Jullie zijn — You are (plural)
Zij zijn — They are
In Afrikaans, it goes:
Ek is -- I am
Jy is /U is -- you are
Hy/Sy/Dit is -- He/She/It is:
Ons is -- we are
Julle is -- you (plural) are
Hulle is -- they are
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I approve of that kind of simplifying, in both English and Afrikaans.
Ad astra! Sean
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