(urth) The Pelerine (COTA 12)

[Mr Thalassocrat]

2010/9/14 António Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com>

> Mr Thalassocrat wrote (14-09-2010 10:40):
>
>
> Not all of them are bizarre or implausible, but overall I think the list
>>  is consistent with hypotheses that (a) Dorpian names come from some list
>>  of Dutch words that the Whorl team found somewhere & as a body don't
>> have much to do with names that a real Dutch culture would use; and (b)
>> the Dorpians quite possibly don't even speak Dutch & have no idea what
>> these names "mean".
>>
>
> Here I disagree. Not only are the dorpians seafarers, which is quite dutch,
> their names are not weird at all. Even Dorp (english thorpe) is the word
> for
> 'town'. Of course they are not dutch, but they do look dutch-inspired. As
> to
> the language, they speak the 'common tongue' funny, with what can be
> considered a dutch syntax.
>
> Not that this is in any way inconsistent with the hypothesis that the
> cultures in the Whorl were fashioned from bits and scraps of urthly
> originals rather than from the full orginals themselves.
>
>
>

As you say, it's not really very important whether or not the Dorpians
actually speak Dutch or know what their names mean. Obviously some of the
Whorl cultures know something about "their" languages - the Trivigauntes and
apparently the GrandeCittans, for example.

On the hypothesis that the Whorl team constructed these cultures from
whatever info they could find in the old records, I guess there would be a
spectrum. To me, the Dorpians look like they are at one end of that
spectrum, as far as a recovered language goes. Little example: Vadsig -
neither she nor anybody else seem bothered that her name means "Slothful".

As to why the Whorl team went to all this trouble: possibly just whimisical
megalomania. But maybe also this: Typhon's intention with the Whorl project
is to do somethling like recreate the evolution of the First Empire. To do
this he plans to recreate something like the world of "our" time, and re-run
a struggle between nations and cultures to dominate it, with whatever
culture emerges from that as victor honed in conflict and ready to conquer
the stars - and with him as their immortal god.

On the Whorl, that struggle has to be kept at a low level, to avoid any
victor being powerful enough to challenge Mainframe. On the Whorl, with
Mainframe safe in orbit, it can start in earnest.

The purpose of the Whorl then is to get a collection of cultures to a new
planet and make sure that they remain foreign and little understood to each
other until they get there. On arrival, they will all lack various
necessities and will start to fight each other for resources. Wars will
escalate and continue over a long period until some culture dominates.

Anyway, I think that's plausible. Typhon is the kind of guy who would
believe that war is the best mother of progress.
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