(urth) This Week in Google Alerts: story with Gaiman

[Jeff Wilson]

On 2/19/2011 6:27 AM, David Stockhoff wrote:
> Funny that the guy who complained about Wolfe's use of Latin calls
> himself Lepton. I am assuming he is not actually Greek, yet he
> resurrects this archaic language and reuses its dead, worn-out words. ;)
>
> I was interested to read this thought:
>
> "Yes, I know what Latin is. What I'm saying is that the sword is not
> actually called Terminus Est. It's name is actually in English, which to
> Severian and the other characters is an ancient and defunct language. If
> Wolfe gave us the actual name of the sword, it would convey to us the
> meaning but not the sense. So Wolfe translates it to Latin."
>
> We've had some debates about names and languages used (towns on the
> Whorl, etc.). But I am not sure anyone has proposed that the dead
> language is actually English, even though this would explain some of
> Severian's linguistic explanations, among other things. There is
> probably a limit to how literally one can take the idea, but generally
> sense it works well and yet is not obvious. And of course it's another
> puzzle of the simplest and most confounding kind.

Is it necessarily a single dead language? Perhaps Sev recorded the 
translations rather than the originals.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >