(urth) On Blue's Waters (Initial thoughts)

Jerry Friedman jerry_friedman at yahoo.com
Mon Jan 9 20:52:33 PST 2012


> From: António Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com>
> No dia 09/01/2012, às 19:36, Antonin Scriabin <kierkegaurdian at gmail.com> 
> escreveu:
> 
>>  See, I found the way the thieves and other disreputables spoke in Long Sun 
> to be great; the odd words were carefully selected (like the vocabulary of New 
> Sun) from other places and cleverly used.  A lot of the words were actually 
> found in thieves slang from the 1800s (like "dimber" for example).

My objections in the /Long Sun/ are to Xiphias (every sentence ends in an exclamation point!), Olivine (every sentence gets to the second-last word and then... every sentence gets to the last word and then repeats), and--ah--Remora.  (Do Oreb and the catachrest count?)   In the /Short Sun/ we get Pig and the people of Dorp.  Wolfe does better, in my opinion, with a lot of the other characters's ways of speaking.

> The character on Blue who simply had the order of words in his sentences changed 
> up clearly didn't have the same amount of work put into him.  
> 
> Arrghhhhh!!!! NO, NO, NO, NO! He's DUTCH! It's a masterly rendering of 
> Dutch that Wolfe does there! PLEASE, folks, wait a little before you form your 
> conclusions!

Wikipedia says, "Dutch exhibits subject–object–verb word order, but in main clauses the conjugated verb is moved into the second position in what is known as verb second or V2 word order."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_language#Word_order

However, the dialect of Dorp has object-subject-verb order, with the conjugated verb never moved that I've noticed.  "Another Main you got.  Maybe a name it's got."  (OBW, Chapter 4.)

I looked at /Ik heb altijd gelijk/, a novel by Willem Federik Hermans, which seems to confirm Wikipedia's description.

"'Ik ben bedrogen!  Ik heb mij laten belazeren!  Dat is nog het besten om ervan te zeggen!'"

Compare Wijzer's "That I see," "This I hear," "It you must finish," etc. (ibid).

> Linguistic individuality is one of the things Wolfe pays a lot of attention to 
> and it's frustrating to see it taken for random seasoning.
> And of course the _vironese_ thieves will differ mostly by their lexicon. 
> Speakers of related languages or dialects will have different grammars and 
> phonologies. My only complaint is the amount of h's in a certain part of the 
> book. Since the aitches really are there, one could do without the apostrophes. 

I have the gravest possible doubts that either the h's or "yer" for "you" are part of the dialect Wolfe seems to be aiming at.

Jerry Friedman



More information about the Urth mailing list