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

António Pedro Marques entonio at gmail.com
Tue Jan 10 06:52:37 PST 2012


Jerry Friedman wrote (10-01-2012 04:52):
>> 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.

With the possible exception of Pig's 'eye dialect', how can those 
characters' specific ways of speaking be presented other than as they are? 
You may say you'd rather they didn't have specific ways of speaking, or that 
their ways of speaking weren't so conspicuous (like those of thieves, 
soldiers, councillors, and so on), but there I'd just have to disagree, as I 
quite like Remora and just love Oreb, for instance. The one I feel is a bit 
forced is Incus, but that's in character also.

Xiphias can not but remind me of one of The Secret of Monkey Island's 
characters.

>> 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).

You are right. Dorp's word order is not the same as Dutch. Not only the most 
usual order isn't the same, Dorp's is quite consistent whereas modern 
Dutch's is more complex than just SOV/V2. However, to me as someone who's 
been learning Dutch, Dorp's english evokes just the right feeling of dutchness.

I can't quite explain it, but, for instance, the placement of pronouns in 
Brazil differs from that in Portugal. However, in some types of clauses, 
they appear in the same position. Rather than perceiving that as being a 
similarity, what it feels like is that a very different type of construction 
is being used - so different that by following the different rules of 
placement, the pronouns end up in what looks like the same position. 
Likewise, I don't think the rendition of a foreign grammar in english has to 
be an exact tranposition of the foreign rules. Well, I said I couldn't quite 
explain it.

>> 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.

There is no Scotland in the Whorl.



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