Re: American dialect of Brithenig

[Sally Caves <scaves@frontiernet.net>]

andrew wrote:

> > you
> > also read Stirling's new "trilogy" (only two books out): _Island in the
> > Sea of Time_ (about how Nantucket just gets temporally cut off by some
> > phenomenon referred to as "The Event") and transported back in time to
> > 1250 b.c.?  The islanders have to figure out how 7000 people are going
> > to survive with dwindling fuel, little farmland, no cattle or grain,
> > and how they are going to sail to, and trade with the pre-British
> > inhabitants of Britain.  The second book chronicles their contact with

> I have seen them in the bookshop.  Do you recommend them?

Yes.  I'll tell you what gets tiresome about them, though...no that
might
give away the plot.  Another annoyance:  Stirling writes so large...
both books
could have been cut by about twenty-five percent had Stirling taken out
all the long asides and "in-jokes."  In the middle of a confusing piece
of dialogue he'll put the person's thoughts in italics and muse on them,
in ways that seem to me to be annoyingly trivial (where was his
editor??),
then resume the dialogue.  You have to go back and reread to get the
sense
of what the members of the dialogue are disputing.  He also has too much
of what the Turkey Lexicon calls "laugh tracks."  Unsure that you won't
feel as nauseated by the "reality" of war and slaughter and carnage as
he wants you to feel, he always ALWAYS has somebody urping or vomiting
as
soon as anything violent or dead is witnessed.  It really is
predictable.
"They came upon the dead bodies in the boat [I paraphrase].  Marion
Alston
leaned over the railing to retch."  No really.  Everybody is completely
queasy, to the point where you realize that it's an overdone device,
due to bad editing and deadlines.  But it's pulp fiction.  

Otherwise, sure!  They're an engrossing read, and he certainly has done
his homework.  He even puts it in: there's a historian, Ian Arnstein,
who's
always saying, "well, Prof. Famous Current Anthropologist certainly had
it
right, even though he was scoffed at by his critics..." etc. etc.  The
characters are interesting.  Except for the villain, William Walker, who
is so inutterably evil and banal that you want to throw the book at the
wall.

> > Stirling
> > has done some linguistic research, apparent in a few phrases he tries
> > his hand at in PIE, but my impression was that he assumes that the stuff
> > with the asterisks was written in stone.

> Written on bark maybe, or in the opinions of linguists (which is pretty
> tough stuff to carve in the first place), but stone?  You amuse me.

I meant just that! <G>  Stirling leaves in all the "dh"s and "bh"s and
"x"s
when reproducing their names and the words they say to each other, as
though
its been found somewhere in stone (and in the Roman alphabet!!!!).  

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SALLY CAVES
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Niffodyr tweluenrem lis teuim an.
"The gods have retractible claws."
				from _The Gospel of Bastet_
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