On Tue, 3 Sep 2002, Steve Simmons wrote: #I think the Fenarians are a third branch, distinct from Dragaerans #and Easterners. They're not baseline human, but they don't seem to #be Dragaerans as we know them. Their language is much different, and #that's more important than might be immediately apparent. Hungarian is "much different" from most other European languages, being, as far as modern linguistic science knows, totally unrelated to them. (Distant kin to Turkish, Finnish, and Estonian.) So that doesn't count as evidence that the F-ans are a third branch. # In PHOENIX pg #116, it's clear that the Communist documents that Kelly found and read #were originals, and therefore not something translated into modern, #er, Dragaeran or Easterner. So we're talking millions of years with Well, over 200,000, the age of the Empire. AFAIK we have no evidence for that. Alexx's speculations aren't canonical, are they? #little or no language change for Dragaerans. So distinctly different #languages probably imply *very* ancient divisions. This is one of those places where sf/fantasy authors simply don't deal with the science, because it would mess up their main point, which is telling a good story (and whatever else they want to do with it). I speak here from my stronghold, so to speak, as a professional linguist. The "universal translator" of classic Star Trek is one example, and historical linguistics here is another such case. The time depth between, say, English, Hindi, Russian, Greek, Albanian, French, and Lithuanian -- the time that has passed since their ancestral languages were all one, or all very close -- is on the order of five to seven thousand years. Any documents that had been preserved for 30 to 40 times that long without a parallel tradition of conserving the ancient language (cf. Hebrew over 2-3000) would be totally incomprehensible and indecipherable. Either there has been magical intervention to slow or halt development (a point that has also been raised on this list w.r.t. culture and technology of Easterners in general and Fenario in particular), or Steve is simply ignoring the point, as he has a perfect right to do. #> They don't think of it in those terms. Whatever Alfredo has, the Tree or #> the power behind it cuts him off from. But I don't see why it's not #> straightforward Orb sorcery. # #I can give you a couple of reasons why it isn't. First and foremost, #everyone we've seen who has a link with the Orb is either Dragaeran or #has purchased a title. There was some brief discussion here a week or #two back about how Vlad got his link to the Orb, but whatever the #actual mechanism is, it isn't something that's handed out to common #Easterners who wind up doing farm labor for the lord of the Pepperfields. That's how Miklos got it, isn't it? Joined the Teckla in service to some lord? #Vlad (and everyone else who has it) is very aware of his link to the #Orb. From everything I can see in the text, Vlad is the *only* easterner #who has one. Cawti doesn't. Noish-pa doesn't. I really can't believe #that all three of the Fenarians who've gone into Fairie got one in their #relatively brief stay there. Cawti and the family Taltos live in the capital of the Empire. Things may be quite different in the backlands. Just think of the cultural differences between Adrilankha and Smallcliff in _Athyra_. In the capital, there is a community of Easterners, and they're at the bottom of the social scale, along with the Teckla who are there; they're *known* and actively disliked and discriminated against. In the country (I speculate) it could be very different, and a stranger who walks in out of the outback, small and unthreatening even if he is odd, and is willing to work on the usual conditions, might be accepted into the Teckla without much fuss. #And the link to the Orb includes things that the Fenarians with power #don't seem to have, like a clock, immediately knowledge of the Empress, #etc. All of this seems to be blank to Sandor, Miklos and Brigetta. So #I'm pretty convinced their talent, whatever it is, is not due to a link #to the Orb. Fenarians don't have clocks, do they? Why would they bother with the clock link once they're back home, where the position of the Sun (hidden in the Empire) tells you the time of day as precisely as an agrarian economy ever needs to know? And what's the point of teaching some new Teckla that he can contact the Empress through the Orb, and she'll disintegrate him if she thinks he's wasting her time? Right; and what will she think of the Dragaeran who gave this double loser (Teckla *and* Easterner) that access? Sure, it may be the law to tell them, but how much is that going to mean in practice? #Hmmm, I just had an idea. Maybe Fenarians are actually Dragaerans #of a sort! Maybe they're the remnants of the of the 14 lost tribes. #Maybe they're half-breeds. Have you read _Issola_? I'll say no more here, to avoid spoilers. #And a special thanks to Mark for reminding me of his Cracks and Shards #page <http://world.std.com/~mam/Cracks-and-Shards/>. That, and Alexx's #Dragaeran timeline <http://world.std.com/~alexx/timeline.txt> are two #of the most helpful sources around; I should have looked in C&S before #writing my original. My great pleasure to be of service, sir. # [[ An aside: I've made the claim that the increased sorcerous powers # post-Interregnum are not due to skills honed during the low-power # Interregnum days; that's just plain silly. If it were true, folks # born after the Interregnum (like Vlad) wouldn't be able to teleport # because they didn't get those centuries of skill honing. ISTR that it wasn't attributed to honing of individual skills, but to advancement of the state of the art. And those developments would have been passed on to anyone learning sorcery. #Possible, but I don't think so. Fenarr gets there by going past the lake #the bears his name; so I think the Pepperfields is the area just NW of the #mountains of Faerie. It's an area very good for growing peppers (paprika). The Treaty granted the Fenarians the right to *come in* and farm it. It's not their own homeland, though I think it may have been disputed -- claimed by both sides -- before the treaty. Oughta check the text, eh? -- Mark A. Mandel http://world.std.com/~mam/Cracks-and-Shards/ a Steven Brust Dragaera fan website