--- Mark A Mandel <mam at theworld.com> wrote: > On Wed, 21 Jul 2004, Jerry Friedman wrote: > > #By the way, if anyone is really bored, you can wonder why such > #names as Istvan and Tomas are the *only* trace of Christianity > #we've seen on Dragaera. Or are they not Christian? > > Yes, they are. But my name is Mark, and I'm Jewish, and my ancestors as > far back as anyone has any idea have been Jewish. Well, Stephanos and Thomas were Greek names before anyone was a Christian, but the only reason they were adopted in Hungary and Spain was Christianity. > Names come into a language and a culture and lose their associations > with their origins. > > In point of fact, after >200,000 years no name or word or language would > be recognizable. This is something that Steve has done as an author that > we can try to explain away within Dragaera, or that we can simply refuse > to worry about. I don't have a problem with it. Right. It's not really a problem. He needs a human language for the Fenarians so he uses the language of his ancestors. We're not really supposed to think that Noish-pa is a native speaker of twentieth-century Hungarian. It just seems to one part of my mind that if Istvan is a Fenarian name, the Fenarians should have big celebrations on Dec. 26 Jerry Friedman __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Vote for the stars of Yahoo!'s next ad campaign! http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/yahoo/votelifeengine/