Dragaera

Name similarities and pure speculation

Thu Jul 22 17:56:05 PDT 2004

--- 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


	
		
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