>The human v. human terminology was introduced in Jhereg. Forgive me if >after 22 years I was perhaps a bit flippant in my initial answer. Oh, yeah, I got that but since it worked into the point I was making I ran with it anyway. ;-) >Is not Dragaera the name for the world, i.e. planet? Actually, we don't know what the name of the world is. The empire is The Dragaeran Empire and Vlad refers to everyone of that race as a Dragaeran so we, as readers, do the same. As you point out, the name of the world is likely to be different depending on which of its inhabitants you ask. >Then again, your average Fenarian >is unlikely to self identify as an Easterner. East of what? Exactly. "Easterners" call themselves "humans". They refer to the race Vlad calls "Dragaeran" variously as "elves", "fairy folk" and probably dozens of other names depending on the country and language in question. >We're talking about names that we, residents of a land entirely apart can >comfortably use to differentiate two humanoid species, for that I posit that >'Dragaeran' and 'Easterner' work reasonably well. I'll agree that works perfectly fine for us as readers. The point that Maximilian was making and that I was alluding to as well is that VLAD is going to require a new way of referring to people. Vlad currently uses "Dragaeran" to indicate a species. If he accepts the idea that "Dragaeran" actually refers to a citizen of the Empire, then he's got to come up with a new word to describe the species instead of the nationality. Whether this will ever happen or not will depend to a large extent on whether Vlad ever admits the he himself is a "Dragaeran". Noish-pa calls them "elfs". I think that the other Easterners we've encountered either don't refer to them by race at all or refer to them by House. In other words, the only person who we've ever heard refer to them as "Dragaerans" is Vlad. I'm interested in why that is. The real-world answer, of course, is that Steve has to call them something and calling them Dragaerans is as good a thing as any. The in-character answer would have to be something else though. Why doesn't Vlad call them "elfs"? We can guess that his father, a Dragaeran wannabe who probably never left Adrilankha and so never considered anything outside its boundaries, is the one who came up with the word Dragaeran as a replacement for the hated Eastern vernacular. We're getting into weird subtleties here. When Vlad uses the term "Dragaeran" when speaking to Morollan and company, he's speaking their language and using their word for "people". They may not even really understand that he's equating the word for "human" with the word for "citizen of the Empire". It would be interesting if Morollan and Vlad had some cause to speak in Fenarian or another Eastern language and for Morollan to discover this nuance. I could even see that as the point where Morollan says "Well, yes, I AM a Dragaeran but so are you..." >On a side note, it seems to me evident that in some important ways, the >East, like the Paths, are a place very much apart from the Empire. While >these places physically intersect, they have such distinctly different >properties that you and I might not recognize them fully as belonging to the >same "world", were it not that Steve has knitted them together. Oh, yes, very much so. I rather like it that way. It's very amusing that the Easterners consider the Empire to be a "fairy land", yet to the modern cosmopolitan reader of the Vladiad, the East actually appears to be a "fairy tale land" full of strange places, mystical people, and unknown adventures. A land of myth, magic, and folk tales come to life. I don't think it's "another world" in the sense that the Paths are "another world", it's just a collection of very different cultures. Despite Sethra the Younger's ambitions (and contrary to Aliera's smug assertion that Easterners exist at all because Kieron "allowed" them to live so that the Empire would have an outside target for aggression that would otherwise be aimed inward) the East appears to be a large place that has barely been touched by the Empire despite 200,000 years of on and off warfare. The Eastern Mountains (or Western Mountains if you happen to live in the East) do a pretty good job of limiting the places where the two sides can actually come into conflict. They're a separate world in the same way that a citizen of Victorian England would consider an African tribesman to be from a different world.