A Shadow Rises

[metoo]

Naïve largely in the sense that her entire world, confined as it was to such a small area and relatively isolated, was naïve with regard to the cold harsh world that surrounded them. Naïve also in the implication that she was quite unused to hearing other languages spoken, or seeing armored men on horseback. Her world as she described it seemed to be orderly and gentle. As, apparently, was her language itself when compared with the 'barks and coughs' of the invaders'.

Is that what you were trying to say here? Or did I interpret it wrong?

I interpreted it the same way!

[metoo]

I've sometimes found words being used in old(er) English texts in similar ways as they are used in Swedish today. I found an example in this story, too:
"Mark ye not that I laugh not?"
In modern Swedish this would translate into: "Märker du inte att jag inte skrattar?"

[sauvin]

I honestly never thought about it. It wouldn't be too hard to imagine this 'host' were mercenaries from a different language family. Even in those times (middle ages, or so), in downtown Europe, different languages were a dime a dozen. Her halfway isolated home still had "wayfarers" and "trading grounds", so you'd think she'd be accustomed to people talking funny. I think I was thinking more in terms of this army being the first time a military presence made itself known in her area; even in English (which is NOT a language of barks and coughs), sergeants barking orders at the soldiers is often harsh and grating.

Metoo: a great deal of my "early middle English" comes from what I (mis)remember from the King James bible, snatches of it were taken from JRR Tolkien (was WAS a linguist), and the rest from the German I've now all but forgotten. It's not surprising you'd find resonances, since Swedish and the Anglo-Saxon blood and bones of the English language are cousins.

[dongregg]

I honestly never thought about it. It wouldn't be too hard to imagine this 'host' were mercenaries from a different language family. Even in those times (middle ages, or so), in downtown Europe, different languages were a dime a dozen. Her halfway isolated home still had "wayfarers" and "trading grounds", so you'd think she'd be accustomed to people talking funny. I think I was thinking more in terms of this army being the first time a military presence made itself known in her area; even in English (which is NOT a language of barks and coughs), sergeants barking orders at the soldiers is often harsh and grating.

Metoo: a great deal of my "early middle English" comes from what I (mis)remember from the King James bible, snatches of it were taken from JRR Tolkien (was WAS a linguist), and the rest from the German I've now all but forgotten. It's not surprising you'd find resonances, since Swedish and the Anglo-Saxon blood and bones of the English language are cousins.

Winston Churchill's stirring speech that rallied the English nation takes almost all of its words from Anglo-Saxon roots. "Surrender" is a notable exception.

"We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old."

It translates pretty smoothly into its Swedish cousin (using http://imtranslator.net/translation/eng ... anslation/).

"Vi skall gå på slutet, vi skall kämpa i Frankrike, vi skall kämpa på haven och oceanerna, vi skall kämpa med växande förtroende och växande styrka i luften, vi ska försvara vår ö, oavsett kostnaden kan vara, vi skall kämpa på stränderna, vi skall kämpa på grund av landning, vi skall bekämpa i fälten och på gatorna, vi skall kämpa i bergen; Vi skall aldrig ge upp, och även om, som jag tror inte för ett ögonblick att, denna ö eller en stor del av det underkuvade och svältande, sedan vår imperium bortom haven, beväpnade och vaktas av den brittiska flottan, kampen, skulle fortsätta tills, i Guds tid, den nya världen, med all sin kraft och kanske, steg fram till undsättning och befrielsen av gammalt."

[EEA]

Reading the story reminded me when I was in school and I had to read The poem of the Cid in Spanish class. The language is almost the same.
I feel that both Orson and Elysse are protecting one another when they tell their tales to each other. They both don't want to hurt each other.

[dongregg]

Sauvin. It's after midnight. It's all I can do to stop reading. More tomorrow. Thanks. Vous êtes très gentil de nous donner ces contes!

[metoo]

Metoo: a great deal of my "early middle English" comes from what I (mis)remember from the King James bible, snatches of it were taken from JRR Tolkien (was WAS a linguist), and the rest from the German I've now all but forgotten. It's not surprising you'd find resonances, since Swedish and the Anglo-Saxon blood and bones of the English language are cousins.

Well, I was aware of this common heritage, of course. Add to that the Viking occupation of parts of Britain as another contributing factor.

Winston Churchill's stirring speech that rallied the English nation takes almost all of its words from Anglo-Saxon roots. "Surrender" is a notable exception.

"We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old."

It translates pretty smoothly into its Swedish cousin (using http://imtranslator.net/translation/eng ... anslation/).

"Vi skall gå på slutet, vi skall kämpa i Frankrike, vi skall kämpa på haven och oceanerna, vi skall kämpa med växande förtroende och växande styrka i luften, vi ska försvara vår ö, oavsett kostnaden kan vara, vi skall kämpa på stränderna, vi skall kämpa på grund av landning, vi skall bekämpa i fälten och på gatorna, vi skall kämpa i bergen; Vi skall aldrig ge upp, och även om, som jag tror inte för ett ögonblick att, denna ö eller en stor del av det underkuvade och svältande, sedan vår imperium bortom haven, beväpnade och vaktas av den brittiska flottan, kampen, skulle fortsätta tills, i Guds tid, den nya världen, med all sin kraft och kanske, steg fram till undsättning och befrielsen av gammalt."

As always, those automatic translators produce some amusing results. Below you'll find excerpts with a corrected translation and in some cases a reverse translation.
Vi skall gå på slutet - vi ska fortsätta till slutet (we shall walk on the end)
oavsett kostnaden kan vara - oavsett vad kostnaden skulle vara (missing pronoun 'vad' and less than ideal tempus)
vi skall kämpa på grund av landning - vi ska kämpa på landningsfälten (we shall fight due to landing)
vi skall bekämpa i fälten och på gatorna - vi skall kämpa i fälten och på gatorna (the word "bekämpa" is not used in this context; it leads the mind to pest control)
som jag tror inte för ett ögonblick - som jag inte för ett ögonblick tror (strange word order)
denna ö eller en stor del av det underkuvade och svältande - denna ö, eller en stor del av den, underkuvad och svältande
sedan vår imperium bortom haven, beväpnade och vaktas av den brittiska flottan, kampen, skulle fortsätta - sedan skulle vårt imperium bortom haven, vaktat och beväpnat av den engelska flottan, fortsätta (strange word order)
med all sin kraft och kanske - med all sin kraft och styrka (with all its power and maybe)
steg fram - stiga fram (wrong tempus)
till undsättning och befrielsen av gammalt - till undsättning och befrielse av den gamla

[dongregg]

Thanks, metoo. Long passages are the worst for online translation software.

That aside, what struck me was comparing word-for-word for the similarities between English (as Churchill used it so powerfully) and Swedish. The screw ups aside, the similarities are remarkable.

Your English is of course as good as it gets. But there are dialectal and regional pronunciations (that get little kids yelled at by teachers) that are very similar to Swedish sounds and phrasings. "Det där" has the rhythm of "that there," which is used widely in rural areas. The pronunciation of är is identical to "are" as spoken in Southern Appalachia and sounds like this: "Air ye goin to town?"

Having spent some time with Chaucer--the heart, soul, and mirth of Middle English (d. 1400 AD)--I have come to appreciate how conservative the speech of common folk is. English Cockney dialect preserves "oy" as it was spoken both in Middle English and in Old French. The educated (read: well off) long since turned oy into the i-sound (in English) and the wa-sound in French. And Chaucer scans very well when you read him as a common person would: And little birds sleep all the night with open eye, "so pricketh 'em (hem) Nature in 'ir (hir) corages." Dropping the initial h persists in Cockney, but it began to be scrupulously pronounced by the educated folk as the centuries rolled on. Little did they know that the silent h was the correct pronunciation. I have to laugh at country folk today who in polite company pronounce mountain as "mounting," as though mountain were really mountin'. That sort of class awareness is, I think, what drove the Great Vowel Shift in English (occurring between the time of Chaucer and Shakespeare), as a way of obscuring one's rude origins. There are many scholarly theories about the vowel shift, but that's mine, and I'm sticking to it.

Churchill knew very well who his audience was, and he spoke plainly and directly to them.

Edit: Now look at the time! Sheesh--I coulda kept on reading Sauvin's stories. And so to bed.

[sauvin]

I feel that both Orson and Elysse are protecting one another when they tell their tales to each other. They both don't want to hurt each other.

Consider Elysse's position in this story. When she woke up, all she could remember are the events as told in the story. What I didn't flesh out was that she came up the stairs into a kitchen and living room that would have been utterly alien - strange materials, strange building styles, "candles in crystal" (light bulbs) and probably craploads of other details I'm overlooking; Orson is wearing contemporary clothing which would have been no less alien to her, and he talked "funny". She has no memory of Orson; she has no memory of anything else that might have gone on in the intervening decades or centuries. At this point in time, the only feelings Elysse might have towards Orson involve his apparently knowing her, knowing what she is, and managing somehow to treat her like a regular person anyway.

Orson, on the other hand, isn't kidding when he says he's her husband, and he most definitely does NOT want a divorce.

I don’t know where this came from...

Du'a Khalil Aswad, about whom I wrote earlier, mentioning that my Thanksgiving weekend having been indelibly marred by having watched a clip of this murder taking place. I suspect it was far more upsetting for me than it would be for most forum members because of this young woman's resemblance to my daughter.

Do not view the Youtube clip for which a link is provided later in this paragraph unless you have a very strong stomach. You have been warned, and will be warned again twice if you click on it: somebody with a camera in his cell phone took some footage of the young lady being murdered. However, if you start watching it, no matter now much it might revolt you, I beg you watch it in its entirety. Unless you do, you probably won't fully appreciate the place where Elysse's darkness comes from.

Now that I've seen it, I can't unsee it. It's not as bad as it had been, but it's rather like the photographs I'd mentioned years ago, one of a girl running away from a village in Viet Nam wearing absolutely nothing but a look of mindless terror on her face, and another of a young woman keening over the body of her dead friend at Kent State. These are images that will follow me around until the end of my days.

On a more rational level, as I had written earlier, folks who defend the practise of honour killing would say I'm not from that time or place, and I don't understand the dynamics and forces involved. Fair enough. It'd be easy to intellectualise by noting that the Middle East isn't exactly the world's food basket, and that historically, this implies pressures folk living in the US don't understand to keep population growth under control. Again, fair enough. It'd be furthermore easy to intellectualise by noting that some societies or cultures are less fluid and elastic than others, and that some of these in the Middle East are among the oldest and most established and most tradition bound in the world. Again, fair enough, although I'll be very quick to point out that my little corn patch here in the American midwest is at least a couple of centuries younger than the Boston area I spent much of my adult life in, and while Bostonia does indeed have its traditions, it's far less conservative and hidebound than Cornpatchia. Age sometimes is just a number.

So, cultural bias on the one hand and the appalling cheapness of human life on the other both set aside for the moment, what I don't understand is the necessity for torture. Maybe this is just another facet of cultural bias; in the US, if a person is accused of a capital offence, he's subjected to trial, imprisonment and (eventually) a speedy demise. A fall from a rope, a few high caliber bullets to the heart, a few huffs of deadly gas, a few amps of electricity, and these days a nighty-night shot. Apparently, in the Middle East, accusation alone is trial enough, and execution, it would seem, is by grade school playground dynamics gone horribly wrong.

But what really gets my viscera all torqued up is the report that it was Du'a's very family who ordered, organised and brought about her execution. What father can order that the mother of his unborn grandchildren be murdered so? What mother can bear the thought of the fruits of her womb being tormented in this way? What brother or sister or aunt or uncle could just stand by and let it happen? Either these people value society so far above anything else that even their own blood really has no meaning, or these people have even less spark of humanity than did zombi Haakan.

And if these people had managed to reach all the way into Canada to find my daughter and treat her in this way, can't you just imagine what dreams of large scale retribution I'd have? Verily, I say unto ye, my gentle and worthy fellow Forum folk, I should most surely consume them on whose bodies was spilt the blood of my blood, and their fathers and sons and brothers and sisters and mothers and daughters and uncles and aunts and nieces and nephews - and I should go thence unto the nations which whelped them, breaking down their great houses of iron and stone, salting the fields in which grew the grasses as sustained them, burning down their houses of wood and the woodlands wherefrom was taken the wood to build them, and pour poisons into the lakes and flosses from which they drank and fished; yea, I should most certainly lay utter waste to their entire lands and peoples... and then, gentle readers, after having limbered up and gotten over a bit of the initial shock, I'd get nasty.

Take Du'a. Slice her, dice her, spice her up just a little, but let her live. Let her instead see these kinds of things happening to the people she loves - or worse, having to just imagine them.

Now give her alabaster skin, kohl black hair, polished black onyx eyes, an inability to eat falafel, and the worldview of a medieval peasant tween.

[Clubmeister]

The story is very good. I think, for English-speaking people all those Elysse's old speech turns are rather funny to read.
But for me, non English-speaking person, it was a real torment. Each her sentence I had to copy-past to google translator, like if I've forgotten English completely.
And google translator translates clumsily, so I should look at the translation afterwards and think "what could it mean?"
And the rest - all wonderful