[Dragaera] *slaps head about Tukko* *AGYAR SPOILERS*

Philip Hart philiph at slac.stanford.edu
Wed Oct 15 11:25:31 PDT 2008



On Wed, 15 Oct 2008, Jerry Friedman wrote:

> "I wot" is a very clever suggestion for "Aye, what".
> However, of the 15 hits at the searchable Shakespeare

I'm happy enough with "I know he knows", with its period flavor
and dark implication.


> --- On Tue, 10/14/08, Philip Hart <philiph at slac.stanford.edu> wrote:
> ...
>> On Tue, 14 Oct 2008, Alexx Kay wrote:
>>
>>> There is little-to-no textev on this.  I *suspect*
>> that 'vampire' and
>>> 'undead' are both rather poor translations
>> into English of Dragaeran
>>> concepts that have no exact analogues in our culture.
>>
>>
>> I had been wondering whether perhaps there was one term,
>> which the
>> Translator had chosen to render as "vampire" in
>> the earlier-appearing
>> Texts but then switched to "undead" except for
>> Sethra to be consistent.
>> Maybe there are as you say two terms, and both have about
>> the same
>> meaning but one is popular and the other technical.  Vlad
>> in early
>> Narratives uses the former, as does Savn.  Paarfi I suspect
>> uses the latter exclusively.
>
> I hope you don't mind if I repeat this quotation from
> /Athyra/, Chapter 6, which I think clearly indicates
> that there are two different words and that vampires
> are a subset of the undead (as far as Vlad knows).

I wrote "had been wondering" with your find in mind.
But I'm not sure the below is as strong as you argue.

>
> "Moreover, he is undead himself, which proves that he
> is a skilled necromancer, if I hadn't known it before."
>
> "Undead?  You want me to believe His Lordship is a
> vampire?"
>
> "A vampire?  Hmmm.  Maybe.  Do you know of any cases of
> mysterious death, blood drained, all that?"

Imagine that there are folktales about vampires, stories that
Fenarians and Teckla (and even Jhereg) tell around campfires.
But those tales are untrue, or at best distortions of the truth
about undead.  Vlad knows Loraan is undead; he wants Savn to
get over the "his Lordship" business; so when S asks the above
V doesn't say, "No, that's just a myth", he asks S a logical 
followup.  V's esp. respectfully since he himself had believed
in vampires as of _Taltos_.



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