Poul
Anderson was a popular journeyman science fiction writer
whose career ran from the Age of the Thirty-Five Cent Paperback until
his death in 2001. One day he decided to write a short essay about
atomic physics without using any words derived from Greek, Latin or
Romance languages, but using only words with Germanic/Anglo-Saxon/Old
English roots.
Why? Because he liked language, liked
playing with it, it hadn't been tried before, and he wanted to show
off. A word-lover's version of the mountain-climber's "because
it was there." Same reason a guy named Ernest Vincent Wright
wrote and published an entire
novel that did not use the letter "e."
Of course, Anderson had to make up a
lot of words for concepts the Anglo-Saxons didn't possess, like
anything that didn't involve farming, fighting and drinking. So an
atom is an "uncleft," scientists are "worldken folk,"
etc. Here's a sample:
For although light oftenest behaves as a wave, it can be looked on as a mote, the “lightbit”. We have already said by the way that a mote of stuff can behave not only as a chunk, but as a wave. Down among the unclefts, things do not happen in steady flowings, but in leaps between bestandings that are forbidden. The knowledge-hunt of this is called “lump beholding”.
Here's how it ends:
Today we wield both kind of uncleftish doings in weapons, and kernelish splitting gives us heat and bernstoneness. We hope to do likewise with togethermelting, which would yield an unhemmed wellspring of work for mankindish goodgain.
Soothly we live in mighty years!
You can read the whole thing here.
5 comments:
Binding! I mean, fascinating.
As I tried to parse that word at first I thought that might be ricpic's uncle - you remember old uncle Ftish, first name Gefil. Okay, that doesn't really work...
That is an interesting concept, and I think it takes someone who grew up in a non-English speaking home to view our language like Poul did. I have a friend from Iceland and he does the same sort of thing - plays with English in a way that would never occur to me.
Also, I remember reading works by Poul Anderson back in the early '70s but I'll be darned if I can remember a single title. Tomorrow's Children, maybe? Heinlein, on the other hand, I remember his work and the names of his books.
I remember reading and enjoying his books about the Vikings.
They were very well done.
The Last Viking trilogy was excellent as I recall.
Now I read Griff Hosker who must have written about sixty books about the Vikings, Celts and Saxons. Very readable on Kindle as each book costs less the five bucks.
He also writes about the Romans, WW2, WW1 and even the Confederates in the Civil War.
He has become my go to guy for mindless easy entertainment.
I love Poul Anderson's time patrol series. One of them involved a bunch of olde anglo saxons encountering a bunch of off world freaks who, of course, view them as inferior, and then beating their asses, taking their rocket, making a hostage fly it, then taking their home planet. It sounds silly but he's such a good writer that ends up being a good read. "Delenda Est," from the same series, is an awesome short story.
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