Coldfire re-read: When True Night Falls - chapter 4

[carmentalis.livejournal.com]

We have a few new faces around here, so I'd like to remind you all that if you haven't finished with the books yet, just mention it in your comment whether you want to stay spoiler-free and up to where you can be spoiled. That way, the rest of us can talk to you without fear of ruining the story for anyone. Even though it may make us sit anxiously on our hands thinking "damn, can't mention that yet, no matter how fitting it would be". It's worked well in the last posts, I think, so we'll stick to that method for now.

Do we have anyone who is reading WTNF for the first time and hasn't finished yet? Or is that currently safe for everyone?

Anyway, done with the brief mod-ly bit, and onwards with the reading! It's time for chapter 4, where Damien meets interesting new people, gets shot at, and gets to dress up.

Plot Summary
A lovely morning at sea, somewhat interrupted by the arrival of an unknown ship, complete with guns. Which are fired, which leaves quite an impression and which leads Damien to doing a bit of impression management on his own. On board of the other ship, we get to meet Toshida, who immediately embarks on a search of the Golden Glory as though he knows something - or rather, someone - has been hidden there in the darkest corner. When nothing is found, Damien and the others are welcomed in a cloud of sheer foreshadowing.


Quotes

• Cannon on a ship. That one phrase embodied the impossible. Gunpowder might have limited use on land - mostly in the hands of those whose luck or power permitted them to control it - but it had no place on the open sea, not where a single mishap might doom a ship full of men and goods to a sudden watery grave.


• Had enough prayers, enough religious devotions, finally fulfilled the Prophet's vision? Was the fae and its constructs no threat to these people? It was almost too much to hope for. The mere thought made his head spin.
  Careful, Damien, careful. You don't know anything yet.


• "I think you should mull over the fact that we'd all be a good bit safer here if I knew what the vulk was going on. It's hard to play the game right when you haven't been told the rules, Reverend. Think about that, will you?"


• He ran down the checklist in his mind, the do's and don't's that a man must observe when going from the field to the court. Damien had done it so many times now that he could no longer remember whether the list had been one of his own devising, or the parting gift of a well-meaning tutor.


• White silk split open down the front to reveal close-fitting civilian garments, a mixture of priest's regalia and common attire that might have seemed blasphemous but for his attitude, which made it clear that everything he did and everything he wore was utterly correct.


• "The crossing was made, verda. And mankind has . . . flourished." A slight hesitation there, fleeting but eloquent. "As to whether we would welcome contact . . ." His expression hardened. "That has yet to be determined."


• We are not at war, but we have an enemy to the south. And sometimes the best way to avoid a war is by preparing to fight it.
  I understand, Damien assured him. And he did, more than the Regent could possibly know.

Thoughts

• I love it when little bits of Earth show up, like the silhouette of North America in the flag of Toshida's ship. They're such unexpected anchors at times, and great reminders of all the heritage.


• Despite all his hopes and the sheer potential of what he's seeing, Damien doesn't let himself be anything but suspicious. I've never really noticed it before, but he's remarkably cautious for someone who is witnessing the potential achievement of goals he's been working towards all his life.


• The captain, telling Damien how it's easier to go along with a plan when you know what the plan is. Surely I can't have been the only one who smiled at that little bit of foreshadowing?


• We get another little glimpse of Damien's past here - he's switching between field and court often enough to be practiced at adjusting to the requirements. It supports what we found out about him in BSR, but I still wish we knew more about him.


• I'm curious: what did you think of Toshida when he is first introduced?


• For the language-wise ones - what are the odds of English staying practically the same in two isolated societies for several centuries, with just a slight change in dialect and sprinkles of almost-Spanish? That one has always struck me as a bit of an avoidance of realistic portrayal versus ease of plot progress.


• Toshida's reaction to the Golden Glory is quite intriguing and a hint that not all is well here. The searching of the ship, the very chilly reception, the initial gunshots... did it make you wonder?

On Monday chapters 5 and 6 are waiting for us, where we'll meet a girl and Damien and Hesseth talk theology.

Comments

[ladyphoenix9]

I think sometimes when I read this book, I forget how much time has actually passed with no contact between the continents. I'd imagine, though, the languages would have started to diverge a bit more. I believe Friedman's official explanation was that the settlers were homogeneous English-speaking Earthies and the ones with a bit more of a Spanish influence ended up on the sea voyage. Seems kinda thin for an explanation.

Then too, I'd expect Tarrant to have different speech patterns from everyone else. Perhaps I'll chalk this one up to a "readability vs. reality" issue with dialogue, because my head would be thumping if Toshida were given some heavily applied dialect. I'll take "verda" over Yoda-speak any day, thanks. ;)

[carmentalis.livejournal.com]

Actually with Tarrant I don't have problems where the language is concerned. He's not spent the centuries entirely isolated, so he has the chance to keep up with the language evolution.

I just went over the chapter again, and Damien does spare a thought to the possibility of different languages when he says he should be the one to go to the other ship because he's most likely to speak their language. Who knows, Erna may have an equivalent to Latin at this point because Ernan English evolved.

[ladyphoenix9]

Oh, I agree, Tarrant is smart enough and has enough outside contact to stay unnoticed, even if in his heart he desperately wants to use some archaic constructions. He does have a more measured speaking style than Damien, for the most part, which is nice, but I can't help but think at least some of it is just in his nature to speak properly and precisely, and not so much being a product of his Revivalist upbringing.

Dialog is hard to get right, especially trying to convey language differences (especially if it's an accent, because nothing turns me off faster than trying to slog through "clever" phonetic spellings.) It just seems like Friedman made a big point in saying how the rahk languages had diverged, so I would of thought she'd have had the humans diverge a bit more -- not as drastically, but some new words to describe the new conditions/hardships/society structures would have been especially nice. Or had Damien perhaps think their pronunciations were a little funny (American/UK/Australian English comes to mind -- I am ashamed to say I've seen strong Irish and Scottish speakers subtitled in American programs, so obviously someone here thinks Americans can't understand it!)

As someone else suggested, the settlers could have kept a death grip on the language as a lifeline, and that too would be okay, too. Maybe I'm trying to wring too much realism out of a hypothetical situation. ;)

[carmentalis.livejournal.com]

but I can't help but think at least some of it is just in his nature to speak properly and precisely, and not so much being a product of his Revivalist upbringing.

You know, it keeps startling me when he swears. In a normal reading I don't notice it so much, but going as slowly as we are now, it's so... ungentlemanly.

I suspect I'm missing subtleties in the language due to not being a native speaker, which is a shame since I know the translations tend not to get this right. Still, as you say, a thought or two about odd dialects would have been good. Friedman is aware of the language issues - she does it with the rakh, and later with the Iezu as well, but here she lets an opportunity pass. Some linguistic differences really could have underlined the cultural issues.

(Austrians and Swiss, when speaking German, tend to get subtitled in German TV. It's not just Americans. ;-)

Maybe I'm trying to wring too much realism out of a hypothetical situation. ;)

*g* It's hard to draw the line. And I'll freely admit that I had a hard time coming up with thoughts and questions for this chapter, so I latched onto the language bit as something of an emergency question.

[fallintosanity.livejournal.com]

Dialog is hard to get right, especially trying to convey language differences (especially if it's an accent, because nothing turns me off faster than trying to slog through "clever" phonetic spellings).

I agree. I've only seen one author ever to get it right - Sarah Monette, in her Doctrine of Labyrinths series. (Excellent series, especially for slashers *g*) She has two first-person narrators, one of whom speaks with a very heavy dialect that she says is roughly analgous to the American Southern dialect, though readers have said it can be mapped to almost any "low" English dialect. But she doesn't do phonetic spellings, either - the dialect is all in the character's choice of words and rhythm of speech. While he does have dialectic pronunciations, this is only alluded to by the other narrator, who more than once comments on his "terrible vowels," and by other characters who often have to ask him to repeat himself several times.

But although his dialect was handled exceptionally well, the frequent asking him to repeat himself - even though it was usually handled by an offhand "I had to say it a couple times before he got it" - got tedious quickly, so I can understand why C.S. Friedman might have chosen to minimize the language differences for the sake of readability.

[fragorl.livejournal.com]

That actually bothered me a bit TBH - how he and later any other immortalish characters seemed to talk in exactly the same way as the modern ones - it seemed out of fit somehow with the attempt she had made to make the Ernan culture suitably modern. Can you imagine an aristocrat walking around here and speaking in the same way as they would have when they were first around.... It would seem like it would be a fairly good indication of - evil being standing here please avoid if you want to live kind of thing... I guess adepts live for a long time too though... Also it would seem like a potential bonding point - any figure from that time would surely hold some allure just from a purely nostalgic mindset - difficult to talk about this without mentioning spoilers so I will just shut up now xx

[prettyarbitrary.livejournal.com]

how he and later any other immortalish characters seemed to talk in exactly the same way as the modern ones

Frankly that's puzzled me in every vampire book ever. I mean, I imagine they'd make an effort to keep up on the modern language, but... I dunno, not having any around to ask, I suppose it's hard to imagine how an individual's use of the language would differ from society's over hundreds of years. :)

[carmentalis.livejournal.com]

I think it would all depend on how much outside contact there is. The Master of Lema had practically none (as far as we know) for a good century or so, so if she'd sounded old-fashioned, it would have fit. Gerald, on the other hand, has occasional outside contact - even if a lot of it may be women pleading for mercy - and he has his servants and apprentices around. Plus his little city trips. He has his changes in tone from formal and (possibly) a little old-fashioned to a more modern language whenever Damien manages to really rile him, too.

(And feel free to go on spoiling - the ones who want to stay unspoiled say so in their comments, so just don't reply with "well, you know when Tarrant does that thing at the volcano" there. ;-)

[aubrem.livejournal.com]

I just wanted to say that I've finished the books so please don't hold back on spoilers for me.

Also, it's going to take me a bit to digest it all - I'm still reeling.

[carmentalis.livejournal.com]

Yay!

Reeling is perfectly understandable after that.

[prettyarbitrary.livejournal.com]

For the language-wise ones - what are the odds of English staying practically the same in two isolated societies for several centuries, with just a slight change in dialect and sprinkles of almost-Spanish? That one has always struck me as a bit of an avoidance of realistic portrayal versus ease of plot progress.

Well, it depends. Historically, if you take a difference of several centuries, you get the difference between modern English and something between Chaucer and Shakespeare (which, incidentally, was a period of such tremendous linguistic instability for English that it's known as the Great Vowel Shift). But that's English in an uncontrolled environment. It was the vulgar tongue, evolving freely as it suited its users. It was seldom even written in (not that a lot of people could read), so there wasn't any fixed point to refer and compare to.

Now, it did change incredibly rapidly in that period. I don't know if the argument that it was still evolving is applicable...certainly it had fairly recently grown out of Old English, and there were several invasions in succession, all of which brought their own languages which quickly got absorbed and repatriated... I think English has settled down somewhat at this point. It's evolving a lot more slowly. We can (with a bit of work) read Shakespeare without real need for translation (his own toying with the language makes it harder to understand, because he deliberately blurs contexts for the sake of puns and poetry), and anybody after him was writing in fairly comprehensible dialect. But it could always go through another significant period of change, if the right things happened (say, if Chinese became the lingua franca, I could see native English speakers adopting a lot more Chinese into the language).

On the other hand, Friedman makes clear that English is the standard on Erna and among the colonists, so the rapid changes created by collision with other languages are less likely. Still the pronunciations will change--just look at what happened to American and British speech patterns in about 400 years. But that's not so far off that we can't readily understand each other, outside of a bit of slang. Granted, the two countries weren't isolated from each other for all that time, but I think it's fair to say the changes wouldn't have been too much more drastic, without outside influence.

Also worth considering is that some languages have oversight committees. You don't go around changing German or French randomly and calling it square. There's a template to compare it to, a "proper" use. Those languages evolve too, but much more slowly, under controlled conditions.

I can imagine that such structuring might've taken place for English between our time and the time the colonists' ship left (it'd be useful for colonies to have some basis for communication), or at least somewhere around the Revival period (which, we've been told, doted on arbitrary rules). If that's the case, then maybe the explorers to the East still abide by that. In which case, while I expect they'd have different (possibly thick) accents (and I did notice the rhythms of their speech were often somewhat different), the language might well still be essentially recognizable. So my conclusion would be that Friedman fudged a bit, but probably within acceptable bounds for the sake of reading comprehension.

That Spanish argument, though? Seriously slim. For one thing, why would Spanish-heredity people all be the ones boarding those ships? For another, by then how would they still be recognizably Spanish when nobody else could still be ethnically identifiable?

I actually assumed the use of "verda" came from an regression of something like "verdict" back into the old Latin sense ('declaration of truth' from verus and dictum). It made sense to me, given what we see of their society, that they'd have re-appropriated it into colloquial use.

[ladyphoenix9]

This was what I was trying to get at yesterday with a lot less sleep. Here's the link to the FAQ in case you have no freaking clue where I was pulling this from: http://www.merentha.org/faq.asp#verdat

[fallintosanity.livejournal.com]

I think the oversight committee concept is probably the best explanation - after all, look how carefully the colonists and their descendents have worked to maintain Earth knowledge, customs, and culture. It would make sense that they kept a tight hold on English, as well. There's also the possibility that English has changed, and for readability, Friedman's writing in normal English. After all, look at Damien's preferred expletive. :)

There's also the possibility that the Eastern dialect is more audibly distinctive than visually - that is, if you look at an American's words and a Brit's words on the page, they appear the same, but they could be pronounced very differently. And you're definitely right about the speech rhythms - Easterners sound different when I say their lines in my head. I always took the Spanish thing to be that one of the original ships sent to the East was run by a large Hispanic or Spanish trading family which retained and spoke some Spanish among themselves. Then when they settled in the East, some of those speech patterns slipped into the general language.

As for Tarrant speaking without a noticeable accent, I would imagine that his own speech patterns would, consciously or not, change to fit modern speech patterns over time. Look at how quickly slang and verbal memes spread in modern languages (helped along by TV and the Internet, but still). Tarrant does still have some archaic speech patterns - fewer contractions, more elaborate language in general - but he probably worked to make himself sound fairly modern to avoid drawing unnecessary attention when wandering around pretending to be his own servant.

[carmentalis.livejournal.com]

I like the point about influences of other languages. There wouldn't be any here, aside from that of the Rakh, and contact is almost nonexistent there.

German is going through that influence impact right now. English words creep into daily language everywhere, and it's a marked change from the language fifteen years ago. But since on Erna there is no second language, and neither is it being spread rapidly by the internet, their English is probably still fairly pure.

Also worth considering is that some languages have oversight committees.

Admittedly, that would surprise me on Erna. I can't see them working because of the difficulty it would mean to implement and control things. Large-scale regulations, in a region where it takes months to get from one end to the other and with no reliable means to get the news to everyone... I'm not sure about that. Possibly a standardized lingua franca for those in the sphere of influence of such regulations, but I'd expect regions to develop dialects and eventually segue into their own languages.

For one thing, why would Spanish-heredity people all be the ones boarding those ships?

Columbus heritage? :-)
The ethnic divides seem to have dwindled to nothing even with the settlers, if the names are anything to go by. It's something that startled me out of reading more than once - running into a person with name and surname from two different ethnic backgrounds, or a name that hints at a certain background but then an appearance/statement that contradicts this again.

The "verda" alone wouldn't have made me wonder, but there are a few more scattered Spanish, or at least Romance, bits around.

[dawrei.livejournal.com]

Uhm..I'm new, but never showed my face. So. Hi! XD
Also, since I've already read the books about three times, I'm not afraid of spoilers. However, I did read all the books in Dutch, so I have no access to the original texts...I don't think it really matters much, but it might make for small differences. Since I'm Dutch, though, you can expect me to make some weird English mistakes...Please bear with me, kay? ^^;

As for the language matter, I'm not exactly sure. I think there's a lot to be said for readability in a book. Perhaps the use of more foreign words would have been better though - the only odd word I distinctly remember is "verda". There might have been more, but this one stuck around in my head as the most dominant...on the whole not very impressive XD

Now, what did I think of Toshida? Well, in all honesty, I wondered about his Japanese name more than anything else. And then I thought, hey, maybe he's even going to slap in some Japanese loan words. Of course he didn't.
I did think he was creepy. Whenever he was around, I kinda expected him to slip a poison into Damiens drink or something. XD

All in all, the chilly reception, the very well-managed city...it all reminded me too much of very resticted lands, like currently North-Korea or something. And we all know that there must be something extremely FISHY underneath the surface. Toshida smelled of this fishiness. I never liked him XD

[carmentalis.livejournal.com]

Hey! Great to have you here!

And no worries on not being a native speaker - I'm not entirely sure, but the English native speakers may actually be the minority around here. :-)

Perhaps the use of more foreign words would have been better though - the only odd word I distinctly remember is "verda".

*nod* That's one of the things that bugged me about it. That, and that no-one never had to ask "can you say that again please? I'm not sure I got that right."

Toshida smelled of this fishiness. I never liked him

Not a fan, I see. *g* I'm not really sure what to make of him, myself. He has his moments, but he's also a bit... fishy is actually a good word for it.

[ladyphoenix9]

Now, what did I think of Toshida? Well, in all honesty, I wondered about his Japanese name more than anything else. And then I thought, hey, maybe he's even going to slap in some Japanese loan words. Of course he didn't.

Yep, that got me, too, in the first reading. Japanese name and Spanish loan words = does not compute.

[aubrem.livejournal.com]

I liked Toshida because he was smart and strong and had presence. I especially loved that he searched the ship like he knew what he was doing. (I was holding my breath the whole time because I wasn't sure if Damien had done what Gerald told him to - I wondered if he'd spent his time in bed with whatshername instead).

One of my favorite things about these books is that everyone is smart and competent. No one is an idiot. I've always liked all the characters in any fiction to know what's going on all the time. I don't like farce, I don't like unobservant, obtuse characters - I find it too frustrating. Damien's always careful and quick to pick up on everything. Gerald is always a step ahead of course, and even the secondary and minor characters are sharp. It's a pleasure to read. ; )

[carmentalis.livejournal.com]

The smart characters are one of my reasons for liking the trilogy this much, too. Like you say, it's just so good that for once I'm not left banging my head against a wall because a character didn't notice something blatantly obvious. Or the "he noticed it but is too obtuse/distracted/mentally challenged to do something about it" excuse.

Toshida always makes me think Tarrant-in-training. Either that, or a posterboy for Machiavelli.