Now is the winter of our discontent

Well, technically we're past the equinox and in Spring. But it is cold out there, blustery and/or wet. The kind of weather that brings on Seasonal Adjustment Disorder as people are stuck inside and away from friends.

Except oops, we have other reasons for that as well. I've been too cold and lethargic to walk to work (which would help me shake the cold and lethargy...) Still managed to drive down to the shop and put in some practice on the violin.

Walking outside feels like playing one of those stealth games, when you are keeping track of everyone walking near you and moving or pausing or ducking into alleys to keep that safe distance.

I am almost done with the first chapter of the novel. The last scene was when I really ran headlong into some of the challenges of this particular story.

I really miss walking down to work and then being there cutting wood and having lots of time to think on a creative project. It is, paradoxically, harder when you are sitting there at the computer.

Well, anyhow, I hit a place where I needed to make some decisions on dialect.

No, this isn't entirely exaggeration. It does get that deep in casual conversation.

And once again I'm glad I didn't outline. Because I had to juggle names and regional backgrounds and character attributes in order to be rounded characters and yet recognizable to their cultural affiliations and able to do the dialog I needed in order to advance the scene.

And that turned out to be a problem. I've a pair that are the comedy duo of the story; they are constantly bantering with each other. Except one is a Geordie and the other a Scouser and although they can chose to slide Estuary in order that others can appreciate their wit, when they are talking privately to each other it becomes impenetrable. Not to mention time consuming to write.

Here's their first two lines, extremely backed down from what they should be even though they aren't intended to be overheard by others:

“Ee, take a butcher at Widow Twankey,” one of the students murmured to the other.
“We’ve nowt left but the panto horse,” his friend rejoined.

Here's a line that's the pure distilled stuff:

“Boss webs, la,” one of the Wonder Twins sneered at me.

I had to re-arrange parts so that almost never happens. Basically, the first examples are really the furthest I can afford to go with anything but...well, Mick of the Mustaches demonstrating RAF slang at the Imperial. But that's...oh. That's next chapter.

Sigh.

So I re-arranged and re-assigned and chased lots of Steve Limit problems, and also condensed my cast; Stewart/Stu lost his name and all his lines and I don't think "Widow Twankey" has said anything since she gave her real name. It was just too many to keep track of.

I may rethink this all again. The lads are fun, I like having a comic duo, but they would work just as well if they both spoke flawless RP. The confrontation I want Penny to have as she learns exactly what Churchill meant by "...separated by a common language" can happen later and in other contexts.

But I'll wait until I've a couple more chapters completed.

Sure I do, and so's the Queen

I'm watching Time Team and getting distracted by dialects again. I can't help but notice the British don't correct each other. Or even pause, or seem to notice. But I've heard the same thing in podcast discussions between an international group of archaeologists or historians.

Sure, let's just pass over "Mycenae" versus "Mykenae." That's the c-k problem inherited from the long history of Latin within other Western cultures. I've run into people who make a point of not just pronouncing, but spelling "Akropolis" et al. And other more accurate transliterations, which can slow your reading a bit while you puzzle out the new form of a too-familiar name.

I'm talking more of distinctly different pronunciations of other words. Like mesolithic; in one programme I recently watched, there were conversations between a mezo-lithic and a miso-lithic.

In the one I'm watching now, I'm hearing tsu-nami (the wall of water), su-nami, and tu-nami.

Oh, yes. And this on top of dialectic distinctions that can be generally made between British english and American english; shed-ule/sked-ule, gla-ceer/glay-seer, geyser/geezer, etc.

Hot Time in the Old Town

We're having a heat wave. Worst in my memory for this town because it just keeps going. It is just cool enough this morning I'm taking the excuse to go to work late so I can air out my place a little.



Finished back-filling on all the scenes I'd skipped over and I'm at a solid 26K now. Did a skim-read and it seems to hit the plot points at a decent pace.

I'm still concerned about the density of detail. (Actually, I have a lot of concerns, from title down to narrative voice, but anyhow). It is partially a problem of doing history. It is more a problem of doing a story about people who are passionate about history. I'd have the same problem if it were, say, cars.

History just makes it worse. You can name-drop "65 Mustang" and trust the average reader won't feel left out. Name-drop "Alcibiades" and it's a bit more of a question.

For both, though, if you chose to dig deeper it is a real question of where to stop. How much you have to explain. How many of the connections you can afford to explore. However, I think it is a little easier to make generic statements about what a 65 Mustang means. You can say "muscle car" and the idea comes across. "Vintage car" also works.

I suppose you can say "Peloponnesian War" and the idea of "some important war" gets across. But how do you say "Desecration of the Herms" and have any hope of communicating what that means without a lot more explanation to the reader?



In any case, one of the progressive edits I'm doing is taking out elements where I can, and expanding on others where it feels like it is too much of a naked name drop. Latest of those was replacing "...Helios chases Selene across the course of a day," with "...Helios in the Chariot of the Sun chases Selene the Goddess of the Moon across the course of a day." (It's an on-screen lecture about the Parthenon Friezes.)

I also trimmed most of the French-isms out of Océane's dialog, although I left, "And do not the phone in the back pocket," (as part of her advice to the neophyte tourist as to how to discourage pick-pockets).

Come to think of it, there's only one character in my roster who indulges in Gratuitous German (TVTropes link not provided). I don't count the frequent use of "hello" and "thank you" in whatever the local language because that is an important courtesy and I make a direct point in the novel of that being a good thing to learn. The one fellow who puts German words in when speaking in English to an English speaker is the same guy who is putting on an accent so patently false my protagonist starts calling him, "Herr Satz."



And, yeah, sure, it is partly having fun with language, but it is also reflective of the kind of code-switching that happens when you are navigating around multiple languages. In one conversation between two historians they may say "Temple of Hephaestus" at one moment, and "The Hephaestion" at another. When traveling in Germany I found myself saying "train station" at one moment and "bahnhof" at another. Even signs (especially in heavily touristed areas) both alternate and duplicate between languages. So it is an authentic part of the tourist experience to do this kind of code-switching.

One people separated by an uncommon language

A friend asked why I'd never figured out my vocal range. I thought I was a light tenor as that's where my tessitura lies. Well, after a bit of a struggle finding middle C (see, on a piano it is easy. It's the one in the middle. For synthesized instruments it can be harder to determine the octave), I sung my highest comfortable note and my lowest comfortable note and they were exactly the notes identified as typical range for baritone. So I'm mildly disappointed at that, but at least I know now.

I'm also still struggling with the "high C" on the trumpet. That's the C above the treble clef. Trumpet players throw around the term "double C" and what they usually mean by that (unless they are very inexperienced) is the C an octave above that. No two can agree on whether a double F is below or above that double C.

##

Still struggling with the book. Still on a key scene that brings out and will largely define the inner and outer conflicts, all the way out to the meta level. I just dropped a major character from the scene along with all the stuff I was going to do with him. I think I may have added a new person, though. I'll have to see.

Reworked the first part of the first scene to make the camera guy a proper character and it helps. I'm going to take another crack at it, though; going to try doing their first meeting in-scene -- if for no other reason than it allows someone to say the name of my protagonist and allow her to have some conversation as herself before she gets into character for the video.

I'm also still on the fence about the scene where the goddess Athena shows up in disguise to drop some cryptic hints. I've spilled a lot of ink -- err, electrons -- pondering the many and varied pros and cons involved in the scene and what underlies it.

##

I'm trying not to do much free research now because I don't want new ideas. I'm tugged in too many directions already. But read about a private museum in Japan that may have bought up a whole hoard of looted artifacts over a short period. It was funded by a person close to the charismatic leader of a weird and controlling cult and it has a fancy modernist building that is described as including an entrance that wouldn't be out of place in a James Bond villain lair.

I was also looking up nothing more than a possible surname for a character. I looked for the author of Captain Michalis (famed Greek writer, but that was all I remembered at the time). One link later and there was the intriguing mention of the "accent wars." I think the editor flubbed that one, because what it actually was, was the struggle to define modern Greek.

And it is a fascinating read. Short form; when Greek Independence finally came, the elite (academics and politicians) saw the need for a national identity, particularly, one that was clearly linked to the classical past. They rejected what they saw as a "debased, shopkeeper's speech" and, like the French Academy, tried to define a proper grammatical language with a standard orthography that preserved as much as possible the classical heritage.

Not the first culture that has gone through this. I might venture a majority of nations have had something like this when they grappled with the idea of nationhood. The Chinese and Japanese both went through major orthographic reforms, English speakers fell in love with latinate grammar and tried to impose that on a hybrid germanic language, meaning even today almost no-one can explain who went to the shop with them without stopping to think about it).

The Greeks managed to get it worse than most, in part because they came up with a sort of hybrid, a language that was sort of a simplified classical greek combined with vaguely familiar "demotic" (the most common name for the Greek equivalent of vulgate) and a whole bunch of often-clumsy neologisms.

So the new language fought with not just language as she was spoke but also retrenched classicists, a battle made all the more confused by the fact that almost nobody actually understood the rules of classical Greek that they shouted at each other, and the Katharevousa was still very much a work in progress and nobody could agree on its rules. Oh, yes, and some people were fighting for demotic but it didn't have any standard written form and was split into far too many dialects.

It got so bad that generations of school children spent all their time being told all the words they already knew were wrong and being taught how to spell words that not even the adults could agree with; leading to generations that were nearly illiterate and an elite that was more and more divorced from the general populous.

Eventually, though, demotic won -- but it was a hard struggle, especially as the nationalistic aims of the Katharevousas (the language of a unified Greece versus the degraded polyglot of immigrants and modern metics) cross-bred with accusations of populism, communism, atheism, and of course class struggle. The identifications of language with political aims got so strong and so weird that when the Junta took over in the 60's they threw out the demotic textbooks and forced the poor students back to Katharevousa.

So it is a fascinating story of the process by which language can be used (and mis-used) to define common culture, common cause, and convenient or inconvenient divisions of class and politics and national identity.

Thing is; demotic wasn't a wonderful thing when it started. What is now standard Greek has borrowed some of the more structured grammar and more flowery terms from Katharevousa. It is itself a hybrid language, and stronger for it. But what the academists missed is that demotic remained connected to spoken, and common, language. People were able to (learn to) read a language that was similar enough to what they spoke to feel natural, they gained from what they read a wider vocabulary and more powerful grammatical forms that could, in turn, be used in speech. And that speech was the basis of further codifications of the language.

(And not to overstate; diglossia is a natural state of many languages, from those where the distinctions are difficult to draw -- spoken versus written English, for instance -- to places where there exist simultaneously a commonly used language and a more formal language used in special circumstances.)

Equipotential Point

On the good side, I'm largely finished with general research. On the bad side, I've barely started focused research.

Hopefully, if the outline holds together as I flesh it out, it will generate mostly specific questions. But, oh, so very many questions. I've been putting off worrying about stuff like what do people wear, what do people eat, because there are things I need to know that have a greater influence on my characters. Is Kes freeborn, a bondservant, a slave? I assume she's non-Greek but what does she think she is and how does that change her position in society? Is she a corvée worker who lives in a village when not called to the palace, or is she of an isolated group kept in a dormitory?*

I'm not to the point of describing pots yet. I'm watching the establishing shot come into focus. The palace...where I seem to be going is that the labyrinth (aka almost everything but the central court) was destroyed long ago, the Mycenae put up a few walls here and there (Evans tore most of these down, but at least he spared the griffons), but the Mycenae use it as an administrative center only. The royalty, whatever they are at Knossos, may be next door at the "Little Palace."

Phillip Boyes posted this wonderful LEGO Minoan Temple on his site Ancient Words

In an only slightly related question, I'm going to accept the isotope analysis of a sectioned stalactite that was done a few years back and say there was a previous drought -- this is the one that caused those, err, floods of letters back and forth between Ugarit and Hattusha and Egypt asking for grain to help their starving peoples. Then a period of recovery which very roughly corresponds with the cyclopean wall building in some of the Mycenaean cities. And then the real bad news; this is the year where the drought comes back, the drought the Navarino Environmental Observatory believes stretches a hundred years through the heart of the Greek Dark Ages.

And that cascades in a number of directions. The red tide is back in the picture (an invention of mine, totally unmentioned in any actual history). It is harbinger and what causes at least some of my cast to go into motion. Oh and yeah...if the Egyptian noble is going to be able to do half the things I want him to do, he has to be pretty awesome. Speak and write a dozen languages for a starter. Which means my etocretan weaver needs to step up her game, too, reaching that larger-than-life status of genre protagonists and other heroes before she leaves Crete.

And either that, or some other recent surfing through the blogs of Classics folks and ancient language nuts** and historical fiction writers has made me think that the Hittite Empire is not off the table. Nor is Cyprus, but boy is that place complicated. Even explaining the situation in Enkomi would be a massive info-dump. And I still need to leave room for some Sea People.

Frowsivitch, at DeviantArt.  I dunno which I like most; the authentic armor and helmets, or the cats fighting lobsters.

*I've got a book that may answer those questions, but it is seven hundred pages long and I'm only in the first chapters. On the plus side, I'm beginning to read (transliterated) Linear B. "pu-ro ri-ne-ja MU 9 ko-wo 3 ko-wa 3 TA" would be typical of a "PY Aa" series tablet, a documentation of personnel describing a work group of 9 adult women and 6 children of both sexes at Pylos or the Hither Provinces. 

(MU is the ideogram for "woman," named as are all Linear B ideograms in an abbreviation for a Latin descriptor. TA is an ideogram that is inferred in context to mean some sort of supervisor. Pu-ro is how you have to transliterate Pylos to get it into Linear B -- see why we hate the stuff?)

And as for "ri-ne-ja," Olson calls this "etymologically transparent," with that dry academic humor I'm getting so accustomed to. It means "Linen Workers"; from the Greek lineiai of course, plus the -ja worker suffix.

** I've found the blogs of two different people who do ancient scripts baked goods, like Phaistos Biscuits or cakes with cuneiform frosting decorations.

"By Jove!" he thundered.

I've got voices in my head.

Character voices. It's a great method to work out details of their background and how they interact and their distinctive voices; set them to talking.

It is also a way to explore the idiosyncrasies of the Translation Convention.




The reader is going to read the book, dialog and all, in a language which is comfortable to them, regardless of what the characters might have been originally using. Thing is, this is one of those illusions that works best when it goes unremarked.

It may be an obscure example, but in the Japanese theatre the ninja-like garb of the kuroko stage hands is a signal to the audience that these people don't exist within the frame of the story. This approach reaches its height with the puppetry art of bunraku. On first glance the stage is crowded with people in black (three puppeteers are necessary for each puppet.) Blink, and most of them go away, leaving just the actors in the story.

The thing about invisibly accessible dialog is it is terribly easy to throw a stumbling block in front of the reader. The moment the reader notices a word choice, they are thrown out of that easy immersion. They stop hearing the character voices, and start seeing words on a page where an author has made choices.

The easiest way to throw the reader out is to use speech that sounds too colloquial. Never mind that "Okay" has citations going back to 1839, and "puke" was invented by Shakespeare; use either in a novel set much earlier than 1920 and your audience is going to stop, lift their eyes from the page, and ask, "Did they really say that then?"

What's funny is that this is not restricted to language that is plausibly correct for the period. (Strongly related to the Translation Convention is the unsaid understanding that dialog is edited for clarity and time; it is understood that no-one actually talked like that -- ever! -- but the reader is willing to pretend they do rather than wade through page after page of, "Um, well, the way we sorta did the thing, I mean the thing, um, the thing we were doing, was..." The same goes for overly exact replications of period speech patterns and slang.)

That is to say, an "Okay" can yank the reader out of a story set in Ancient Rome, too. Despite that the text is modern English, not Latin. As I said, the Translation Convention only works when the reader is able to pretend it isn't there.




Linguistic origins are another potential stumbling block. In my trunk novel Shirato the setting is an alternate world but the conceit is that the culture we spend most of our time with is speaking colloquial modern Japanese. So it is "understood" that the dialog on the page is translated from Japanese into nearest English equivalents. Then I had a nuclear reactor to describe and hit an interesting problem. They could speak of plutonium, and gamma radiation, but the blue glow of Cherenkov was off the table. Why? Because "Cherenkov" was obviously derived from the name of a Russian, and there's no Russia in the world of the story.

Of course there are no Roman Gods (Pluto), or Greek Alphabet (Gamma) in that world, either. The point of how the Translation Convention works is not that the words are somehow right or wrong, it is whether the words are obvious enough to the reader to attract their attention in the moment. 

Randall Munroe pointed this out in a strip he did about Star Wars. Han Solo has just identified his ship, the Millennium Falcon, and Luke Skywalker asks, "What's that?" When Han starts in the Kessel Run story, Luke stops him, "No, I mean; what's a falcon?"

Of course many, many writers try to get around the terrestrial animal problem with what James Blish dismissively called the, "Call a rabbit a smerp" method. This is usually a failure. Even David Weber is guilty with his "near-bears" and "psuedo-corn" and whatever, despite there being good reasons for those terms in-world. It still stops the story while you think about it.

So is the related, "Hold your hippogryphs" attempts to localize.  On a really good day, a character can yell, "By Toutatis!" or "Great Hera!" and it slots into the "interesting and different thing a character says that helps make them distinctive" place in the reader's brain. But try out, "A Flying Greebix in the hand is better than two in the Vorus-Fruit thicket," and the reader will find themselves contemplating your cleverness -- or lack of it.

It's the sort of thing that some writers and some texts get away with better than others (Sir Pterry was a master). And often there are no good solutions. If you write "Cat" then the reader may ask, "They have cats on Alpha Centauri?" If you write "Smerp" they'll wonder what that is. If you write "Neo-Cat" they'll also take note; which is a good way to intentionally attract the eye to the way things are different there, but in many cases to the local it fills the cat-shaped hole and even if it doesn't look exactly like a cat or meow exactly like a cat, it is, for all intents and purposes, just a cat.

In short, if it is there for color then, sure, give it an interesting name and remark on it. But if the point is getting from point A to point B so the plot can progress, it is better to call it a horse.




And then there's where the language is successfully transparent but is saying the wrong things. The horse of the late Bronze Age had yet to be bred and trained to riding; they pulled chariots. And the sheep had yet to be selected for sheering (bronze makes louse scissors) so they were more hairy than wooly. Not a real problem; if chariots or wool come up in the story you can explain then how it works in period.

Thing is, we have language to describe many of the places and things of the Bronze Age. But that language is foreign. Spear and shield and sword have become invisible enough to use. But what of, say, amphora? There are a great many understood Greek terms for things that were common in the late Bronze Age. But they are Classical Greek, in some cases originating in the archaic Greek of Homer, which is on the other side of the Greek Dark Ages from Mycenaean Greek. Which we don't really know; it is so poorly transcribed in Linear B most academic works chose to spell out the words rather than try to give a more colloquial transcription.

And many of the common words for people and things of the Egyptian New Kingdom are...Greek. Also Classical Greek. Again there is a transcription problem, as the older Hieroglyphs do not preserve vowels.

So there is a terrible balance necessary by the writer here on whether to try to use an anglo-saxon (or a franco-germanic-latinate loan word incorporated so long ago into English it merely reads as "English,") or a Greek word that has more color and specificity but might cause the reader confusion, or a best attempt at a Mycenaean term which would be nearly impenetrable.

This gets really basic. "Crete" sticks in the reader's eye because it is clearly modern. "Kriti" gets a semi-pass except that it is at best early Greek -- but I read a book recently in which the author chose that for his Minoan characters. (Oh, and don't get me started on "Minoan!")

What I meant by misleading above is that the more you use words from Classical Greece, the more you lose the distinctions of this earlier and quite different Bronze Age society. Just as if all you have is "pots" and "boats" it loses all distinctiveness as a culture.

(Yes, you could go on to describe the thing in detail, as I did with the horse and sheep above, but there are always tradeoffs. Sometimes you need the text to move more efficiently than that.)

And then comes those places where the easy, familiar, nearly-invisible term is saying the wrong things.




I was doing a trial sketch of a scene for the novel. There's a mild earthquake, and my POV character ascribes it to "The Earth-Shaker." Which is one of the sobriquets of Poseidon. Or perhaps aspects. And this already is a problem; that gods are rarely immutable points in most cultures. They have different local versions, different faces for different occasions, different personalities that are often treated as distinct entities. And they change with time.

It's a problem I had my characters point out in my Stargate fanfic; when you say, "Hathor is the goddess of fertility and music" you are making a mistake.

In any case, I chose "Earth-Shaker" because that fit the voice of the character. The Earth-Shaker can be identified with Poseidon, but this is not quite the Poseidon of Classic Greece. In Homer's time Poseidon was connected to earthquakes, the sea, and horses. (Sure, why not.) In the Mycenaean times the sea was more the bailiwick of other gods and Poseidon's role was closer to that of being chief honcho (although there's also a Zeus, and a female Zeus...and it gets complicated).

So, even though calling him "Earth-Shaker" is uninformative to the reader, calling him "Poseidon" can give the reader the wrong impression. Just like using any other Classical Greek terminology can give the wrong impression. And part of this is educating the reader; Athens always had an Acropolis, because an Acropolis is a hill (or, rather, the use of a height for a structure). That's the name, that's what it means, but the reader is going to be imagining the Parthenon up there and it has too good a chance of dragging them out of the story while they ponder when that was actually built.




As usual, there are no simple solutions. Worth noting that there are distinct approaches. If you start a book with a bunch of italicized words that are very much calling attention to themselves as foreign and/or technical terminology the reader will adjust and, in time, be reading smoothly again.

If you start ultra-colloquially, that also will vanish in time (although you still risk dragging the reader back out of the story when they notice just how much someone is sounding like, say, a pulp noir detective.)

The most invisible, and the way most writers go especially for English earlier than King James and all historical periods before that is to use slightly more formal language. Full sentences, an avoidance of contractions. This does become problematic when you want a character or a speech to stand out for being rough-talking; if your Roman Legate has instructed, "Have the men draw up in equal ranks, and we will proceed across the marsh to engage the enemy directly," it is difficult to follow this with the grizzled old Centurion turning to shout at his troops, "Roight, you lot!"

"Bird, bird, palm tree, man sitting down, another bird..."

Made a small breakthrough on the sax. The low C was giving me trouble again and I changed my embouchure to fix it. Meaning I have some sense now of how the embouchure works, and the beginnings of the tools to get around problems. Now the biggest hole I have to playing "almost anything" is I haven't memorized the fingering for any of the non-chromatic tones.

A bigger breakthrough on the novel. I changed one letter. (Or, rather, changed from the Ugarit Letter to the Medinet Habu inscriptions). And so much fell together.

I've been outlining too long. There's still so much to learn. Not a day goes by when I don't discover something that totally throws my previous understanding. Yesterday was finding out there were other Mycenae capitals on Crete (well...yeah! It's a big place! But I simply hadn't thought of it). But it is time to start making choices. Even poor, under-researched choices. It is time to start writing.

So I love this change of a letter. It means I know magic is in (at least that one skill is), it tells me how Setna and Kes meet, it also tells me why Setna was in Amarna, it tells me who they think the threat is and what they'll do to try to stop it, it tells me how I want to understand the LBA Collapse and the role and structure of the Mycenae in LHIIIB-C. It puts the Sea Peoples firmly into the picture, too. And it even gives me a good lead as to why Kes left the Peak Sanctuary to come to Knossos.*

It is also firming up my itinerary. Since the Sea Peoples are a thing and the Acheans have a suspected connection, Mainland Greek is on the table. Even Mycenae itself, Lion Gate and all. And if I'm hitting the big cities (started in Knossos, after all), then really should show off Pharaonic Egypt with Pi Rameses if not Memphis.

*See, the Medinet Habu funerary inscriptions are in Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Which were sometimes embroidered onto trade goods for the Egyptian market by Mycenae weavers -- in my mind they didn't know the language and these come across like those jumbled English words on Japanese novelty t-shirts, but I don't know if that's true. And then there's thinking about Markov chains, and that you can write nonsense that is still grammatical (or nonsense words that still agree with the phonemic rules).

And then there's memory, and all the bardic tricks (like Homeric epithets) that allow you to memorize a long poem. I don't memorize a poem as a photograph of a piece of paper with characters on it, I memorize strings of words which are organized in grammatical ways. Apply these same necessary crutches to make a vision coherent, and -- voila, Kes has to learn hieroglyphs before she can "see" the entire inscription and decode it.

But before that she could realize that some of the words -- even as she doesn't even know how they are pronounced -- have dread meaning. Words like "Sherden" (one of the Sea Peoples). So she's writing that one out a lot. And Setna finds it on an embroidered border, and he knows about the Sherden from the Amarna letters (things that may have been temporarily lost to the Egyptians in their race to erase the Heretic Pharaoh and his entire era from history).

But even before this, at the Peak Sanctuary she grew up in, there's the moment when she is first struck down by a vision. Obvious assumption it is from the gods, so what, child, did you see?

"Birds."

(Which if you know anything about Greco-Roman soothsaying is exactly the right -- or wrong -- answer).

The scene gets even better, though, if she elaborates; "Birds made of stone. They were trying to tell me something."

Spelling B

I got a wee bit into the character system of Linear B today. I wanted to engrave side names on the tablets I'm lasering up for my mini loom. But anyhow.

Everyone knows their alphabet. That is, alpha, beta, gamma, delta...  And, yes, there's an alphabet song for Classical Greek. There aren't obvious equivalents in the Linear B script. No "B" sound, for instance. I don't know what the rules are for transliteration. Apparently I'm not alone; evidence from the Linear B tablets at Pylos is the scribes themselves did not have consistent spelling -- neither between scribes, nor even the same scribe on different days.  (There are also clear indications of a scribe smoothing out the clay and marking a different symbol instead.)

Contrast this with say kana. Written Japanese is a combination of ideograms and syllabary. The former being the "kanji" or characters adapted from the Chinese, the latter the kana; hirigana and the harder, more angular katakana (it's the same -kana suffix for both; there's one of the subtle rules of Japanese that softens hard consonants in certain contexts.)

The katakana are sort of like italics; perhaps carrying over from their use to transcribe foreign words, they carry a sense of emphasis and angularity. So katakana get used a lot in advertising, and sound effects in manga are almost entirely in katakana (sometimes a manga-ka will use hiragana for a more old fashioned/refined feel).

There is a bit of variation but the general rules for transcribing English are easy enough to pick up. "Brian" comes out as ブライアン or "Bu-ra-i-a-n." Linear B has a similar problem; "mi-sa-ra-jo" in Linear B is probably meant as "misraios," meaning a person from Egypt. As you can see, diphthongs are difficult to transcribe unambiguously, and compound consonants are worse. This is why in all academic writing, the original Linear B inscription is usually spelled out, with the currently assumed Mycenaean Greek transliteration given after, if at all.



There's another cross-language bit of interest here. The same scribes are recognized by their handwriting. In specific, the direction and order of the strokes used to form the characters are different from scribe to scribe. If there is a paper attempting to trace them back to groups or teachers I haven't seen it, but it is unlikely, since basically the Linear B fragments form very narrow slices of time (most of the preserved material was the temporary clay records of a single week's work for that particular shop, which then got fired and thus preserved when the shop itself was fired, and, well, not preserved. Or at least, only archaeologically.

This differs quite strongly from Japanese, where the stroke order (and direction) are an imbedded part of the learning process. Perhaps that is because when you are getting up into the 14-stroke Kanji, you need something to keep it sorted in your head. The Linear B characters are generally simple -- rather alchemical looking, if you ask me -- and in any case in the hands of individual scribes degenerate pretty quickly into simplified scribbles.



And just because the picture isn't complex enough. Linear A was used to write Minoan, and the only thing we're really sure of is it wasn't Greek or even of the same language family. However! There was a long transition period in which Mycenaean words were sneaking into Linear A inscriptions. This is the best entry the would-be Michael Ventris's of this generation have into finally unlocking Linear A.

By the way, despite existing dictionaries and syllabary not all characters in Linear B are unambiguous. But then, there seem to be some ideograms worked in there as well. For many languages, the ideograms came first and then were re-used rebus-style to construct a syllabary. Say you have ideograms for cow, asp, and tortoise, but you need to write "cat." Well, use the first three ideograms and make it clear you are only using them for their sounds.

In Japanese, this can be ambiguous; it isn't always obvious on first glance if you are meant to use the On or Kun reading. In Egyptian Hieroglyphs, there's actually a special character that means, "read the previous group as sounds only." All languages with this system give ample opportunity for puns (puns, which, alas, are difficult to translate, dependent as they are on the juxtaposition of sound and meaning in a particular character set.)

(In Takahashi Rumiko's Urusai Yatsura there is a crazy Buddhist monk whose name is written Sakuranbo -- a nice traditional-sounding name; a common name for the quiet traditional girl in manga is Sakura. Both mean the Japanese Cherry, but in the monk's case the pronunciation "Cheri" is given in ruby above the kanjii of his name. Also not unheard of that a Japanese name is meant to be pronounced differently than written, although it never gets to the Monty Python sketch level. The joke has hardly started, though. Instead of the usual kanji for the Japanese Cherry, two kanji with similar pronunciation are used; two characters that when mashed together like this could be read as meaning "Deranged Monk." Actually; the "deranged" here is "Ranbo," which has a certain sense of explosive violence that meant that the Japanese posters for Sylvester Stallone's trio of movies about a violent veteran simply used his character name rather than trying to translate the title. Oh, and of course -- this is Takahashi-sensei after all -- that sort of random explosive violence is entirely appropriate for the crazy free-for-all style of the manga, and Cherry has a too-often repeated phrase in which he compares monastic life to a cherry, "sweet on the outside but inside it's the pits.")



How much of any of this I'll use I don't know. Scribe 103 is going to be a character in the novel, and if my Cretan weaver continues to have her strange gift of seeing writings from the future she is going to have to study (and inevitably will geek out a little about) writing. But at this point I don't even know if the magic is staying...

Xenephon's Cravat

I'm very much on with "Five Senses" writing. Isaac Asimov made a long and fruitful career without describing as much as the color of a character's hair, but I gravitate towards fiction with enough look and feel to make me feel as much physically embedded in the setting as I am intellectually engaged with the story.

This is not always the easiest stuff to research, especially as one moves back in time. It is also not the easiest thing to describe. The colors in a sunset or the odors of a cooking fire are easy enough to translate to modern eyes and nostrils, but how does one economically carry across design motifs, clothing styles, technologies?

This is exacerbated by the fact that it is much easier to find the name "khopesh" or "krater" than it is to find out how heavy it is, how it breaks, how it smells, how to carry it; in short, all the five-senses stuff that is at the forefront of the experience of someone actually living around and using these things. The name is of use mostly to those who are cataloging them, so of course so many sources both contemporary and modern tend towards lists of names.

Names are also an often necessary short-hand. In a modern-day setting the writer can say "Paris" or "Taxi" or "Starbuck's Coffee" without having to explain and describe. The look and feel comes across to the reader because they have their own sensory experience with the thing to draw upon. Or at least have encountered sufficient other descriptions to be able to fill in.

But for those things which are not modern (or referred to frequently within modern contexts?) Well, there's one peculiarity to note right off. There appear to be certain genres or periods -- Victorian era and Roman era leap to mind -- where part of the contract with the reader is an assumption that the reader knows what a cravat, a Hansom Cab, a spatha, a legate is. And there are sufficient depictions so said reader can get a little of the five-senses impression of how loud, uncomfortable, effective, powerful, etc. these things are, in addition to the general size and shape and color.

This is not like, say, shogun, samurai, kimono and katana, which are more-or-less assumed to be part of our general cultural knowledge (as inaccurate as common understanding of these things might be). This is instead a special expectation; that someone drawn to stories set around Rome or with a Lost Legion on patrol will know or will make an effort to know what the lorica and gladius are and have at least some idea what it means to be a Roman.

I'm pretty sure the Bronze Age isn't one of these exceptions. So the names alone are insufficient. The names are often problematic anyhow. For every wonderfully expressive, essentially self-translating term like "ox-hide ingot," you have two like "krater" that need translation, and two like "stirrup jar" that seem useful until you realize stirrups hadn't been invented yet.

This latter is a tremendous problem for the writer. Not only do many terms in English have specific, known (and therefor culturally inappropriate) origins, so do individual words. "The point of no return" comes from aviation, "running the gauntlet" came to English in the 17th century and had a Swedish origin (although there is a Greek equivalent, "Xylokopia," that just puts it back into the other problem of needing translation.)

You need to catch as many of them as you can, because once the reader's attention is attracted, they are going to realize how many of the words you are using in an ordinary 20th century English-language text are quite obviously derived from other languages, and that brings up too many questions you don't want them to have.

I ran into this during Shirato when I wanted to mention a certain blue glow but "Cherenkov" is both a personal name and the name of a Russian. Which didn't fit at all with my pseudo-Japanese setting. It yanks the reader out of the text while the ordinary anglo-saxon (despite its also complex cultural origins) sneaks by unremarked.

And what do you do with something like "Wanax?" It is the appropriate name of a Mycenaean ruler of the palatial period. It is similar to "king" but there are important differences. Put "King" in the book and the reader will make certain assumptions that don't fit the culture under discussion. But put "Wanax" and you have to explain it, slowing the narrative. Or -- from a later period -- there is the entirely appropriate word "tyrant," which was applied then without the pejorative sense we give it today thus would, again, require explanation.

I'm willing to bet there is no global rule. Each item has to be approached on a case-by-case basis. "King" will do because we're not going to meet many of them, but "Basileus" (which is a later Greek transliteration of a fortunately quite similar Mycenaean term) is a better match for the former functionaries/local governors who during the LHIIIC phase of Mycenaean culture take over from the fallen palaces and morph over the years into local chieftains/warlords.

"Khopesh" is fine because it is vaguely familiar to the audience and (vowels aside) is a faithful recreation of the Egyptian "ḫpš."  "Naue-II" is out because it is obviously an academic coinage and contains the name of the German archaeologist who categorized them. Since they were traded all over the place there are probably some authentic names for them out there, but as that doesn't help visualize them it would be best to describe them from an in-universe point of view; "One of the long narrow swords that had come out of the North in recent years."

And, yeah; this little game is even harder when it comes to the names of entire peoples. I am perhaps fortunate that in the period I am writing few have a national identity per se; they are mostly tribal, with a certain affiliation towards cities in some places. My Mycenaean may self-identify as Athenian, for instance; Athana or perhaps Athenai goes back as a city name to at least the late Bronze Age. My Laconian is less lucky, as his people (quite possibly Mycenae fleeing from the collapse of the palatial system) didn't move from the lower Peloponnese into Laconia until a few hundred years later.

And of course "Egypt" is a modern transliteration of classical Greek; the earlier Linear B inscription is "a-ku-pi-ti-yo" which possibly derived from the Amarna-period name "Hikuptah." Which is back to the original naming problem; "Egypt" is expressive but wrong, but "Hikuptah" would take a bunch of explanation. The one advantage I have in my particular story is my characters are a polyglot bunch; the moment one of them says one name, another will correct or amplify with the name that their people use!

Just as well the Bronze Age is not one of the periods with a special dispensation. Because this research is tough enough without having to face those critical and well-informed readerships.

Grenades and Tanks

I just sold and shipped one Pulse Rifle grenade and I have a happy customer.

I'm still enjoying myself doing the machining. I've always liked working with metal, and having access to the tools that can really carve into the stuff is something I've wanted for a long time. I've also been checked out on the milling machine, which will eventually open up even more fabrication options for me.

On the other hand, dimensioning has been an ongoing struggle. I've finally settled on a tenth of an inch smaller in diameter and that chambered in an Airsoft shotgun replica. But length is still an issue (and was for the movie; despite the official claims, only three rounds would actually fit in the real prop.)

I've been reflecting just how many things I had to learn to get where I currently am on the lathe. I was also reminded recently just how much there is yet to learn. But that will be another post. I want to mention an odd yet very watchable 2012 anime I saw recently.


"Girls and Panzer" is about one year of a sports club at an all-girls high school. The name of the sport is given in the anime as "Sensha-do" and is variously translated by various media; I like the cleverness of "Tankwando" myself but the official translation uses "Tankery." Yes; it is about mock battles using lovingly restored W.W.II era tanks.

It doesn't sound like it could possibly work. It sounds really silly. It is silly. But it does work. Somehow, it is a really fun show to watch.

Yes, a lot of it is the usual meat and potatoes of anime set at a Japanese high school; friendships, friction with families, trouble fitting in, etc. And it does follow much of the familiar sports club script of the underdogs going into the nationals with the very survival of their school at stake (apparently the national schools administration was browbeaten into agreeing that if Oarai High School makes a strong enough showing in that particular extra-curricular activity, they will continue to be funded.)

But it also breaks with one of the traditions of much Japanese manga about certain sports (particularly martial arts) and most traditional activities, as well as with a cross-cultural tradition common to way too many shows in general. In the first, there is no stern instructor, none of the self-abasement, none of the rote learning. Although the students of Sensha-do very much respect the traditions of their sport, it is never presented that there is only one correct way of doing it, and it is certainly not presented as the protagonists having to move beyond their pride and learn the correct ways.

This is almost lampshaded. When their instructor shows up for the first day of practice, she gives the teams a map and says, "Get in, drive to these spots, then start shooting." They have to figure out how to start the tanks on their own -- one team by riffling through a manual, another by frantically Googling it, and at least one by having handy a tank fan who has really, really studied the subject previous to this.

In the second, the "gambatte" routine is downplayed. Too often, in Western works just as often as in Japanese (and I'm looking at you, Disney), the key to victory is having enough "heart." Of wanting enough, of trying anyhow, etc., etc. In "Girls and Panzer" the key to victory is often as not reading the damn manual.

Sure, they also come up with the usual maniac plans of such things, and there are also several key moments where the most important thing is to rebuild their trust in the team, and have hope they can continue on. But for all of that, it is shown over and over that merely wanting it a lot doesn't magically make things go right. You need to put in the work -- of practice, and of study.

This is a very strange universe. The entire idea of tank combat as a high school sport is ludicrous, and the anime doesn't help any with the Academy Ships (entire towns with their central high school built on top of massive aircraft carriers). Whatever is the educational equivalent of OSHA fled the scene gibbering long, long ago.



The show also passes the Bechdel test. Laps it, even. Only one named male character ever shows up, and the conversation about him is very short. Really, very few men, and very few adults, show up at all, and those that do don't do much. It is as I said a strange universe.

In any case, language is another part of the fun. For no particular reason, one of the amateur sub groups chose to throw in a bunch of gratuitous German. Now, of course "Panzer" is used as the common term for "armored vehicle," and the phrase "Panzer vor!" appears frequently, and one character says "Nein" once. And the ampersand in the official titles is transliterated on those same titles as "und." But the subtitlers just went ahead and replaced many of the occurrences of common, idiomatic Japanese with equivalents in German.

I thought my German was better than my Japanese (I don't know either language, not particularly) but I still usually caught the Japanese first. Japanese being such a contextual language anyhow, it makes a certain sense that "Hai!" can be translated as "Ja!" or "Jawohl!" or "Gute!" (and several other variations as well. But the translation is really reaching when a character comments on an explanation just given -- simultaneously with taking out her contacts and putting on glasses -- and the translation of the Japanese all-purpose syllable "Ja" is translated in the subtitles as "Alles klar."

Oddly enough, a quote from Guderian himself is spoken in the anime in what sounds to my ears as ordinary Japanese, but is properly given by the subtitlers as "Nicht Kleckern sondern Klotzen!" Yet, they completely miff the famous McAuliffe retort to a request for surrender (during the Battle of the Bulge), rendering it as, "They sure are nuts."

The translators leave alone a nice translation of Caesar's,"veni vidi vici" into idiomatic Japanese (at least I think it is; I only understand the "mitte" that begins it), but the same character's other foray into the classics, "Festina lente," is transcribed exactly.

This language fun is shared by the characters; the first time "Panzer vor!" is uttered by one, another swivels around with a shocked "Pants are for what?" At least, that's the subtitling; my Japanese is not up to understanding the rapid-fire idiomatic reply of the original anime. But the "subtler" joke is that the Japanese use British, not American garment terminology here. Which possibly makes later scenes with their cries of "What would panzer be doing in a parking lot?" and "Where are the damn panzers?" even funnier.

The cast really gets into it with the "Russian" school, though (all the various schools that field Tankwando teams are Japanese, but they chose to put on a show of various national stereotypes. The "American" school sets up camp -- in a blink-and-you'll miss it bit -- with folding tables, boxes of K-rats, a jeep, and Coke in the old-style glass bottles.)

One of the voice actresses is a Russian Language student, and during the big tank advance they SING "Katyusha." And then to add frosting to the moment of awesome, the same character reprises part of the song as a lullaby to her sleeping commander. My musical day was made even before the "German" school advances to the music of the Wehrmacht marching song "Erika." A song I partially learned myself during work on "The Sound of Music."

And I've made a botch of describing this thing. As I said above, it doesn't seem like it could possibly work, or be anything else other than silly, but it was very much worth watching.



And was perhaps one of the things that helped me recover from the slump of this past week. I'm still not back up to full strength, but at least I'm back to lathing, and I've got Holocron code spinning around in my head, too.