Re: Yelmalio-ist Far Point

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_cs.ucc.ie>
Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 17:58:07 GMT


Moi:
> >I wasn't suggesting it was in a numerical
> >majority as a religion, for example, compared to 'Orlanth-worshipping
> >Orlanthi', (I sincerely hope you're not warming up another neologism...)
> >at least not necessarily. (John Hughes' problems notwithstanding.)

Mikael:
> _Politically_, though, the Yelmalio 'religion' might be biggest.

It's not clear, however, how that's really different from the 'Harvar faction', which distinction is the where we came in. Harvar is surely 'politically Yelmalian', whatever ends up being determined about his own personal religious situation. In that sense they seem to be the biggest, or at least the most powerful.

> I maintain that it's Bad that 'Orlanthi' denotes both cultural
> affiliation and religious affiliation.

I noticed. And while I do indeed think this has a Naffness level approaching that of, say, 'East Ralios' (to pick on one of my many bêtes noires, and to make a change from assorted grumblings about many of Greg's alleged Errors in such regard), my present point was that in this context, you'd need yet _another_ term to disambiguate between on the one tentacle, Orlanthism as a culture, on the second as an individual religious practice or relationship, and on the third as a 'clan type', in the sense mentioned above.

Since we as a rule game in English (or Swedish, or dare I say, Italian), rather than LogLan or Mostali, I don't see resolving ambiguity by such mechanistic means as being desirable, or indeed really possible. And if we _were_ to seek to abolish a meaning of the term 'Orlanthi', then the sense of 'culturally Orlanthi' is the one I'd least like to say go, personally.

Cheers,
Alex.


Powered by hypermail