THE (ALMOST) UNDELETED

I missed this one when it came out last week, but thought y'all might find it interesting, too.

On the possible real world sources for the language in the books.

Languagehat - May 16, 2008 - CHAKOBSA.

(posted by Stoned in Arrakeen on alt.fan.dune.)

That was an interesting read. I noticed in the comments someone posted some snippets from a book that mention a whistling language. Have the Tleilaxu master's whistling language origins been discussed anywhere?

Not that I've seen.

I think there are several known whistling languages, but I'd have to poke around to find any refs.

The one I remember reading most about a few years back was in the mountains of Spain or Portugal? Somewhere in Europe.....

They're not complete, fully developed "languages", by the way. You couldn't discuss the Dune novels or Greek philosophy or astrophysics using one, for example. More on the order of "Have you finished mending the fence over there? "Yes, I have!" "Good! Mom says come home for lunch then!" Basically a means of communicating over distance, the ones I've read about, at any rate.

Presumably the Tleilaxu whistling language would be something equally restricted: a way of communicating commands to gholas and FDs.

Wow.. just googled "whistling language" there are over a million results.

You're probably thinking of this one in the Canary Islands:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/science/11 ... nguage.ap/

Plus there are two wiki articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbo_Gomero_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistled_language

This one is good http://www.crystalinks.com/whistledlanguage.html

Sorry, I know this is supposed to be about Chakobsa.

So Chakobsa was real.... fascinating!

Yeah, Canary Islands! That's it.

Totally cool! I swear, I really am going to go to Florence Oregon someday. There is a public library there that has FH's old book collection. I would love to see what he had.

I started to post that here but I figured you saw it at AFD.

That is indeed where I saw it, and just yesterday morning. It's kinda slow round there lately, so I don't check in every day.

Used to read Languagehat daily as well....

The comment in that blog were interesting. Is it true that Kwisatz Haderach is Hebrew for Shortening of the Way and Bene Gesserit means Children of the Bridge, Orald?

Yes, "jumping of the way" literally, ,meaning "shortening of the way".

Bene Gesserit is a bit mutated but you could recognise it as what you said.
"Bene", being close to "ben"(son, boy) and the Arab "ibn" of the same(?) meaning. Chig could probably tell you better that this is some mutated or old form of it.
It could be closer to "children of the bridging", I think.

It's translated as Gishrit, which is fairly close to gishur(bridging), from the word gesher(bridge).

Where does the word "hrethgir" fit into all of this?

But I wasn't the one asked.



I think the key here (to use Orald's qualifiers) is "a bit mutated/some mutated or old form/could be closer to, fairly close to".

Obviously Kwisatz Haderach is (time/FH-mutated) Hebrew. But trying to interpret Bene Gesserit as Hebrew as well has always seemed a bit reaching to me. (Why would an organization of women refer to themselves as "children" using a word originally meaning "sons of"?) Granted, the Latin phrase makes only a bit more sense, but if we climb up to the meta-level, maybe FH went looking through famous phrases for something that sounded a bit like "Jesuit", as Brian has suggested. (He can't be making everything up, can he? He doesn't seem that imaginative.) It would be interesting to see which name FH came up with first, the Bene Gesserit or the Bene Tleilaxu.

chanilover wrote:The comment in that blog were interesting.

I particularly like the one by marie-lucie (June 2, 2008 11:17 PM), since it's been a pet peeve of my own for years. It really is quite appalling how lax so many linguists of the Chomskian school have been with data over the last half-century (since the "Revolution" in the late '50s ). You really can't trust most of the data. (A lot of the supposedly theory-crucial data came from English-speaking linguists through introspection...what some call "armchair linguistics" but I call just fooking lazy. It's getting a little better in their camp now...but not much.) It's my firm belief that Chomsky, the "greatest linguist who ever lived", will eventually be regarded as the man who turned Linguistics into a pseudoscience and set things back several centuries.

Anyway, I'm sure you're all thrilled by that kinda shtuff...so, Omph...hrethgir? WTF? I've never even been able to find a source language for it. It looks Scandanavian, probably Icelandic or Old Norse (almost the same thing), but I suspect it has a bit of fecal matter clinging to it from Kevin's bum.

Err, doesn't "hrethgir" come from L. Ron's books? Like Battlefield Earth or something?

SC wrote:It's my firm belief that Chomsky, the "greatest linguist who ever lived", will eventually be regarded as the man who turned Linguistics into a pseudoscience and set things back several centuries.

He's also a near-antisemitic leftist.

OK, that was a joke, right, about hrethgir? The KJA/Scientology line, right?

Whew....


Chomsky...just another loud-mouthed self-hating Jew. I got ZERO use for the old bastard and seriously plan to throw a party when he finally dies.

SandChigger wrote:But I wasn't the one asked.



I think the key here (to use Orald's qualifiers) is "a bit mutated/some mutated or old form/could be closer to, fairly close to".

Obviously Kwisatz Haderach is (time/FH-mutated) Hebrew. But trying to interpret Bene Gesserit as Hebrew as well has always seemed a bit reaching to me. (Why would an organization of women refer to themselves as "children" using a word originally meaning "sons of"?) Granted, the Latin phrase makes only a bit more sense, but if we climb up to the meta-level, maybe FH went looking through famous phrases for something that sounded a bit like "Jesuit", as Brian has suggested. (He can't be making everything up, can he? He doesn't seem that imaginative.) It would be interesting to see which name FH came up with first, the Bene Gesserit or the Bene Tleilaxu.

chanilover wrote:The comment in that blog were interesting.

I particularly like the one by marie-lucie (June 2, 2008 11:17 PM), since it's been a pet peeve of my own for years. It really is quite appalling how lax so many linguists of the Chomskian school have been with data over the last half-century (since the "Revolution" in the late '50s ). You really can't trust most of the data. (A lot of the supposedly theory-crucial data came from English-speaking linguists through introspection...what some call "armchair linguistics" but I call just fooking lazy. It's getting a little better in their camp now...but not much.) It's my firm belief that Chomsky, the "greatest linguist who ever lived", will eventually be regarded as the man who turned Linguistics into a pseudoscience and set things back several centuries.

Anyway, I'm sure you're all thrilled by that kinda shtuff...so, Omph...hrethgir? WTF? I've never even been able to find a source language for it. It looks Scandanavian, probably Icelandic or Old Norse (almost the same thing), but I suspect it has a bit of fecal matter clinging to it from Kevin's bum.

I meant the stuff about Kwisatz Haderach and Bene Gesserit, that other stuff you've mentioned was a bit boring.

The only reference to Bene Gesserit I know of is "quamdiu bene se gesserit", which means "whilst he is of good behaviour" and refers to the security of tenure held by High Court judges and above in England. Don't know which judges the Yanks apply it to.

SandChigger wrote:

OK, that was a joke, right, about hrethgir? The KJA/Scientology line, right? .

Sorry. Must have been channeling Nekhrun there for a moment. Its all gone now.

I was being serious, IDK where I heard it but I'm sure I did.
I checked Wiki' and Google for "hrethgir" though and it shows only New Dung refrences.

Other than a few pages in an old paperback copy of Dianetics that I found in my office here, I can proudly say I have never read anything by Hubbbbbard, so you could be right, Orald. I've never managed to turn up any non-Dung references for it online, either.

It's Dung...crap from the minds of shitheads.


(Afterthought: maybe it's from some obscure early era pulp fiction that KJA read and touched himself over as a boy, something that no one else remembers now?)

I thought at first that hrethgir was an anagram from something, but i found nothing, except a small result :

get rihrh

I know, it doesn't mean anything

But if you google it, first thing you see is : Did you mean: get richer?

I don't know why, but first thought i had when i saw this was KJA...

Too much time on your hands, too, huh?

Yes...i do

But it's ok, i'm on vacation

Nyah!