The Grantville Gazette Volumn VI Page 22

  Phillip paused for breath. He looked up, made eye contact with Doctors Rolfinck, Herbers, and Hofacker. He raised a hand in silent greeting before continuing his discourse.

  "The nerve of the man. Did you see that? He waved to us as if we were his colleagues," muttered Dr. Rolfinck. "We are going to have to do something about the man. His conceit is beyond words. We have to do something about him."

  Dr. Hofacker shook his head. "Our hands are tied, Dr. Rolfinck. The radio people passed on the news that Dr. Gribbleflotz holds a doctorate from an institution of some stature. It is best we ignore him."

  While the doctors drank to drown their sorrows, on the other side of the common room Phillip continued to talk to his audience. He was getting into his stride talking about the topic dearest to him. Dr. Phillip Theophrastus Gribbleflotz.

  "Of course there are some up-timers that have a clue. I have been pursuing references in their library's collection about pyramids, and crystal power. While much of it is obviously in conflict with well-established systems, some of their points are most amazing." Phillip removed his spectacles and drew a special up-time cleaning cloth from a pocket in his up-time style jacket. He exhaled onto the lenses and wiped them. After he slid the spectacles on, he smiled at his audience. "I am particularly interested in the combination of gems with the new metal, aluminum. My careful calculations, corroborated by a most interesting tome in the Grantville Public Library, suggests that a pyramid composed of aluminum members with the appropriate colors and cuts of gems at the strategic points, especially these new faceted gems, could result in the invigoration of the Quinta Essentia of the Human Humors. I am most anxious to pursue it. But as always, funding is problematic. Perhaps the new Aeolian Crystals will assist in it."

  Phillip looked over his audience again. He had them in the palm of his hand. Tonight's crowd would be happy to go home and spread the words of Dr. Phillip Theophrastus Gribbleflotz, the Worlds Greatest Alchemist.

  "You have heard of the Gribbleflotz Aeolian Crystals I am supplying the up-time radio technicians?" It was a rhetorical question. Aeolian Crystals were too new for any of the audience to have heard of them yet. "They allow the conversion of the Essences of Lightning the technicians have captured in their singing wires to be converted into sensible sounds. The crystals themselves sing. The up-timers insist on referring to them as "Rochelle salts," but I can assure you that they have no parallel in Rochelle, or any other part of France. No, the singing Aeolian Crystals are a purely German product of German alchemy and up-time technology." Dr. Gribbleflotz paused dramatically. "We are calling the 'earphones' Gribbleflotz' Aeolian Transformers. They are much better than those simplistic mechanical earphones produced by the jewelers' guild. Wire and bits of Iron! Ha! Cold Iron can never compete for the spirits of Sound with Salts of Sound Itself!!"

  Non-Fiction

  Exegesis and Interpretation

  of Up-timer Printed Matter

  by Francis Turner

  Derived from my Hobson's Choice story, this article is about a subject that I think people frequently think is simpler than it actually is. It is my belief that down-timers who get their hands on purloined up-time books will generally have a hard time figuring out what is being talked about. Of course, in Grantville this is not too much of a problem since there are plenty of people who can interpret and/or answer questions. But a copy of a copy that makes its way to Spain (say) is going to be a whole different kettle of fish.

  Some things to consider when examining a modern magazine from the point of view of a down-timer are:

  1. linguistic changes including new words from foreign tongues (kamikaze, thug, gringo), chaynges inn spelinge, slang . . .

  2. hidden assumptions of technology or science (e.g. electricity)

  3. geographic changes (names of countries, regions, cities etc.)

  4. advertisements

  What Is Exegesis?

  Exegesis is defined in the dictionary as "Exposition; explanation; especially, a critical explanation of a text or portion of Scripture." It is the sort of thing that monks, theologians and other literate people of the seventeenth century did all the time and is a word they would understand even if it is somewhat less well known today. Interpretation of a text is effectively just a translation; exegesis attempts to put the translation into context. Exegesis is the piecing together of clues from a variety of sources to arrive at the "correct" meaning for an obscure piece of text.

  When the King James Bible was translated it involved a large amount of exegesis. The translators attempted (with only indifferent success) to locate Greek, Aramaic and Latin versions of the bible and then compare the different versions to try to determine what the original text was that should then be rendered into seventeenth-century English.

  One thing that exegesis tries to solve is the case where there is a choice of meanings because a word has mutated over time or is a homonym. A good example of this is the seventy-two virgins that some interpretations of the Koran believe is the reward awaiting martyrs in heaven. Because of the way the Koran was written down originally there is considerable dispute about whether the relevant word really means virgins; it could apparently mean a lot of things, including a sort of white grape.

  How Long Will This Be A Problem?

  For historians in the 1632 universe, it will always be a problem because English will not develop in the same way as it did in this universe. For the majority of people, though, it is likely to be a shorter duration problem because eventually all the useful up-time literature will be translated into down-timer German and probably Latin and possibly English and French. Moreover, there will also be produced basic primers of up-timer English and culture that will assist those who need the knowledge in much the same way that we use phrasebooks and dictionaries when traveling today. But, of course, anyone who stumbles across an up-timer newspaper hidden in an attic in 1793 will need to go and find a professional historian to help translate or dig up his primer of up-timer English.

  Undoubtedly, in Grantville and surrounding/allied territories such primers will be quickly available, however although they can help with problems 1 and 3 above (and explain the concept of 4), problem 2 is going to remain a problem for people who haven't been exposed to the relevant technology. Without knowledge of what an automobile is, for example, expressions such as "when the rubber hits the road," or "putting your foot to the floor," or "coming to a screeching halt" can be translated but the translation will lack much of the subtlety of the original and may therefore contribute to a cascading series of misinterpretations like the virgin/grape confusion mentioned above. However, such primers will never be able to list all concepts and phrases and will never be universally distributed so problems will remain. Scholars who are not allied with Grantville and lack direct access will undoubtedly study obscure up-timer texts for quite a few years and they will need the techniques of exegesis to do so successfully.

  The Challenges of Up-timer English

  The greatest challenge is undoubtedly that the up-timer documents are in English. Thus the first requirement for a down-timer who has gotten his hands on some Grantville printed matter is to locate someone who can read English well, which is not as simple as one might think. Although Tudor and early Stuart England (and Scotland) had produced many works that today are universally recognized as classics, in the 1630's their fame had yet to escape the British Isles. English was, quite simply, not a language much learned in the 1630's by foreigners. The international language of scholarship was Latin and works not written in Latin were generally shunned. Thus most people would learn their own native tongue and Latin during their education. Further languages learned would generally be the ones of the major continental powers, that is to say, German, French and Spanish. Indeed this remained generally true for a considerable period. An ancestor of mine who traveled central and southern Europe in the mid 1800's had a number of useful conversations with academics and clerics in Latin since he did not speak either Italian or German and
some of his conversants could not speak French (his other modern language). Merchants and traders would, of course, learn other tongues; thus countries with trade with England, such as Holland and France, might have significant numbers of English speakers, especially in cities and ports, but other lands would typically have extremely limited numbers of them.

  The second related challenge is the malleability of English and the lack of reference materials. To understand this it helps to look at works published in English at the time. Consider, for example, Hakluyt's Voyages, which was produced near the end of Elizabeth's reign, or the various versions of the Book of Common Prayer. One is immediately struck with the lack of the letter J and the mixing up of U and V not to mention the usage of Y as the (Icelandic) thorn (þ = th sound) and the frequent abbreviation of common words. Today we have different idiosyncrasies, such as the acronym, which would appear just as peculiar to a seventeenth century reader. Spelling was quite radically different (and inconsistent) and although there was an English dictionary (Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall, first printed in 1604) it only contained about three thousand words, many of which are not used (or used differently) today.

  The third related challenge is the changes in handwriting. This will not, of course, apply to people who manage to get original books or photocopies, but those unfortunates who end up with handwritten copies or stolen notes will discover problems. Again this sort of thing is easy enough to figure out when you have someone to ask but it is a lot harder if you are stuck on your own without anyone to help.

  When Interpretation Is Easy

  Sometimes, of course, it is reasonable for down-timers to find it easy to understand up-timer literature. Exegesis is easy when the book is intended to teach. Encyclopediae are easy and school textbooks are generally easy because they will proceed in a logical fashion and will have diagrams and sidebars explaining things. In addition, the context of the words are easy to grasp and, generally speaking, refer back to things discussed earlier. Of course book 3 of high school physics (for example) may refer back to things in book 2, but in my experience there will be a short reminder section before anything that is complex and important. Even in the event of excerpts (such as a particular entry in an encyclopedia), the text will normally be simple and not require additional data. Consider a random article in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica for example:

  http://1911encyclopedia.org/I%5CIN%5CINDIAN_OCEAN.htm

  INDIAN OCEAN, the ocean bounded N. by India and Persia; W. by Arabia and Africa, and the meridian passing southwards from Cape Aguihas; and E. by Farther India, the Sunda Islands, West and South Australia, and the meridian passing through South Cape in Tasmania. As in the case of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the southern boundary is taken at either 40 5., the line of separation from the great Southern Ocean, or, if the belt of this ocean between the two meridians named be included, at the Antarctic Circle. It attains its greatest breadth, more than 6000 m. between the south points of Africa and Australia, and becomes steadily narrower towards the north, until it is divided by the Indian peninsula into two arms, the Arabian Sea on the west and the Bay of Bengal on the east. Both branches meet the coast of Asia almost exactly on the Tropic of Cancer, but the Arabian Sea communicates with the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf by the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb and Ormuz respectively. Both of these, again, extend in a north-westerly direction to 30 N. Murray gives the total area, reckoning to 40 S. and including the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, as 17,320,550 English square miles, equivalent to 13,042,000 geographical square miles. Karstens gives the area as 48,182,413 square kilometres, or 14,001,000 geographical square miles; of these 10,842,000 square kilometres, or 3,150,000 geographical square miles, about 22% of the whole, lie north of the equator. For the area from 40 S. to the Antarctic Circle, Murray gives 9,372,600 English square miles, equivalent to 7,057,568 geographical square miles, and Karstens 24,718,000 square kilometres, equivalent to 7,182,474 geographical square miles. The Indian Ocean receives few large rivers, the chief being the Zambezi, the Shat-el-Arab, the Indus, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra and the Irawadi. Murray estimates the total land area draining to the Indian Ocean at 5,o5o,ooo geographical square miles, almost the same as that draining to the Pacific. The annual rainfall draining from this area is estimated at 4380 cubic miles. . . .

  In this geographic article the only elements required would be knowledge of place names, longitude and latitude and the length of a mile/kilometer and, as the article progresses, the definition of the temperature degrees. There are occasional more complex words and references to obscure things (e.g. cable ships) but they rarely disturb the narrative and provide corroborating detail rather than vital facts.

  Exegesis is also easy when the subject matter is historical to the up-timers. In this case, there will probably be less new technology involved and less scientific terminology that will be unfamiliar to a 1632 reader. For example, the previous entry in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica (Indian Mutiny) describes dragoons, artillery, various places in India and so on but lacks words about technology. Even explicitly technological articles are easy so long as the reader either is uninterested in precise details (e.g. the knowledge that vanadium is a metal may be sufficient for getting the gist of an article about steel) or has access to something that provides the interpretation of the necessary details.

  Misunderstanding the Basics

  Let us consider a short amusing tagline such as might be found in a current affairs magazine or a book on political theory:

  "For every action there is an equal and opposite government program."

  How is a poor down-timer going to work out what this is about?

  To begin with at least three words are going to be confusing.

  1. Action has almost certainly changed its meaning, Cawdrey defines it as "the forme of a suite" which sounds like the definition of a legal action (today we talk about some statement as being "actionable"). Also in French "action" these days can mean a share in a quoted company (i.e. the same as the German AG—Aktiegesellshaft) so it is quite possible that a down-timer will think this refers to a lawsuit or a company share.

  2. Government is a word of misleadingly similar meaning (government is the act or method of governing, it does not mean the bureaucracy, etc., that it does today).

  3. Program is a word yet to be coined (and in this case one may find misleading meanings in looking at the word in other contexts—"government program" is not the same as "computer program" or "program of events").

  Then, once that little difficulty has been taken care of, there is the minor issue of the fact that this is a deliberate misquotation of Newton's third law of motion: "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." Quite a lot of the reason why this quip is considered so apposite is that it equates government with the conservation of momentum and the like. Without understanding Newton, even if someone understands the words, there is something lacking. In the 1630's Galileo has just about invented the concept of inertia (which becomes Newton's first law) but the concept of a force and hence the concepts of conservation of momentum in a closed system need a good deal more brain work. Anyone exposed solely to classical Aristotelian laws of motion would utterly miss the point because these laws were (not to put too fine a point on it) wrong.

  Newton's Third Law is just one of the thousands of phrases and quips which we expect educated people to be familiar with. There are many others. Just simple slang such as "Frog" for Frenchman or "Limey" for Englishman would be unfamiliar to a seventeenth century reader since they were coined in the eighteenth century.

  Phrases That Flummox The Down-timers

  A more complex example of a phrase that we take for granted is that "something is the last straw" (see below for where I used it). This phrase "the last straw" is an excellent example of a phrase that will be utterly incomprehensible to a down-timer. In seventeenth- century English there was an expression "'Tis the last feather that breaks the horse's back" which has since dropped out of us
e, replaced by "The straw that broke the camel's back" once the latter was coined by Charles Dickens. Dickens' expression has then been then shortened because everyone knows about the camel to being just "the last straw." A seventeenth-century native English speaker might be sufficiently smart to figure out that where they talked about the last feather, twentieth-century English talked about the last straw but I'd be surprised. A seventeenth-century nonnative English speaker is going to look at the phrase, understand every word, and still have no idea what it refers to. Indeed it is quite possible that such a speaker, if he knows about shoemaking will wonder if "last straw" is straw for making lasts (i.e. molds of people's feet) and wonder why twentieth-century Americans used straw when in the seventeenth century they use wood.

  The problem gets worse when you involve foreign languages—especially when the foreign language has seen the meaning change. For example people talk about someone mounting a "kamikaze attack" on something or someone else. Unless the context makes it clear what a kamikaze attack is then this phrase is going to be meaningless. If by some mischance the word kamikaze is recognized as being Japanese then this will be a complete "red herring." To the seventeenth-century Japanese the Kamikaze was the wind sent by the gods protecting Japan that sunk and drove off the invading Mongol fleets in the late thirteenth century. There is no idea of suicide or self sacrifice in this meaning whatsoever. Amusingly, it is just possible that a seventeenth-century reader would understand what a "red herring" was since the Oxford English Dictionary quotes this phrase first appearing in print in The Gentleman's Recreation by Nicholas Cox in 1686: