Look to the West Volume V: To Dream Again
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
First off, great timeline and great updates. I personally enjoy the alternate technological development and the hints at the future given in the opening quotes - although I must echo OwenM's confusion as to what type of communication is being used.
Secondly, I have some questions about the Cherokee empire - specifically, relating to language.
Secondly, I have some questions about the Cherokee empire - specifically, relating to language.
- How many Cherokee citizens speak English as opposed to Cherokee?
- What are the etymologies of the various towns in the Empire? I've been trying to translate them, and the only ones I could fully translate were Talugisgi [meaning hardware/iron, perhaps a contraction of talugisginvnohi, railroad] and Amaganugov [a misspelled version of amaganugogv, spring].
- Was an independent Cherokee writing system developed, as in OTL, or is it written solely in Latin characters? If it is the former, who developed it?
- Why is the orthography so similar to OTL? Do the Thande Institute team "correct" Cherokee to be in line with OTL, as (IIRC) they do with English?
"The Shadow of God: From the Ottoman Empire to the Eternal State”
An interesting title - one wonders if it indicates that Islam, in some form, will continue to play a major role even after the Empire goes Societist? (Biggest unifying element in its OTL history, after all - "Ottomanism" was a bit of a non-starter).
An interesting title - one wonders if it indicates that Islam, in some form, will continue to play a major role even after the Empire goes Societist? (Biggest unifying element in its OTL history, after all - "Ottomanism" was a bit of a non-starter).
That means Belgian Maximiliaanstad in Antipodea lasted less than a decade.
It is remarkable how short-lived the colonialism of the new European powers (Belgium, Norden/Scandinavia, Naples) seems to be.
Speaking of colonialism, what was Russian Erythrea doing during the Euxine War?
Erythrea enables Russia to open another front against the Ottoman Empire
yet it is not mentioned despite the RLPC involvement in the war and successful raids on the neighboring Ottoman Arabia.
Was there some LTTW equivalent to the Gentlemen's agreement between the Russian-American Company and the Hudson Bay Company which prevented war between them during the OTL Crimean War?
Thande
Donor
It was covered fully in Part #168.
I'm glad someone remembers that!
Guilty as charged - and then, as always when I do this, I actually forgot to add the punchline and had to go back and edit it inAdmit it, Thande... You wrote the entire update to set up that Pirates vs Ninjas joke.
(This has happened before...)Thanks for spotting that - I did write the line but must have left it off when copying the text from my document. Edited.Where's [3]?
That's a very interesting set of questions. Basically, I don't know enough about Native American Indian (I am hedging my bets there with terminology
) languages to do this 'realistically' so what I tend to do is just use the modern OTL orthography with a few alternate anglicisation twists thrown in (mostly wearing down difficult combinations of consonants). I do this in general not only with English as you say but also with Chinese for example where I said at one point I use pinyin even though the transliteration in TTL is different, just because it would be too big a headache to keep track of. The Cherokee population will be pretty much all bilingual by this point except perhaps in some isolated villages which only speak Cherokee, and there will be a fair few (especially the rich plantation owner types) who identify as Cherokee but aren't fluent in the language anymore and there's nothing immediately to identify them to a stranger as being different from their Carolinian neighbours, especially given that there's been some intermarriage.
As far as the place names go, these are meant to be short forms used by Carolina and other foreigners, hence why it's just Talugisgi 'iron' rather than 'iron town' or whatever (named for its iron deposits, though those are obviously not unconnected with the railways you mention). Daguvnawave is supposed to be a translation of 'Pearl River' and Nevadoheyadav, the capital, is a worn down form of a word for 'harmony'. If you have any suggestions for more place names I can always use them!
Good point, it's the sort of thing that likely wouldn't be mentioned in a brief overview of the conflict like that (as you say with Alaska) but I can talk about it in a later update.
(I wasn't aware of the gentleman's agreement thing, it explains a thing or two - I always wondered why in Decades of Darkness Britain/Canada got Alaska in the Crimean War, presumably because there wasn't one in TTL).
That doesn't adequately explain, though, why the ENA will be reviving Carolinian culture in a fit of Diversitarianism. It suggests the health of the culture across the border is.... not good.
The quote said it was "a step in the [REDACTED] direction." Censored by the Combine.
While technically one could make an argument for that being either a "right" or a "wrong," only the former seems to jive at all with his personality and opinions as we know them. Furthermore, it is basically the first big move in the timeline to resolve the nationalities / diversity problem - Societism's raison d'être. Given that context, what is the argument for his labeling it wrong? Compared to a world of nationalism-linked violence, I strongly suspect he saw it as progress.
I gotta confess that I've been shortening Nevadoheyadav to just 'Nevadoh' in my mind.
Thande, would it be alright to ask what are the major cities of the ENA by this point besides the Arc of Power? I admit curiosity if due to much of the southern *USA being dominated by Carolina, French Louisiana, and New Spain if that's affected the prosperity and size of certain cities due to not being in a massive free-trade zone/united federation; or allowed others to grow based on commercial and border travel precisely due to being close to foreign nations that are based in OTL American states.
Thande, would it be alright to ask what are the major cities of the ENA by this point besides the Arc of Power? I admit curiosity if due to much of the southern *USA being dominated by Carolina, French Louisiana, and New Spain if that's affected the prosperity and size of certain cities due to not being in a massive free-trade zone/united federation; or allowed others to grow based on commercial and border travel precisely due to being close to foreign nations that are based in OTL American states.
The mass extinctions could be tricky. Would Societists talk up the extinction of other hominids as the inevitable consequence of division between humans? Or (my guess) would they have difficulty accepting that other species of humans even existed, when - as we all know - all humans are fundamentally the same.
Not pure paleontology, but on evolution in general: I could see Societist scientific communities emphasizing that the concept of "species" being inherently distinct is an artificial construct. Diversitarian ideologues might treat species (maybe even subspecies) as sacrosanct divisions, to the detriment of their work.
Great update.
Europe's changed circumstances are really showing in how the the rest of the world is taking advantage of the temporary breathing room.
Pirates and ninjas in the Crimean war inserted into a timeline, and all the TL-natives will remember of it is a novel occasion of unimpressive cannon fodder duking it out.
On a less positive note, though this was well written in its entirety, I found the English author absolutely unbearable. It was a huge relief when the (apparent) Italian took over.
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And I think we might hazard a guess on where the two sides might come down on the multiregional vs single-origin out of Africa theories of modern human evolution...
I was thinking that too.....
the
Thande
Donor
To an extent this reflects which ones are shown on Alex's map, although that also shows all provincial and territorial capitals regardless of whether they are three men and a dog operations.
For a more detailed answer, I still need to think about how the different political forces and economic trends in TTL (especially after Carolina breaks away) will affect the OTL progression of which cities expand. Especially given that most of OTL Canada is not in a separate polity (itself linked to a global institution) to the rest of North America. These are not simple questions to answer.
That was kind of what I was going for with that style, so it provoked the right response
Sort of a cross between up-own-backside business self-help book and More Information Than You Require...come to think of it, Cracked.com might be a good OTL comparison.Something I thought of today... I can't recall if you've touched on the status of the Comanches TTL. OTL, they basically operated like a North American version of a Steppe horde and were unholy terrors to settlers and neighboring Indian tribes. It's from tribes like them that we get the stereotypical savage redskins from old Westerns... They basically considered all non-Comanches fair game for murder and rape, and were fond of abducting young children to raise as Comanches, most famously the white mother of the last Comanche warchief, Quanah Parker.
They had a de facto independent territory stretching from Kansas to El Paso that wasn't fully broken until 1875. The high, dry grasslands they made their home in were essentially a desert as far as any traveling white man's armies would be concerned. They were the continent's finest horsemen in their day and knew every stream and watering hole so they thrived there. OTL they raided as far as Jalisco and the Gulf; the original Texas Rangers (a bunch of crazy bastards with abysmal self-preservation instincts) were formed to try to beat them at their own game of cavalry raiding, because the Comanches had become brutally effective enough to roll back white settlement.
The stretch of Westernesse between Santa Fe and Trinity province would be the heart of Comancheria this time in OTL. I can't recall if they were broken or otherwise subdued during the Great American War, but if they are still actively raiding (and western settlement is delayed TTL so I assume they would be) subjugating them is going to be Priority #1 for Westernesse. They pretty much laughed at treaties so there wouldn't really be any other options, unfortunately. Comanche independence makes any claim to the Llano Estacado purely theoretical and probably makes St. Lewis's influence on Hamilton Territory mostly theoretical as well, since you either have to brave Comancheria or go a loooong way around it to get to Santa Fe.
I'd recommend The Empire of the Summer Moon by SC Gwynne as a quick and entertaining primer on the Comanches; I read it a while ago for my (indefinitely suspended for RL reasons) mesquite domestication TL and found it very informative.
E: doing a thread search of Volume IV the word "Comanche" only appears once... Hate to say this but some retcons to the GAW may be in order. There's no way you could have armies roaming around the American Southwest without accounting for the fact that as far as the Comanche were concerned, this was their land and their raiding grounds and they were absolutely capable of reminding any transgressors about that. There really wasn't any prospect of allying them or paying them off either... there were five major independent tribal groupings so you'd have to deal with each separately, even if the ones you'd just dealt with don't decide to stab you in the back whenever they feel like it. The Comanches would be a pure wild card... I can easily see them preying on the remnants of losing armies, stealing their horses, and growing immensely stronger by expanding their herds.
They had a de facto independent territory stretching from Kansas to El Paso that wasn't fully broken until 1875. The high, dry grasslands they made their home in were essentially a desert as far as any traveling white man's armies would be concerned. They were the continent's finest horsemen in their day and knew every stream and watering hole so they thrived there. OTL they raided as far as Jalisco and the Gulf; the original Texas Rangers (a bunch of crazy bastards with abysmal self-preservation instincts) were formed to try to beat them at their own game of cavalry raiding, because the Comanches had become brutally effective enough to roll back white settlement.
The stretch of Westernesse between Santa Fe and Trinity province would be the heart of Comancheria this time in OTL. I can't recall if they were broken or otherwise subdued during the Great American War, but if they are still actively raiding (and western settlement is delayed TTL so I assume they would be) subjugating them is going to be Priority #1 for Westernesse. They pretty much laughed at treaties so there wouldn't really be any other options, unfortunately. Comanche independence makes any claim to the Llano Estacado purely theoretical and probably makes St. Lewis's influence on Hamilton Territory mostly theoretical as well, since you either have to brave Comancheria or go a loooong way around it to get to Santa Fe.
I'd recommend The Empire of the Summer Moon by SC Gwynne as a quick and entertaining primer on the Comanches; I read it a while ago for my (indefinitely suspended for RL reasons) mesquite domestication TL and found it very informative.
E: doing a thread search of Volume IV the word "Comanche" only appears once... Hate to say this but some retcons to the GAW may be in order. There's no way you could have armies roaming around the American Southwest without accounting for the fact that as far as the Comanche were concerned, this was their land and their raiding grounds and they were absolutely capable of reminding any transgressors about that. There really wasn't any prospect of allying them or paying them off either... there were five major independent tribal groupings so you'd have to deal with each separately, even if the ones you'd just dealt with don't decide to stab you in the back whenever they feel like it. The Comanches would be a pure wild card... I can easily see them preying on the remnants of losing armies, stealing their horses, and growing immensely stronger by expanding their herds.
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Absolutely, it's full of color and choice details. For instance, the Comanches tended to go for nicknames over traditional names... many of which had a rather scatological flavor (one prominent warchief was known as Coyote Vagina
). One of their favorite "games" was to ride up to an isolated homestead and ask for a "gift" of grain or some choice tools. After the terrified settlers complied, they'd give them a few minutes head start before running them down on horseback. If the settlers were lucky, they were killed immediately. If they were unlucky... well...They pulled this shit on most of the neighboring tribes as well, which did not make them at all popular; the name Comanche is actually an Ute word for "those people who are always fighting us", their own name for themselves was Numunuu. They were far too numerous and strong for any of the other tribes to fend them off. As a matter of fact the Comanche had a few neighboring tribes they singled out for particularly vicious treatment, like a band of high school bullies picking on the nerdy kid with glasses... if the ENA is smart, they could use the neighboring tribes against them, as they tended to be almost as good of horsemen as the Comanches were. The Supremacist upswing in ENA politics makes me think they probably won't be, though... OTL it was fairly common for groups of white men to go kill any old group of Indians in revenge, including peaceful East Texas tribes. Mass buffalo slaughter was also used as a method of denying Comanche riders their traditional sustenance. But some of the above-mentioned bullied tribes still hated the Comanches enough to help the Army out when they got around to crushing the Comanches for good.
Texas is divided between New Spain and the ENA TTL, so the Comanches have a few more options than OTL as well. If one nation's army chases a raiding warband off their land, they can just make for the border of the other and dare the army to follow them. Which might make for some... interesting border incidents actually. A real alliance with the Comanches is a non-starter (barring a unifying leader), but helping them might be a useful spite move if ENA-New Spanish relations grow colder. If either side looks like it will lose Texas or the SW, then helping the Comanches could be a useful form of area denial.
OTL, the Comanche were really conquered by smallpox and cholera rather than the army, which reduced them from ~45,000 strong to a few thousand. Since western settlement has been delayed, I can see them being a force for longer.
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Staring at the beautiful update of the gorgeous map Alex made of North America in 1857....I'll get the last thoughts on America out of my head in one big post than spamming the thread up.
1) It occurred to me: Carolina's confederal color had it stayed in the Empire may very well have been gray via parallel historical development. It's still a distinct color from the other confederal shades but can also follow the reasons the Confederacy used it - that of being a cheap dye used to distinguish their troops on the battlefield.
2) Speaking of the Kingdom, does anyone notice the mainland area would be the perfect size for a Confederation? Especially a bigger one to offset the large New Yorker and New Englander dominance of the Empire?
I'd presume they lost the war for independence but still have the Palmetto League Uprising occur in order to facilitate the new Confederations appearing in that what-if scenario. Perhaps the Confederation of the West Indies I hoped for would have appeared then as well, due to the lack of a split between the Empire/Carolina, and with Hispaniola's Princeport/*Port-au-Prince as the confederal capital.
4) That Canadian Confederation hinted at in the last ENA post I feel would have taken Wolfe, Mount Royal, and Algonkia provinces.... possibly Ontario from New York (but not likely due to ugliness on the map and Ontario probably having closer ties to Niagara), and absorbed in New Britain, Greenland, and Rupert's Land as territories. New York would remain the same otherwise and Yankees residing in a 'classic' New England from Connecticut in the south to Newfoundland up north (claiming whatever, if any, existing Acadians in New Scotland and French Newfies in Newfoundland/Cape Breton/PEI).
I feel like in terms of culture it'd be rather like how much of the Confederation of New York was actually settled by New England colonists and so be more or less correspondingly 'Yankee', but with a thinnish layer of *Quebecker influence underneath. But the '*Canada is now (north) Americanized a la OTL Louisiana' talk's been done already.
5) There's been talk on Virginia being majority-black, but I always felt since the Virginia Crisis of the 1830s, the Carolinian War for Independence, and Palmetto Uprising a large number of slaveholders left for Carolina, but also took massive numbers of slaves with them. Thus that blacks are a large minority but still technically one. That's pure speculation though.
6) The Imperial territories in the Rocky Mountain area could easily be a Confederation unto themselves, if with bigger-than-usually-sized provinces and one of the more plains-filled divisions split up for an extra province. Perhaps even Hamilton Territory, maaaaaybe Ugapa tossed in due to thier 'westernness', hot desert climate, and connection to the mountains that all the territories have.
EDIT: a note on the Imperial territories in the Rocky Mountains were added.
1) It occurred to me: Carolina's confederal color had it stayed in the Empire may very well have been gray via parallel historical development. It's still a distinct color from the other confederal shades but can also follow the reasons the Confederacy used it - that of being a cheap dye used to distinguish their troops on the battlefield.
2) Speaking of the Kingdom, does anyone notice the mainland area would be the perfect size for a Confederation? Especially a bigger one to offset the large New Yorker and New Englander dominance of the Empire?
I'd presume they lost the war for independence but still have the Palmetto League Uprising occur in order to facilitate the new Confederations appearing in that what-if scenario. Perhaps the Confederation of the West Indies I hoped for would have appeared then as well, due to the lack of a split between the Empire/Carolina, and with Hispaniola's Princeport/*Port-au-Prince as the confederal capital.
4) That Canadian Confederation hinted at in the last ENA post I feel would have taken Wolfe, Mount Royal, and Algonkia provinces.... possibly Ontario from New York (but not likely due to ugliness on the map and Ontario probably having closer ties to Niagara), and absorbed in New Britain, Greenland, and Rupert's Land as territories. New York would remain the same otherwise and Yankees residing in a 'classic' New England from Connecticut in the south to Newfoundland up north (claiming whatever, if any, existing Acadians in New Scotland and French Newfies in Newfoundland/Cape Breton/PEI).
I feel like in terms of culture it'd be rather like how much of the Confederation of New York was actually settled by New England colonists and so be more or less correspondingly 'Yankee', but with a thinnish layer of *Quebecker influence underneath. But the '*Canada is now (north) Americanized a la OTL Louisiana' talk's been done already.
5) There's been talk on Virginia being majority-black, but I always felt since the Virginia Crisis of the 1830s, the Carolinian War for Independence, and Palmetto Uprising a large number of slaveholders left for Carolina, but also took massive numbers of slaves with them. Thus that blacks are a large minority but still technically one. That's pure speculation though.
6) The Imperial territories in the Rocky Mountain area could easily be a Confederation unto themselves, if with bigger-than-usually-sized provinces and one of the more plains-filled divisions split up for an extra province. Perhaps even Hamilton Territory, maaaaaybe Ugapa tossed in due to thier 'westernness', hot desert climate, and connection to the mountains that all the territories have.
EDIT: a note on the Imperial territories in the Rocky Mountains were added.
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Doesn't quim mean a part of a woman's anatomy rather than a lady of ill repute?
I have to admit that I do not find the treatment of the annexation of Rio Grande and Cisplatina satisfactory. I can't imagine why someone would structure a history of the Worldfest in such a way that the fact that two small republics existed for a few decades could constitute a loose end.