Look to the West Volume VII: The Eye Against the Prism
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
Actually it just occurred to me that Iceland was a British colony ITTL for a while now. Americans could be familiar with the Yule lads long before the rise of Societism and possibly have preserved older versions of them and their mother.
They probably don't think they'll amount to much, just like everybody between the Pandoric Revolution and the Black Twenties.
I mean, Britain being a “kingdom” didn’t stop it from ultimately being treated like an American colony. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same is true for Iceland.
Christianity is not of the Original Society, ergo it has no place here.
Winter festivals are an entirely natural and human thing to have, though.
It’s been well-established that Societism co-opts religion rather than eliminating it.
I remember they tried to find the source of where all religion comes from and co-opt that.
I think we had this discussion before in this thread (or am I going crazy?) where I said that the solstice being a global event making a good foundation for a winter festival of some type.
I am thinking Nordic, Belgian, and/or Italian colonies are the only ones that might be up for grabs.
xsampa
Banned
Let's see
Nordic:
- Sofala
- Madagascar
- Yemen
- concessions in India
- Ceylon
- Riau
- Belgian Borneo
- Cape Colony
- Somaliland
- Beira
Only threadmarks. Just like the good ole' days, you had to shuffle through the thread to get to a chapter! It built character.
Only threadmarks. Just like the good ole' days, you had to shuffle through the thread to get to a chapter! It built character.
The whole threads have disappeared from where I'm standing.
Only threadmarks. Just like the good ole' days, you had to shuffle through the thread to get to a chapter! It built character.
Um, no, on either count.
The threadmarks are still there - click the threadmarks button at the top of the page, then "View all X threadmarks".
Links to some of the earlier volumes are borked because of changes to how the threads are displayed in the URLs.
So far in reading AH I've seen two examples of conlangs being used by world ideologies, one would be Unitarian from Silver Knight and the other is Novalatina. And honestly, I hope to see many more, because they're just the right mix of cool and chilling that a compelling alternate ideology, especially one that's being set up as the final antagonist, needs to be. But at the same time, they seem pretty unrealistic, right? Never mind the feasibility-- it's hard to imagine why people would really want it when translation is adequate for intercultural communication.
Well, I've been reading about Chinese and Japanese revolutionaries' (especially the anarchists) flirtation with Esperanto as a possible second language in East Asia, and it's been captivating. You had everyone from true Tokyo anarchists to ultranationalists like Kita Ikki to weird new religions like Oomoto declare that Esperanto would be the vehicle by which the East would build bridges to the West... but of course, what would be done with those bridges was a subject of debate. And "Tokyo anarchists" is actually a term that includes a large number of radical Chinese students, who liked Esperanto because writings from all languages and on a variety of subjects were being translated into it, deposited into this one vessel. No less a figure than Ho Chi Minh, anti-Western nationalist par excellence, wrote in it, and plenty of Esperanto advocates were in the CCP. I'm a little skeptical, given that some of the articles I've looked at are a little short on concrete details and of course Esperanto hasn't been doing too good anywhere since WW2, but there's some real research that's been done on this stuff and it shows that, even if the feasibility was... limited, there was a larger appetite for it than you'd expect-- and that appetite wasn't limited to one party or ideology, it drew in sections from a lot of demographics... kinda like Societism itself. But there is the important caveat that only Kita Ikki ever imagined obliterating East Asian native languages by making Esperanto a mandatory first language. No one else was that weird, at least not openly.
So Yapon and other non-European lands may not be as turned off by Novalatina as we'd imagine. That society has been held in a cultural, political, and economic stranglehold by Russia for years. They aren't even allowed to emigrate. So any vehicle for greater communication with the world beyond Russia is great, anything that promises revolutionary change is even better. Giving up Japanese kinda hurts, but... if the only way to "save the nation" (to catch up with the modern world, to gain acceptance into a world bloc) is to discard the language...
Honestly, if there's one thing that I kinda wish happened with Novalatina, it's that instead of going for Latin the Combine used Sumerian instead. The archaeological knowledge is there, they could definitely draft a basic vocab to cobble neologisms out of by the 1890s. And there's a lovely poetry to the Final Society reviving the language of the First, rebuilding the Tower of Babel in a way.
Well, I've been reading about Chinese and Japanese revolutionaries' (especially the anarchists) flirtation with Esperanto as a possible second language in East Asia, and it's been captivating. You had everyone from true Tokyo anarchists to ultranationalists like Kita Ikki to weird new religions like Oomoto declare that Esperanto would be the vehicle by which the East would build bridges to the West... but of course, what would be done with those bridges was a subject of debate. And "Tokyo anarchists" is actually a term that includes a large number of radical Chinese students, who liked Esperanto because writings from all languages and on a variety of subjects were being translated into it, deposited into this one vessel. No less a figure than Ho Chi Minh, anti-Western nationalist par excellence, wrote in it, and plenty of Esperanto advocates were in the CCP. I'm a little skeptical, given that some of the articles I've looked at are a little short on concrete details and of course Esperanto hasn't been doing too good anywhere since WW2, but there's some real research that's been done on this stuff and it shows that, even if the feasibility was... limited, there was a larger appetite for it than you'd expect-- and that appetite wasn't limited to one party or ideology, it drew in sections from a lot of demographics... kinda like Societism itself. But there is the important caveat that only Kita Ikki ever imagined obliterating East Asian native languages by making Esperanto a mandatory first language. No one else was that weird, at least not openly.
So Yapon and other non-European lands may not be as turned off by Novalatina as we'd imagine. That society has been held in a cultural, political, and economic stranglehold by Russia for years. They aren't even allowed to emigrate. So any vehicle for greater communication with the world beyond Russia is great, anything that promises revolutionary change is even better. Giving up Japanese kinda hurts, but... if the only way to "save the nation" (to catch up with the modern world, to gain acceptance into a world bloc) is to discard the language...
Honestly, if there's one thing that I kinda wish happened with Novalatina, it's that instead of going for Latin the Combine used Sumerian instead. The archaeological knowledge is there, they could definitely draft a basic vocab to cobble neologisms out of by the 1890s. And there's a lovely poetry to the Final Society reviving the language of the First, rebuilding the Tower of Babel in a way.
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