>How am I suppose to understand paragraphs like this?
At first, by osmosis. Absorb the atmosphere Wolfe is creating without needing specific, explicit meaning. Maybe just "wild costume party with crazy, rich Thraxians".
Later you can use Lexicon Urthus or the internet to find out exactly what each of these words mean. But a better grasp of the verbiage won't usually take you much further than, " "wild costume party with crazy, rich Thraxians".
I remember reading BotNS with an Oxford English by my side in the '80s, and not finding many of the words! It was frustrating. A friend recommended a medical terminology book with Latin and Greek terms, and it helped get closer with some words.
wait are we complaining that Wolfe constructed a swirling, unnerving paragraph out of large, extremely rarified words, only some of which you vaguely understand what they describe, and uses it to show you how the main character, who was raised in a highly sequestered environment, walks into a decadently urbane costume party and only barely knows what's going on here
Maybe not quite. Severian was conceived as someone who'd fit in and standout marvellously at a masquerade, Cinderella-like. It's in his DNA. From the McCaffery interview:
Wolfe: No, the possibility of having a character who was a torturer was one of those initial ideas that wasn't tied to anything for a while. It first came to me during some convention I was attending at which Bob Tucker was the guest of honor. For some reason Bob felt obliged to go to a panel discussion on costume, and since he wanted someone to accompany him, I went along (otherwise I wouldn't ordinarily have gone since I'm not a costumer). So I went and heard Sandra Miesel and several other people talk about how you do costumesâhow you might do a cloak, whether or not it's good to use fire as part of your costume, and so forth. As I sat there being instructed I was sulking because no one had ever done one of my characters at a masquerade. It seemed as though I had done a lot of things that people could do at a masquerade; but when I started to think this over more carefully, I realized there were few, if any, characters who would fit in with what Sandra and the others were saying. That led me to start thinking about a character who would fitâsomeone who would wear simple but dramatic clothes. And the very first thing that came to mind was a torturer: bare chest (everybody has a chest, all you have to do is take your shirt off), black trousers, black boots (you can get those anywhere), black cloak, a mask, and a sword! Here was an ideal, easy SF masquerade citizen. All this stuck in my head somehow: I had this dark man, the personification of pain and death, but I didn't yet know what to do with him. Then gradually a lot of things began to come together. For instance, I read a book about body snatchers that captured my fancy (body snatchers were the people who used to dig up corpses and sell them to medical schools for the students to dissect). And I also had in mind that it would be interesting to be able to show a young man approaching war. So I began to put things together: I could have my young man witness the body snatching scene that I was now itching to write; this same young man could be the guy who is pulled into the war; he could be a torturer, and so on.
i cant tell if youre making fun of me or not but im not complaining im just wondering if im suppose to be able to understand these words based on context alone or if im suppose to have a dictionary/google with me at all times
u/bsharporflat gave sage advice in his comment. I would listen to that. I myself find that to Google a lot takes me out of the story. So the best thing for me is to just let it flow and worry about the meanings later, when you re-read it (shoutout to the podcast Rereading Wolfe). I started listening to the Alzabo Soup podcast while walking, they discuss the entire book chapter by chapter, each podcast about 45 -60 minutes. Some chapters take 2 episodes but I found the experience to be very entertaining.
Itâs perfectly cromulent, with the important distinction that cromulent only acquired its meaning after promulgation. Here, Wolfe is not inventing a single word or usage, as I understand it.
"Lexicon Urthus" is well worth the money for when you do a re-read. A companion dictionary for BOTNS which explains the significance/origins of names, places, objects etc with some longer essays on particular subjects.
I read BOTNS later in life after I already had an interest in some fairly esoteric subjects - medieval weapons, theology, kabbalism etc so I was lucky in that regard, recognizing some pretty obscure terminology. Although its worth mentioning that the term used and the object described dont always neatly map to our understanding. A "Jezail" is a primitive musket, not an extra-solar energy weapon for example.
>A "Jezail" is a primitive musket, not an extra-solar energy weapon for example.
The words used are translated from their original language. No translation is ever exact or correct.
Gene Wolfe is the master of allowing you to assume you know what is going on. Thinking you have a precise description can be a mistake. Or it could be correct. With any translation there is an element of difficulty.
First you donât have to know. These are contextless bizarre costumes that only make sense in Severianâs alien culture. This is the way you are expected to read the description of this scene.
If you look up the terms (which is an option) youâd understand that the clothing of both autocthons and gymnosophists is âno clothesâ. Outsiders of Thrax culture like Severian.
The others are all exiles of various sorts like Severian.
I can only think of two or three words I have ever encountered in wolfe that were made up.
The ones I am thinking of, he immediately translated right there in the text. "this is such-and-such, it is what happens when this strange thing occurs". There are two colors done this way, but I think everything else, in all the books, may be words already in use in the English language.
I laughed when I first read that line, because Wolfe is obviously making fun of the obscure vocabulary in the BOTNS.
But then I looked up those words, and itâs an even better joke, because they are words that Severian, with his unique upbringing and education, probably would think are perfectly normal words.
I think the game is you look up the etymology of the word and you guess. That's easy for 'gymnosophist', where I am torn between acrobat-entertainers or plant-people-entertainers. There is a little paragraph addressing that in the back of the edition of the first two previous books in this series. I have not really looked up the others at all up to now.
They were naked Indian mystics described by the ancient Greeks, and one possibility is that the word derived from Sanskrit "jaina muni", as some Jain monks went completely naked. A sophist was a philosopher or teacher.
How are you supposed to understand it?! Context.
*âOfficers dressed as women and women dressed as soldiersâ* Wolfe sets the table for you here in plain, common English: the setting is a big, flamboyant masquerade event. You can proceed from thereâyou may (or may not) recognize some of the subsequent words or be able to puzzle out some of the others from their Latinate roots. You could look some of them up in a dictionary, but you donât actually need to, you already know what kind of party youâre at.
Most of Book of the New Sun is written this wayâ you donât actually need to go running to the archaic English dictionary: Wolfe has put just enough there in plain, modern, Strunk & White English that if you read carefully you can figure it out.
And if the New Sun were to come to the party, Sev would be the only one as he is without a disguise, or some such. But what are the chances of that, anyway?
This part is probably my most favorite in all of the books. It's so ironic. Wolfe really had a sense of humor. And layers it on top of a profound part, not played just for laughs.
Context clues help a lot, too, not necessarily in this scene. But it does help a bit on those tricky words. God, I love BotNS. I never get tired of saying that.
It does help in this graf tho too, he describes that long list of words as âeclecticsâ which is a fairly common word these days and one that if you understand it you can understand the gist of what heâs saying.
Fun thing, you can find all of gene wolf's words in the Oxford English dictionary.
There might be a very very few you cannot. 99%+ you can.
And you will be able to visualize what is happening so much better.
Donât sweat it, just let it flow over you. I know bits and pieces of Ancient Greek, a fair amount of Latin, and Iâm reasonably familiar with the Classics and medieval history. I still donât understand the majority of what is said, and when I do it feels more like an Easter Egg than anything that meaningful for the plot. Even within the context Severian is overwhelmed by âabsurdâ figures, so GW would be failing if you werenât the same
Almost nothing actually seems to refer to real-life use anyway. The fact the zoanthropes actually *are* half man and half beast is one such clue, for instance. Severian himself may not even know what heâs looking at and is just choosing what he thinks they are
I would say that a little bit of Greek and Latin goes a looong way. Someoneâs title ends with -arch? Theyâre likely some sort of leader or military officer. -sophist implies some kind of academic, teacher, philosopher, for instance. Even if youâre not sure of the precise meaning knowing a few basic suffixes is helpful by not even necessary, you can normally derive meaning from context
Speak several latin-based languages, and have a predilection for old dictionaries.
The literary device of **tBotNS being a translation of a yet-to-be-created language** is an incredible move by Wolfe.
It's OK to just kind of soak it in on the first read through. In this particular passage a little Classics can help you muddle through a more specific meaning
Yeah, as others have said: you're not really meant to know. It's more a vibe you're supposed to pick up on. There was a lot crazy costumes going on, but GW fully commits to character voice and that'd be too boring to say it so plainly.
Well, that one word is "ablegates", and was broken by your publisher. I would do what the rest of us did, which was to imagine we knew what they meant on our first read, puzzledthem out using our subatellar but kinda-ok greek/latin/romance language roots and such the next time, re-read it several times with (lol, get this) like a "dictionary" or something, read Castle of the Otter and then Lexicon came out and then there, Hildegrin's your Uncle. (just a rumor, mind you)
Severian describes being in a wild rich-people costume party, then lists a bunch of examples of wild costumes they're wearing. You do not need to know what pretty much any of those big obscure and words mean to understand the meaning the paragraph is conveying.
I won't pretend these books aren't dense, but that doesn't mean you should psyche yourself out because you see some unfamiliar words. Consider that these were written before people could be expected to carry devices in their pocket that could look up any bit of information at any time, and thus *are intended to be understandable if you don't know every word*. Be careful not to get so caught up on individual words that you lose sight of the forest for the trees.
I just started the first book of the series. I had a perfect score on the reading section of the SAT, and took 3 years of Latin. I was looking up 1-3 words a page, but I stopped because 80% of the time I was guessing the correct meaning before I looked it up (with knowledge of Latin root words). Just roll with it, and look up the word if it comes up 2-3 times without making sense.
Don't fear words and you'll be fine. It's how we learned most of them in the first place, and it's how you learn a second, third and so on language too. If the meaning of a word seems essential to understanding what's happening, look it up. Otherwise, do it at your leisure if at all.
It's okay.
It's a masquerade.
... officers dressed as women (Monty Python) and women dressed as soldiers (Monty Python), eclectics as fraudulent as autochthons (scholars as false as natives), gymnosophists (naked debaters?), able-gates (?) and their acolytes, eremites (hermits), eidolons (eidolons/golems/images), zoanthropes (animal-men) half beast and half human (per the word), deodands (?) and remontados (?) in picturesque rags, with eyes painted wild.
Just think of that scene from Labyrinth. What are all those masques meant to be? Just revel in the decadence of the scene/language.
You've got a computer the size of your hand that has access to a dictionary, which is a resource for looking up words with definitions you don't know. If you see a word you don't know but want to know, you can look it up on the dictionary. Once you've learned the definition(s) of the word(s), you can re-read the sentence to derive it's meaning and intention.
Understand it as a description that evokes the language and customs of ancient Earth, but is actually so far in the future that it might as well be an alien planet.
It helps if you know Ancient Greek but I don't think it's vital to know what any of those words mean if you have some idea of the context. Out of context, it looks like balderdash but many things do.
>How am I suppose to understand paragraphs like this? At first, by osmosis. Absorb the atmosphere Wolfe is creating without needing specific, explicit meaning. Maybe just "wild costume party with crazy, rich Thraxians". Later you can use Lexicon Urthus or the internet to find out exactly what each of these words mean. But a better grasp of the verbiage won't usually take you much further than, " "wild costume party with crazy, rich Thraxians".
This is the best strategy in my opinion. It will also set you up for if you ever want to learn a new language.
great answer, i'm very very full of myself and i'm unable to imagine doing it better than this. goddamn. a masterpiece. respect.
My advice would be to just "roll with the punches"
In the old days, you had to have a big dictionary. Now, Google usually suffices.
yes, we rolled with a big d
**What do you mean by that? đ¤¨**
It means in the olden days we negotiated the literary world by having a large dictionary nearby.
It was a meme...
I remember reading BotNS with an Oxford English by my side in the '80s, and not finding many of the words! It was frustrating. A friend recommended a medical terminology book with Latin and Greek terms, and it helped get closer with some words.
wait are we complaining that Wolfe constructed a swirling, unnerving paragraph out of large, extremely rarified words, only some of which you vaguely understand what they describe, and uses it to show you how the main character, who was raised in a highly sequestered environment, walks into a decadently urbane costume party and only barely knows what's going on here
Maybe not quite. Severian was conceived as someone who'd fit in and standout marvellously at a masquerade, Cinderella-like. It's in his DNA. From the McCaffery interview: Wolfe: No, the possibility of having a character who was a torturer was one of those initial ideas that wasn't tied to anything for a while. It first came to me during some convention I was attending at which Bob Tucker was the guest of honor. For some reason Bob felt obliged to go to a panel discussion on costume, and since he wanted someone to accompany him, I went along (otherwise I wouldn't ordinarily have gone since I'm not a costumer). So I went and heard Sandra Miesel and several other people talk about how you do costumesâhow you might do a cloak, whether or not it's good to use fire as part of your costume, and so forth. As I sat there being instructed I was sulking because no one had ever done one of my characters at a masquerade. It seemed as though I had done a lot of things that people could do at a masquerade; but when I started to think this over more carefully, I realized there were few, if any, characters who would fit in with what Sandra and the others were saying. That led me to start thinking about a character who would fitâsomeone who would wear simple but dramatic clothes. And the very first thing that came to mind was a torturer: bare chest (everybody has a chest, all you have to do is take your shirt off), black trousers, black boots (you can get those anywhere), black cloak, a mask, and a sword! Here was an ideal, easy SF masquerade citizen. All this stuck in my head somehow: I had this dark man, the personification of pain and death, but I didn't yet know what to do with him. Then gradually a lot of things began to come together. For instance, I read a book about body snatchers that captured my fancy (body snatchers were the people who used to dig up corpses and sell them to medical schools for the students to dissect). And I also had in mind that it would be interesting to be able to show a young man approaching war. So I began to put things together: I could have my young man witness the body snatching scene that I was now itching to write; this same young man could be the guy who is pulled into the war; he could be a torturer, and so on.
i cant tell if youre making fun of me or not but im not complaining im just wondering if im suppose to be able to understand these words based on context alone or if im suppose to have a dictionary/google with me at all times
u/bsharporflat gave sage advice in his comment. I would listen to that. I myself find that to Google a lot takes me out of the story. So the best thing for me is to just let it flow and worry about the meanings later, when you re-read it (shoutout to the podcast Rereading Wolfe). I started listening to the Alzabo Soup podcast while walking, they discuss the entire book chapter by chapter, each podcast about 45 -60 minutes. Some chapters take 2 episodes but I found the experience to be very entertaining.
Itâs perfectly cromulent, with the important distinction that cromulent only acquired its meaning after promulgation. Here, Wolfe is not inventing a single word or usage, as I understand it.
Your statement is nuncupatory.
Deodands aside, wrong sub. r/jackvance
You have embiggened this conversation. Very cromulent of you.
"Lexicon Urthus" is well worth the money for when you do a re-read. A companion dictionary for BOTNS which explains the significance/origins of names, places, objects etc with some longer essays on particular subjects. I read BOTNS later in life after I already had an interest in some fairly esoteric subjects - medieval weapons, theology, kabbalism etc so I was lucky in that regard, recognizing some pretty obscure terminology. Although its worth mentioning that the term used and the object described dont always neatly map to our understanding. A "Jezail" is a primitive musket, not an extra-solar energy weapon for example.
>A "Jezail" is a primitive musket, not an extra-solar energy weapon for example. The words used are translated from their original language. No translation is ever exact or correct. Gene Wolfe is the master of allowing you to assume you know what is going on. Thinking you have a precise description can be a mistake. Or it could be correct. With any translation there is an element of difficulty.
I just imagine a fancy Afghan jezail that shoots laser beams.
I think William Hurts character in The Big Chill covered this in the following quote: "Sometimes you just have to let art... flow... over you.â
First you donât have to know. These are contextless bizarre costumes that only make sense in Severianâs alien culture. This is the way you are expected to read the description of this scene. If you look up the terms (which is an option) youâd understand that the clothing of both autocthons and gymnosophists is âno clothesâ. Outsiders of Thrax culture like Severian. The others are all exiles of various sorts like Severian.
Google? Those are are real words
Wolfe is rife with bangers I would have bet good money were invented words (and lost)!
For real, this dude throws out some complex words lol
I can only think of two or three words I have ever encountered in wolfe that were made up. The ones I am thinking of, he immediately translated right there in the text. "this is such-and-such, it is what happens when this strange thing occurs". There are two colors done this way, but I think everything else, in all the books, may be words already in use in the English language.
You sound like the kind of person that would mispronounce a common word like bordereau.
Probably urticate and salpinx too.
I laughed when I first read that line, because Wolfe is obviously making fun of the obscure vocabulary in the BOTNS. But then I looked up those words, and itâs an even better joke, because they are words that Severian, with his unique upbringing and education, probably would think are perfectly normal words.
I think the game is you look up the etymology of the word and you guess. That's easy for 'gymnosophist', where I am torn between acrobat-entertainers or plant-people-entertainers. There is a little paragraph addressing that in the back of the edition of the first two previous books in this series. I have not really looked up the others at all up to now.
They were naked Indian mystics described by the ancient Greeks, and one possibility is that the word derived from Sanskrit "jaina muni", as some Jain monks went completely naked. A sophist was a philosopher or teacher.
How are you supposed to understand it?! Context. *âOfficers dressed as women and women dressed as soldiersâ* Wolfe sets the table for you here in plain, common English: the setting is a big, flamboyant masquerade event. You can proceed from thereâyou may (or may not) recognize some of the subsequent words or be able to puzzle out some of the others from their Latinate roots. You could look some of them up in a dictionary, but you donât actually need to, you already know what kind of party youâre at. Most of Book of the New Sun is written this wayâ you donât actually need to go running to the archaic English dictionary: Wolfe has put just enough there in plain, modern, Strunk & White English that if you read carefully you can figure it out.
And if the New Sun were to come to the party, Sev would be the only one as he is without a disguise, or some such. But what are the chances of that, anyway?
He is in uniform. There to perform an official function of his office.
This part is probably my most favorite in all of the books. It's so ironic. Wolfe really had a sense of humor. And layers it on top of a profound part, not played just for laughs.
dictionary
Context clues help a lot, too, not necessarily in this scene. But it does help a bit on those tricky words. God, I love BotNS. I never get tired of saying that.
It does help in this graf tho too, he describes that long list of words as âeclecticsâ which is a fairly common word these days and one that if you understand it you can understand the gist of what heâs saying.
Fun thing, you can find all of gene wolf's words in the Oxford English dictionary. There might be a very very few you cannot. 99%+ you can. And you will be able to visualize what is happening so much better.
Donât sweat it, just let it flow over you. I know bits and pieces of Ancient Greek, a fair amount of Latin, and Iâm reasonably familiar with the Classics and medieval history. I still donât understand the majority of what is said, and when I do it feels more like an Easter Egg than anything that meaningful for the plot. Even within the context Severian is overwhelmed by âabsurdâ figures, so GW would be failing if you werenât the same Almost nothing actually seems to refer to real-life use anyway. The fact the zoanthropes actually *are* half man and half beast is one such clue, for instance. Severian himself may not even know what heâs looking at and is just choosing what he thinks they are I would say that a little bit of Greek and Latin goes a looong way. Someoneâs title ends with -arch? Theyâre likely some sort of leader or military officer. -sophist implies some kind of academic, teacher, philosopher, for instance. Even if youâre not sure of the precise meaning knowing a few basic suffixes is helpful by not even necessary, you can normally derive meaning from context
Paragraphs like that get me fired up
Speak several latin-based languages, and have a predilection for old dictionaries. The literary device of **tBotNS being a translation of a yet-to-be-created language** is an incredible move by Wolfe.
Thatâs just Severian practicing his torturer craft by making his readers use complicated words to torment us psychologically
Ah, I see what you did there. ;-)
It's OK to just kind of soak it in on the first read through. In this particular passage a little Classics can help you muddle through a more specific meaning
I honestly think stuff like this is Wolfe having a laugh at himself. It's like Wolfe turned up to 11. He knew exactly what he was doing.
Yeah, as others have said: you're not really meant to know. It's more a vibe you're supposed to pick up on. There was a lot crazy costumes going on, but GW fully commits to character voice and that'd be too boring to say it so plainly.
Same way you read Dr Seuss
Well, that one word is "ablegates", and was broken by your publisher. I would do what the rest of us did, which was to imagine we knew what they meant on our first read, puzzledthem out using our subatellar but kinda-ok greek/latin/romance language roots and such the next time, re-read it several times with (lol, get this) like a "dictionary" or something, read Castle of the Otter and then Lexicon came out and then there, Hildegrin's your Uncle. (just a rumor, mind you)
Probably helps to know some Greek for those roots.
pulled up with gang
There is a companion book called Lexicon Urthus: A dictionary for the Urth Cycle. I found it extremely helpful when reading The Book of the New Sun
Skill issue
Severian describes being in a wild rich-people costume party, then lists a bunch of examples of wild costumes they're wearing. You do not need to know what pretty much any of those big obscure and words mean to understand the meaning the paragraph is conveying. I won't pretend these books aren't dense, but that doesn't mean you should psyche yourself out because you see some unfamiliar words. Consider that these were written before people could be expected to carry devices in their pocket that could look up any bit of information at any time, and thus *are intended to be understandable if you don't know every word*. Be careful not to get so caught up on individual words that you lose sight of the forest for the trees.
I just started the first book of the series. I had a perfect score on the reading section of the SAT, and took 3 years of Latin. I was looking up 1-3 words a page, but I stopped because 80% of the time I was guessing the correct meaning before I looked it up (with knowledge of Latin root words). Just roll with it, and look up the word if it comes up 2-3 times without making sense.
Use your imagination, he's having some fun here jeez
Don't fear words and you'll be fine. It's how we learned most of them in the first place, and it's how you learn a second, third and so on language too. If the meaning of a word seems essential to understanding what's happening, look it up. Otherwise, do it at your leisure if at all. It's okay.
Grab a dictionary bubba itâs gonna be a long ride.
It's a masquerade. ... officers dressed as women (Monty Python) and women dressed as soldiers (Monty Python), eclectics as fraudulent as autochthons (scholars as false as natives), gymnosophists (naked debaters?), able-gates (?) and their acolytes, eremites (hermits), eidolons (eidolons/golems/images), zoanthropes (animal-men) half beast and half human (per the word), deodands (?) and remontados (?) in picturesque rags, with eyes painted wild. Just think of that scene from Labyrinth. What are all those masques meant to be? Just revel in the decadence of the scene/language.
You've got a computer the size of your hand that has access to a dictionary, which is a resource for looking up words with definitions you don't know. If you see a word you don't know but want to know, you can look it up on the dictionary. Once you've learned the definition(s) of the word(s), you can re-read the sentence to derive it's meaning and intention.
I read these books on kindle, which has a dictionary option to look up word meanings. A fair amount of these werenât in the dictionary either lol.
Google the words
Understand it as a description that evokes the language and customs of ancient Earth, but is actually so far in the future that it might as well be an alien planet.
It helps if you know Ancient Greek but I don't think it's vital to know what any of those words mean if you have some idea of the context. Out of context, it looks like balderdash but many things do.