Re: OT: Corpses, etc. (was: Re: Gender in conlangs (was: Re: Umlauts (was Re: Elves and Ill Bethisad)))

>Well, I mean there's no laws protecting Daine in
>general. According to human law, they're soulless
>animals.
Which would account for the horrible treatment that they are subjected to.

Because the Cwendaso refuse to cremate their dead, some Trehels are tempted
to wonder if they don't have souls, because anyone with a soul would
obviously want to free the soul after death by cremating the body.  One of
my important characters, Shohon (or Jostei) is: Cwendaso to all physical
appearances; one half Cwendaso, one quarter Trehelish, and one quarter
Nidirino by blood; and mostly Cwendaso but partially Trehelish by
culture.  At one point, some men were talking and rather embarrassingly
forgot that he was listening.  Rather embarrassingly, because one of them
wondered aloud whether Cwendaso had souls.  Shohon responded, "I'm
one-quarter Trehelish, so, what does that mean - I have one-quarter of a
soul?"  They weren't willing to say that he had only part of a soul, so
that sort of settled the issue of whether Cwendaso had souls or not.

The Trehelish have a tendency to view the Cwendaso as ignorant
savages.  The Cwendaso view the Trehelish as Uninstructed (Emitovláugad)
savages.

>That doesn't happen. Any crime warranting such a
>long sentence would most likely be a capital
>crime.
As you can see from what is below, it was a capital crime.

> > Anyone condemned to death
> > has the right to appeal his sentence to the
> > Tefin, a panel of five judges
> > in Sovchilen.  (The word "tefin" is plural and
> > means "merciful.")  The
> > Tefin may not do anything, in which case, he
> > will hang anyway.  They may
> > exonerate him, if they feel that the original
> > court made a mistake.  They
> > may pardon him, if they feel that that would be
> > a good idea.  They may also
> > "protect" him.  If they protect him, he won't
> > be killed, but he becomes,
> > essentially, slave labor for the rest of his
> > life - and he'll still be
> > buried when he dies, not cremated.  So the
> > Trehelish government does keep
> > prisons, but no one is sentenced to them
> > directly; it's actually seen as a
> > priveledge to get into one.  In some ways, the
> > prisoners aren't treated too
> > badly.  They are fed well, and there is
> > excellent medical care available,
>
>Yeah! Free surgery and herbal treatments! [Just
>sign this release form so our students and
>researchers can get to work!]
No, becoming a subject for medical research and being Protected are two
entirely different things.  They are mutually exclusive.

And over two-thirds of the population would have a good deal of difficulty
with the release form, since they are illiterate :)

Actually, there is a high degree of literacy in the military because they
are also a police force, and that requires, you guessed it, paperwork.  The
literacy rate in the military may be 100%, or it may be that they will
accept illiterate men as soldiers, but only those who can read and write
can be made officers, even low-ranking ones.

The issue of literacy brings something else to mind: the Trehelish idea of
what constitutes being educated.  Only the wealthy become educated.  That
involves studying a broad range of subjects, philosophy, science (such as
it is), music, art, rhetoric, and history among them.  Physicians, who are
all highly literate and have trained for years, are, with a few exceptions,
not educated men and women.  (And daughters are educated to the same degree
that sons are.  The wife of a wealthy man is supposed to be able to do more
than just look pretty and be socially adept; part of being socially adept
is being able to discuss philosophy with your guests.  Upper class
Telekesto, on the other hand, expect their women to be more
ornamental.)  Anyone who has the money can go to school and attain basic
literacy, but, with a very few exceptions, only the wealthy can be
considered educated.  Even printers do not have the temerity to consider
themselves to be educated, although many of them are, in reality, as or
more educated than the less educated wealthy.  Printers not only make
books, they are also in the habit of reading books in their spare time, so
that many of them end up self-educated; they must have an excellent grasp
of grammar so that they can proofread; they are also calligraphers and must
be able to draw well (the last two are things that are expected of
Trehelish printers.)

> > Can they actually fly with these wings?
>
>No. They can help brake a fall or leap from high
>places, though.
That's fun.

>Feathered, yes. Attached at the back on the
>scapulas. Mostly they're used to communicate,
>like how we gesticulate. Of course, they just
>have two extra bits to point and wave with!
How fun!

>I guess they figure a) it's a waste of the drugs
>on a Daine and b) the subject is going to die
>anyway. If not on the table then in the rubbish
>bin.
I would think that it would be worth wasting some drugs not to have to do a
vivisection on a screaming and struggling subject.

> > Well, the Cwendaso will eat almost anything
> > that moves and tastes good,
> > but, surprisingly, they dress themselves almost
> > entirely in wool.  I wish
> > very much that I could draw well, because I
> > know that I could do some great
> > drawings of Cwendaso.
>
>Oh, can you draw them at all? I'm not very good
>at drawing, but I've been meaning to put some
>drawings up on the page. Even if they're not the
>best, I'd like to see a picture!
Don't know.  I could try.  I usually can't get my hand to go where I know I
need it to when I'm drawing.  When I get some spare time, I can try it.  My
daughter has also been saying that she wants to learn to draw.  We have a
very good book called _Drawing_With_Children_ by Mona Brookes, but I
haven't used it yet.  I should.  I'd learn to draw, too.

>They would need to know how to ligate the
>appendix. Same basic idea applies to blood
>vessels.
They're actually very good with sutures and use them for wounds all the time.

> > In the particular case that I
> > had in mind, though, the
> > physician was dealing with a very nasty
> > compound fracture of the tibia and
> > fibula.  (A wagon wheel had rolled over it.)
> > There was so much bleeding
> > already (and it had taken them long enough to
> > get the patient to him), and
> > so much splintering of the bones that he felt
> > that there was no way that he
> > could possibly reconstruct the bone and not
> > have the bone fragments
> > severing important blood vessels when things
> > were moved around.  But, under
> > more normal circumstances, probably they can
> > stop bleeding.
>
>Yeah, that would be tough. A tourniquette might
>be of use in such cases.
In this particular case, a tourniquette wasn't applied in time, and the
patient had lost so much blood by the time that he reached the physician
that the physician decided that it was safer to do an amputation than to
try to control bleeding while he put a lot of bone splinters back in place,
with no certainty that the repair would even go well enough that the leg
could ever be used again.  Unfortunate.

Isidora

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