Re: OFFTOPIC: gernikako arbola

En réponse à Chris Bates :


>I was just reading about this... I've never heard of any government
>apart from this one (the old Basque system) which actually held its
>meetings under a tree...
As the story goes, Saint Louis rendered justice under a tree :) .

I've always found the old Basque government system interesting (the 
"fueros", which is actually a Spanish word, probably from Latin FORUM). The 
interesting part being that the kings had to abide by the fueros :) .

But what I've read is that the tree was the place where kings swore that 
they would not break the fueros, not the place where the assemblies met for 
decision-making.

>  its a very romantic image, along the lines of
>the tree of gondor in the Lord of the Rings, and it think its really sad
>that the Nazis blew it up at the behest of General Franco. :( My opinion
>of him has sunk even lower if that's possible... There's a word in
>german that I can't quite remember (someone told it me once), but it
>means... "the feel of a time/age/century/etc" and I think the feel of
>this century and the one before is loss. :( The more we discover about
>the world, the more we plot it and map it and explain it, the more I
>just get this feeling of loss, like there's nothing left in the
>spiritual realm any more, nothing left except what is and what we know
>and its not fascinating anymore because we can explain it all. :( And
>its even worse when peices of the past, pieces that feel worth saving,
>have been destroyed for one reason or another (like the Tree of Guernica).
>I'd emigrate if there was anywhere to go... but unfortunately we're all
>stuck on planet Earth lol, and we've pretty much moulded everywhere in
>the image of our industrial and scientific pursuits. I suppose I could
>go live in the middle of the amazon or something, but I suppose I
>wouldn't enjoy that either... being isolated from all the information
>and analysis and knowledge that makes me despair sometimes, I think it
>would be like a drug user without his or her fix. Maybe despair is the
>feel of the last two centuries, or perhaps addiction to "progress". I
>don't know. :)
There's a beautiful Dutch song that describes that exactly: "Vluchten kan 
niet meer": "Fleeing is no longer possible".

http://www.xs4all.nl/~werksman/liedjes/laden.html?vluchten_kan_niet_meer.html

Lyrics only in Dutch, but translation shouldn't be too difficult (even 
Babelfish shouldn't make too much of a mess out of it).

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang. 

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