Re: THEORY: Browsing at Borders Public Library

David G. Durand wrote:

> >I settled for some Stanislaw Lem, irrelevantly.
(Actually, cunningly non-irrelevant.)

> Stanislaw Lem actually wrote one of the funnier descriptions of morphology
> in the Futurological congress. One of the characters explains the "science"
> of futurolinguistics, which attempts to gain insight into the future by
> creating the words that will be used in the future. Once you have the
> words, one can guess at the concepts underlying them, and gain new insight.
>
> I've always wondered how this (or any part of the Cyberiad) reads in
> Polish, as it's an truly funny tour through English derivational
> morphology. Michael Kandel's translations of Lem are eerily full of
> carefully directed wordplay, and are most impressive.
Indeed; I was so taken by his many derivations from "dragon"
in just a few pages, I went back and ...

dracon (unit)
draconic
draconical
draconics (applied technology)

dracogenic (productive of)
dracological
dracotron (particle)
dracometer
dracolysis (removal)
draculator (device for making)
dracologists
dracolatry (religion)
dracologians
draco-zoologist

dragonets
dragonomalies
dragonometer (another meter)
dragoness
dragon-skin
drachen-dranginger (pseudo-german)

a-dragon
minus-dragon
anti-dragon (nots, noughts, and oughtn'ts)

anti-draconian
meta-dragon
ortho-dragonality
drastico-draco-stochastic

These are all translated by the above-mentioned;
since they are all "international" affixes, I doubt
they lost much in the translation, but I would like
to hear from a native Polish speaker.