Re: OT-ish: txt - Could it replace Standard Written English?

Keith Gaughan scripsit:

> No, I think that the fact that Ulysses, feckit--Joyce in general, is a rather
> hard read.
Well, that was one of the harder bits of Ulysses.  This, OTOH, is one of
the easier bits of FW:

# Bygmester Finnegan, of the Stuttering Hand, freemen's maurer, lived in
# the broadest way immarginable in his rushlit toofarback for messuages
# before joshuan judges had given us numbers or Helviticus committed
# deuteronomy (one yeastyday he sternely struxk his tete in a tub for to
# watsch the future of his fates but ere he swiftly stook it out again, by
# the might of moses, the very water was eviparated and all the guenneses
# had met their exodus so that ought to show you what a pentschanjeuchy
# chap he was!) and during mighty odd years this man of hod, cement and
# edifices in Toper's Thorp piled buildung supra buildung pon the banks
# for the livers by the Soangso.

A few notes:

Bygmester = master builder, as in Ibsen's play.
messuages = the part of a landlord's land directly occupied by his family.
sternely...swiftly refers to Laurence Sterne and Jonathan Swift.
joshuan judges ... numbers ... Helviticus ... deuteronomy ... guenneses ...
   exodus: the first 7 books of the Bible, with side references to Guinness
   and Joyce's claim that T.S. Eliot wrote "The Waste-Land" in imitation of
   Ulysses (he did it in Switzerland, hence "Helviticus"); "pentschanjeuchy"
   combines "Pentateuch" and "Punch and Judy".
Soangso = Hwang Ho, the Yellow River of China, mixed with "so-and-so";
   "livers" is "rivers" with a Cantonese accent.

--
"In my last lifetime,                           John Cowan
I believed in reincarnation;                    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
in this lifetime,                               jcowan@reutershealth.com
I don't."  --Thiagi                             http://www.reutershealth.com

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