Re: Informants, Issytra, The Gospel of Bastet

On Fri, Mar 14, 2003 at 04:36:31PM -0500, Sally Caves wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@...>
[snip]
> > Ah, "the kittens of the gods"... that's surely a relic from the feline
> > days of Teonaht, I presume? :-) As well as all those retractible claw
> > references, I suppose.
>
> Well, you sweetheart!  You gave it a look-see.  I have done the same with
> Esani the Wise.  Yes, this is a relic of the feline days of Teonaht;  Bastet
> is a favorite goddess, and her angels are all the Feleonym, the flying cats
> I invented when I was four.  They've become a cult.
Right, I remember you mentioning the flying cats before somewhere.

> > ROTFL!!! "If you are afflicted by gestures..." LMAO...
>
> Yes, neither Issytra nor Arrais Aijjy quite know what to do with this.  Some
> have argued that this means that you are afflicted by people making rude or
> dismissive gestures at you, in which you are an outcast; others have
> suggested that you are the one making rude gestures at people, in which case
> you are an outcast.  One medical Teonaht student suggested that it showed
> the symptoms of Tourette's Syndrome, in which case you are truly afflicted,
> and an outcast.  All the afflictions, says Bastet, are to be looked upon as
> hidden gifts given to you by the gods.  The twitching of Bastet's tail.
LOL... you are an outcast _ke_, you are an outcast _ce_, you are an
outcast _re_. That's just so Ebisedian :-)

[snip]
> > "It is the goddess Bastet sending you your mice"... LOL, this is so loaded
> > with double meaning, what with mice being the affliction of kittens and so
> > on... Uh, I mean, humans. :-)
>
> Well exactly!  Mice are the bane of humans and the delight of kittens.
> Bastet is feeding you and punishing you at the same time.  A third meaning
> is that your persecutor could become your victim if you just turn around and
> face him at full hiss--claws extended.  It also means something like "a life
> well-lived is the best revenge."  Those who deride you are so many mice in
> your cupboard, easily caught in mousetraps and fed to the hearth-cat.
Rather vengeful philosophy, if I may say so. Natural in a dog-eat-dog
world, I suppose. Or cat-eat-cat, as the case may be, although I'm not so
sure about that. It may be the cats are smugly just watching the dogs eat
each other. But I'll stop before I start quoting lame jokes like the one
about curiosity killing the cat, the moral of which is, "don't be the
cat." Oh, oops... ;-)

> > And what's with this repeated reference to being half-blind? It certainly
> > strikes one as stemming from a deeper idiom, but I'm at a loss to divine
> > what that may be.
>
> Eyes are an important part of early Teonaht belief--in vision,
> understanding, blessing.  God Himself is often called an Eye, who sees
> through your own closed eyes, even if you don't see Him.  God also has you
> in His Eye, which means He's thought of you before you've thought of Him.
> If you are blind, you have no power of Sight at all.  If you are Half-blind,
> you have no power to understand contradiction and subtleties.
I see. I like your comparison of half-blind to lukewarm later (which is a
term I can relate to better, being a Christian myself).

[snip]
> > [2] Ebisedian has a lot of highly-idiomatic features[3]. I believe I've
> > already pointed out how the strong optative marker, _0so'_, which usually
> > means "my (arrogant) opinion is that ...", can also be used as an answer
> > to a question, with the meaning of "yes I'll do it".
>
> I like this distinction between preference and wish, opinion and arrogant
> opinion.  Whoohoo!
There are 3 optative markers in Ebisedian: (1) _oso'_, which simply means
"I wish"; (2) _uso'_, which is "I really prefer otherwise, but if you
insist, I'll yield.". _uso'_ can also be translated "please". (3) _0so'_,
which indicates (possibly arrogant) opinion, commands, and other shades of
meaning related to obligation.

> > [3] You'll find that I use this phrase "highly-idiomatic" very often, in
> > relation to Ebisedian. It's a convenient umbrella term[4] over those
> > vague, mushy, grey areas of Ebisedian which do not necessarily follow
> > logically from what one might understand of Ebisedian grammar and
> > semantics.
>
> Go for it!  Vague, mushy, grey areas in Teonaht are terms like Felrreo,
> which can mean "fairy," "false person," "invented person," "personal demon,"
> "second self," "wraith," and "alien."  Felrreoth, the adjective, means
> "highly deceptive," "alien," "heretical," "not to be trusted,"
> "paradoxical."
Basically deriving from the fact that fairies are fictional, I suppose? Or
perhaps related to  falsehood.

[snip]
> Veparema is "nothingness," a contradiction in terms, because it means
> the ultimate nothingness that is devoid of being and yet it's a word
> that contains the word "being.  It is the "why is there something at all
> instead of nothing at all?" concept.
That reminds me of the number "zero" in Ebisedian, which is _y'i_ ["?y?i].
It has a very odd noun stem, _y_, which comes from[1] the prefix _y_ in
the nullar form, _yni_, of the subordinating particle _ni_. (As you may
recall, the nullar number indicates the absence of the nou referent.) You
may have noticed that all Ebisedian nouns have /i/ in the last syllable.
So basically _y'i_ is nothingness. And it is, in fact, a nullar noun.[2]


[1] At least, so the Ebisedi grammarians claim.

[2] It may be instructive to realize that there are two sets of numbers in
Ebisedian, one is the quantitative, and the other is the qualitative. The
quantitive numbers are all inflected for number as appropriate for their,
uh, number; :-P the qualitative ones refer to the mathematical object
representing the number, and are therefore singular (unless you're
speaking of multiple or absent instances of that mathematical object, of
course). _y'i_ is a quantitative number word, and is therefore nullar in
number. The corresponding qualitative number is _ivei'_.

> Its first derivation is ve- (no) and parem (be), with somekind of
> substantival suffix (no-being-ness).  But the -ema means "like,"  and
> Vepar means "the sky between stars."  In my cosmology, God rolls
> nothingness into a ball, surrounding it with substance and turns it into
> Hell.
Interesting double-analysis for a word. :-) I gotta see if Ebisedian has
any of these...

> "To throw the farlarop" means to do something that will come back and
> hit you.  Boomerangs are also called nifarlarop.
I see. I was wondering about that.

[snip]
> NOW:  to "The Speaking of Esani"-- to be found at
> http://quickfur.yi.org:8080/~hsteoh/conlang/Esani-1.pdf
>
> I love the fact that you have made a "dramatic" register.  And that sa'ni is
> a word associated with intelligence, wisdom, and expertise.  And that Esa'ni
> and Erosa'ni rhyme.
Yep. _sa'ni_ is a root from the unnamed ancestor lang, and shows up in
various places, although it no longer appears on its own as a noun. There
*is* a related lookalike form, however, which is the introvertive verb "to
teach", or "to learn the principles".

> I also love the triadic nature of Ebisedian thinking!  This is somewhat
> consonant with Teonaht fascination with threes,
I believe it would be an understatement to say that the Ebisedi are
obsessed with threeness. It's everywhere, and permeates every fibre of
their language and culture. I have to leave soon, so I'll unfortunately
have to elaborate on this another time.

> although they see threeness as emerging from dualities:  you, your
> lover, and your relationship (the third thing).  You, your book, and the
> reader.  You, your painting, and the viewer.  The better, the best, and
> the otherly good.  The weak, the strong,
[...]
> dark (blind), or lukewarm (half-blind).  Mykwid and Dohhdakra are forces of
> stability and change in the human world, but they provide a kind of Hegelian
> dialectic with thesis, antithesis, and new synthesis, which, pendulum like,
> always shatters the confident rule with the different one, but whose
> strangeness becomes familiar and a new rule that is shattered by another
> intrusion, and so on and so on and so on.
The Ebisedian view, in brief, is sorta a paradoxical mixture of 3 and 5.
At the basic level, you have the basic 3-ness, corresponding to red,
green, blue; beginning, middle, end; origin, journey, destination,
divergence, translation/conveyance, convergence; etc..

But on the higher level, the basic 3 can also be analysed as white
(origin), colorful (middle, complexity, the stuff between beginning and
ending), black (destination). And of course, colorful itself is divided
into red, green, blue plus their philosophical connotations.

So in that sense, the Ebisedi's view of the universe (or *their* universe)
is that everything has an origin (white) and a destination (black), but
it's the stuff in between (the 3 colors) that is interesting, that's where
all the complexity happens, and that's where the journey (blue
encapsulating the red/green/blue in a paradoxical way) is happening.

> I've got the English version of Mykwid Dohhdakra-jo on a tentative web site,
> which is a dialogue.  And a list of gods on another tentative website.  It's
> getting the Teonaht in perfect form that is the chore, but I can post what I
> have if people are interested.
>
> I really do like the three directions of the Ebisedi!  North, Southeast, and
> Southwest.  What a wonderful concept!
I really have to leave now, so I'll have to wait till another time to
expound more on threeness in Ebisedi philosophy and language.

> The Teonaht keep to the four directions, but each has a middle.  Twelve
> all in all.  Twelve is the number of their fingers, and twelve is their
> base in counting (or used to be...).
There *is* a four in Ebisedi culture, and it is related to the ultimate,
the uttermost, that which is outside their universe of 3-ness. But I don't
have time to explain this now...

> The "Colourful Universe" is also a wonderful concept, Teoh.  It suggests
> all sorts of multiplicities, all the varieties of the world.
[snip]

Indeed, it is the colorful part between white and black, origin and
destination.


T

--
Just because you survived after you did it, doesn't mean it wasn't stupid!

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