Re: Informants, Issytra, The Gospel of Bastet

On Fri, Mar 14, 2003 at 09:34:23PM -0500, Sally Caves wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@...>
[snip]
> > LOL... you are an outcast _ke_, you are an outcast _ce_, you are an
> > outcast _re_. That's just so Ebisedian :-)
>
> Ke, ce, re, "one, two, three"?  Or ke, ce, re, "on the left hand, on the
> right hand, on the third hand"? :)
Probably both. :-) They are just the 3-pronged analogues of Classical
Greek's correlatives. (In fact they are called trichotomial correlatives
in Ebisedian.)

> Maybe the Teonim and the Ebisedi are neighbors.
Perhaps. Perhaps they are just fleeing away towards the Ferochromon. :-P

> Or have literary and philosophic influence on each other.  The early
> Teonaht stuff is full of repetitions, and it seems to be creeping into
> my writing.
The Ebisedi don't really have a craze for repetitions. But they do have an
obsession with triple correlatives that they'd structure their prose (and
thoughts) around 3-pronged ideas, just so they can use trichotomial
correlatives. :-)

[snip]
> > Basically deriving from the fact that fairies are fictional, I suppose? Or
> > perhaps related to  falsehood.
>
> You got it.  Not your diminutive, butterfly-winged creatures of
> nineteenth-century imagination.
Right. That's one of the things I find too _h0'n3ri_ about this whole
fairies deal.

> > 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.
>
> We'll wait!
There are 3 colors, red, green, blue, as I've described, and with it the
connotations of source, journey, destination.

Then there are the three directions... (and oh, did I mention that they
were cognate with the words for the three colors?)

And there are the trichotomial correlatives, which I've pointed out
already. (And you may notice their resemblance to certain sets of three
words.)

Then there are the three "associative noun prefixes". For this, I'll have
to refer you to the Ebisedian reference grammar, section 2.5. The bottom
line is that these, too, are cognate to the other triples, and refer the
former, the current, and the other.

Then in the realm of (locational) prepositions, you have _icu'ro_,
"within", _ili'ro_, "around", and _ita'ro_ "at a distance from". But wait
a second... that corresponds with convergence, conveyance, and divergence.
AND, the other two locational prepositions are _iKi'ro_, "above", and
_ibu'ro_, "below". And in case you haven't clued in yet, _Kii'i_ is the
word for "white", _bui'_ is the word for "black". Bingo.

Then you have the affirmative, and two negatives. The radix _ji_ is the
affirmative, which shows up in such places as _ji'e_, "it is so"; _ji'ne_,
interrogative particle loaded towards a positive answer; _jina_, the
positive subjunctive. The radix _my_ is the negative of absence: _my'_ is
the nullar prefix; _my'e_ means "it is not so"; etc.. But there is a
second degree of negative: the radix _khe_ indicates *opposition* rather
than merely absence. So there is _ji't3mi_, the truthful word (or
confirmatory word); and _my't3mi_, the nullar of _t3mi'_, "word"; and then
there's _khe't3mi_, untruth (word of opposition; that which is opposed to
the truth). In a sense, absence is neutral; it is opposition which is
negative. So you have positive, neutral, negative.

And then you have the fountain (Ka'l3rii), the rivers (l3rii'), and the
"sinks" (vyy'i). Matter flows forth from the fountain through the rivers
into the sink. Source, journey, destination.

> > 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.
>
> Additive color I see.  Very interesting.  All together they form white,
> unlike the subtractive (or reflective?) colors which make gray or black if
> mixed.  So one goes from the sun into the earth?
[snip]

Not really. There is a beginning and an end, and life is in between. And
life is what is colorful. That's the gist of it.

Oh, and I might point out that what comes between the beginning and the
end is the triad of intermediate colors. If you put the beginning on top,
the end at the bottom, and the intermediates as a triangle on the plane
between top and bottom, you suddenly realize that's a description of the
locational prepositions. For the math buffs, this is the trigonal
bipyramid. Every face is a triangle, and there are 6 faces altogether,
which is a pair of triplets or a triplet of pairs.


T

--
Don't modify spaghetti code unless you can eat the consequences.