Re: Dune Conlang

A couple corrections:

>shadout mapes - housekeeper (or was that a name?)
"Mapes" was the character's name, "shadout" was her title,
hence "the Shadout Mapes".  (It's been years since I read the
book, but I still remember Linda Hunt hamming it up as the
Shadout Mapes in that wonderful/awful David Lynch movie.)

>Bene Gesserit - Gesserit "brotherhood"
The Bene Gesserit were a sisterhood - women only.

>The Semitic and Arabic words are not all strictly from Arrakis -
>Kwisatz Haderach is a word planted by the Bene Gesserit. The
>Semitic/Arabic origin may have been intended (by Herbert or "by" the
>Gesserit) to refer to Jesus, or Mohammed, or any of the number of
>prophets from that area.
In the Dune Encyclopedia, it is explicitly claimed (or very
strongly implied, I can't remember which) that the Fremen language
is a direct descendant of Arabic.  The common speech of the Galactic
Empire (represented by English in the books) is Galach, which the
glossary at the back of "Dune" claims to have "mixed Anglo-Slavic
roots", or some such.  There was an article on Galach in the Dune
Encyclopedia, which listed the phonetic and morphological changes
leading to the development of Galach from Standard English.  The
only specimen of Galach text that was given, though, was a translation
of the phrase "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush".  All I
remember was that the first part was "baradit" (a bird) and the last
part was "tau nubukt" (two in the bush), but I don't remember the
middle bit.

Matt.