Brook Conner wrote:
> shadout mapes - housekeeper (or was that a name?)
Shadout was a title, meaning "well-dipper".
> mentat - human computer
Presumably from _mental_?
> chaumurky - poison in the drink(? another one for poison in food)
The other is _chaumas_, presumably _chaum_ is an old word for "poison"?
> Fremen - the people of Dune
Perhaps from "Freemen"?
> Arrakis - planet name - "arid"?
Later Rakis
> muad-dib - kangaroo rat
Muad'Dib
> Some editions have a dictionary at the back that include these and
> many others.
The official language is Galach, which, according to the dictionary in
the back of my edition of Dune, it's "Hybrid Inglo-Slavic [sic] with
strong traces of cultural-specialization terms adopted during the long
chain of human migrations"
I really like some of the words, like the prefix na- (next in line)
> It has been postulated that, given an infinite number of monkeys
> bashing away at an infinite number of keyboards, we could eventually
> reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we
> now know this to be incorrect.
Hey! That's MY old quote! :-)
--
"Old linguists never die - they just come to voiceless stops." -
anonymous
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