From: m.driussi@genie.com
Subject: (whorl) Oosik & Tick
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 97 15:05:00 GMT


[Posted from Whorl, the mailing list for Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun]

Reply:  Item #2252230 from WHORL@LISTS.BEST.COM@INET02#

Wesley Parsons,

Thanks for the tip on Oosik.  No, I'd never seen this one!  Now we're
on the look out for an Inuit lexicon of animals and their body parts!
(`Walrus penis bone'--incredible.  And it is almost as if the Inuits
speak Latin, with "oss" as bone.  Gee, will Mattak be a chip off the
old block?)

viscacha,

Maybe you could whip up a quick catachrest lexicon ("caticon"?).  In
fooling around with word substitution, I wondered if Tick wasn't also
using certain rules of transformation.  I take "Add word" to be "bad
bird"; "add speak" to be "bad beak."  In the first phrase, initial
consonants are dropped (otherwise we might expect "bad" to be
represented by "bat," "bed," etc.) or downgraded into quasi-vowels.
This gives Tick an Elmer Fudd-like baby talk, seems to me.

Then again, in "Add speak" we would expect it to become "Add week" if
this rule were entirely valid.

=mantis=

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