Talk:Stephenson:Neal:Quicksilver:370:Qwghlm (Neal Stephenson)

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

I'd assumed that the orthography of Qwghlm's language was intended as a good-natured appreciation of the Welsh language, though I exist in almost total ignorance of any British Isles culture besides what I see on ancient BBC programs. --Jeremy

One of the Qwghlmian islands is apparently called Sghr. --Jeremy

I had read in an interview somewhere that Qwghlm was NS's attempt to provide a fictitious cryptosystem to the British analogous to the Navajo strategy used by the US at the time. -- Armaced

http://www.eventhorizon.com/sfzine/chats/transcripts/pages/042999.html -- " Neal Stephenson: ... 'I am fascinated by the Navajo codetalkers. They are not included in the book directly. Instead, I have invented a British equivalent. In the fictional world of the book, there is an island off the NW coast of England called Qwghlm, which has a completely unique language that is very pithy, like Navajo is, and the British use Qwghlmians in the same way that the US military used the Navajos during the war. The only problem is that Qwghlmian is not in general use any more, and so a lot of the Qwghlmian codetalkers in my book can't understand what is being said.' ..."

Found another interview (with a real player audio version):

http://fantasticadaily.com/interview.php?iId=36 -- Neal Stephenson: " ... Towering spires of rock, some of which are underwater. It's surrounded by hazards to navigation that ships are forever running aground on. Some mudflats along the beaches. Lots of ice, and lots of guano deposited by seagulls. They claim that it was formerly richly forested, but all the trees had been chopped down by Englishmen. That is true of several parts of the British Isles, so that's not even particularly fictitious. ..."

I'm finding that Qwghlm is so displaced it's off the historical map. If it is to be, in its entirety, a fictional geographical place, we ought to have something to connect to the pieces of reality we can touch. For this we need to know something about its language, has it has figured into historical voyages, and, if its culture is entirely alien to European norms, we need to some method of relating to that culture through its language. You can find a good example of how this might be done in Brian Hall's story of Sacagawea in "I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company." --- User:qoq

Since we readers are dealing with a fictional place and quasi-historical events that evoke real history ie -- the sack of Baltimore1 -- I just picture Qwghlm (I want to pronounce it Kw!ch!elm) as the 17th Century equivalent of Father Ted's Craggy Island and just enjoy. And you have to wonder how many Qwghlmians migrated to Austrailia. Lawrence Waterhouse got punched when he was trying to be polite. From the link below:

"So everyone hears it a little differently. Like just now - they heard your Outer Qwghliam accent, and assumed you were delivering an insult. But I could tell you were saying that you believed, based on a rumor you heard last Tuesday in the meat market, that Mary was convalescing normally and would be back on her feet within a week.""I was trying to say that she looked beautiful," Waterhouse protests.

"Ah!" Rod says. "Then you should have said, 'Gxnn bhldh sqrd m!'"

"That's what I said!"

"No, you confused the mid-glottal with the frontal glottal" Rod says.

And mind you I've not forgotten that Chelm was the fabled Yiddish-speaking "town of fools in Poland.

On pronouncing Gttr Mnhrbgh - how the heck did they get Utter Maubry? Wouldn't staid Britons call it Goddear Minorharbor? Omigod! Have we forgotten that Lawrence Waterhouse had a copy of the Encyclopedia Qwghlmiana? The mind boggles.

http://www.wap.org/journal/hackersandcodebreakers.html " ... Waterhouse found a worm-eaten copy of the Encyclopedia Qwghlmiana in a bookshop near the British Museum a week ago and has been carrying it around in his attache case since then, imbibing a page or two at a time, like doses of strong medicine. The overriding Themes of the Encyclopedia are three, and they dominate its every paragraph as totally as the Three Sgrhs dominate the landscape of Outer Qwghlm. Two of these themes are wool and guano, though the Qwghlmians have other names for them, in their ancient, sui generis tongue. In fact, the same linguistic hyperspecialization occurs here that supposedly does with the Eskimos and snow or Arabs and sand, and the Enccyclopedia Qwghlmiana never uses the English words "wool" and "guano" except to slander the inferior versions of these products that are exported by places like Scotland in a perfidious effort to confuse the naïve buyers who apparently dominate the world's commodity markets. Waterhouse had to read the encyclopedia almost cover-to-cover and use all his cryptanalytic skills to figure out, by inference, what these products actually were. ... "

Links and footnotes

http://explorers.whyte.com/sf/stecry.htm

http://fantasticadaily.com/interview.php?iId=36

http://www.wap.org/journal/hackersandcodebreakers.html

http://www.bartleby.com/246/207.html - links to a poem about 'the sack'

http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Algiers - "... [Holy Trinity Church in Tangiers has] Many of these marbles contain memorial inscriptions relating to the English residents (voluntary and involuntary) of Algiers from the time of John Tipton, British consul in 1580. One tablet records that in 1631 two Algerine pirate crews landed in Ireland, sacked Baltimore, and carried off its inhabitants to slavery; another recalls the romantic escape of Ida MDonnell, daughter of Admiral Ulric, consul-general of Denmark, and wife of the British consul. When Lord Exmouth was about to bombard the city in 1816, the British consul was thrown into prison and loaded with chains. Mrs. MDonnell -- who was but sixteen -- escaped to the British fleet disguised as a midshipman, carrying a basket of vegetables in which her baby was hidden. (Mrs. M`Donnell subsequently married the duc de Talleyrand-Perigord and died at Florence in 1880). Among later residents commemorated is Edward Lloyd, who was the first person to show the value of esparto grass for the manufacture of paper, and thus started an industry which is one of the most important in Algeria. ..." Sure sounds almost fictional

http://www.bbcamerica.com/genre/comedy_games/father_ted/about.jsp

That Baltimore is a small town in western County Cork, Ireland. The name means "white house" in Irish. Sparky 02:55, 30 Oct 2003 (PST)

Sounds a bit like those island in that fabulous Powell, Pressburger movie from 1945, "I Know Where I'm Going!", with Dame Wendy Hiller. I've seen it three times since I first read Cryptonomicon.User:qoq

qoq's links:

http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0037800/ -- The movie

http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0384908/ -- Wendy Hiller's bio

Not being one of "all readers" it seems prudent to question if it would be possible for such a constition of space time and people to exist within the constraints of the accepted reality of our 21st century. Put this way many explanations may be possible for the misperception perpetrated by the folk of Qwghlm that they do not exist.

Seems to me Qwghlm in the books is a conflation of the use of Navajo language in WWII code setting, with the geographic location of the Outer Hebrides and a Basque-like language ie connected to the range of languages which precede the (Indo-European ) P- and Q-celtic languages. I know the language is runic based - but I wonder why that is equated with a vowel free vocabulary?). In terms of pronunciation the author should be aware (maybe is already) that minority native language speakers do not just react to strangers in term of disdain, they can also be quite shy. My own work on the Aran islands was often affected by the locals shyness and embarrassment at the inadequacy of their English language skills - matching my own concerns about my irish language skills.

The geek in me notes that Qwghlm is spelled using the (approximately) two top-leftmost, two middlemost and two bottom-rightmost letter keys on the UK/US Qwerty keyboard.

I have theorized that Qwghlm is some sort of Atlantean mythological precursor to the current principality of SeaLand. In Cryptonomicon, Capt. Waterhouse notes the heavy gernamic influence on the Qwghlmian ducal family, and implied the islands were such because they were in the North Sea between England and Germany, which is why the girl/spy he seduced/was seduced by there was thought to be a german agent. I've also been reading of the island of Rockall, which is a hundred miles west of Scotland in the Rockall bank. Its geology matches the description of Qwghlm, though it is only one lonely spire. I am unaware of any dangerous reefs around it. However it is British territory, outside of a short period in the 1990's when Greenpeace activists camping there declared it the independent nation of Rockall. - Mlorrey 1:00 PM (EST), Jan 5 2005