Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 30
Sep. 8th, 2021 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnIn which, despite the title, I would like to be told about the English Revolution, which is yet another casualty of my extremely poor history education :P :)
Also, this is probably the place to say that RMSE opened with three Fritz-fics, all of which I think are readable with minimum canon knowledge:
The Boy Who Lived - if you knew about the doomed escape-from-Prussia-that-didn't happen and tragic death of Fritz's boyfriend Hans Hermann von Katte, you may not have known about Peter Keith, the third young man who conspired to escape Prussia -- and the only one who actually did. This is his story. I think readable without canon knowledge except what I just said here.
Challenge Yourself to Relax - My gift, I posted about this before! Corporate AU with my problematic fave, Fritz' brother Heinrich, who's still Fritz's l'autre moi-meme even in corporate AU. Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with the corporate world and the dysfunctions thereof.
The Rise and Fall of the RendezvousWithFame Exchange - Fandom AU with BNF fanfic writer Voltaire, exchange mod Fritz, and the inevitable meltdown. (I wrote this one and am quite proud of the terrible physics-adjacent pun contained within.) Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with fandom and the dysfunctions thereof :P
Also, this is probably the place to say that RMSE opened with three Fritz-fics, all of which I think are readable with minimum canon knowledge:
The Boy Who Lived - if you knew about the doomed escape-from-Prussia-that-didn't happen and tragic death of Fritz's boyfriend Hans Hermann von Katte, you may not have known about Peter Keith, the third young man who conspired to escape Prussia -- and the only one who actually did. This is his story. I think readable without canon knowledge except what I just said here.
Challenge Yourself to Relax - My gift, I posted about this before! Corporate AU with my problematic fave, Fritz' brother Heinrich, who's still Fritz's l'autre moi-meme even in corporate AU. Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with the corporate world and the dysfunctions thereof.
The Rise and Fall of the RendezvousWithFame Exchange - Fandom AU with BNF fanfic writer Voltaire, exchange mod Fritz, and the inevitable meltdown. (I wrote this one and am quite proud of the terrible physics-adjacent pun contained within.) Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with fandom and the dysfunctions thereof :P
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-22 05:03 am (UTC)OK,
I won't even be surprised if you've made it this far, read that sentence after I've called attention to it, and *still* have no idea what I'm talking about. ;) If so, read on.
omg, I reread that sentence a couple of times (before reading the rest of your text) and I had NO IDEA. Lol!
I just did an experiment: asked my kindle to search for "resolve" across all text. Of course many of the results were other ways to use the word, but in the sense of "determined to" I found it in the following places:
a) a bunch of Gutenberg stuff written relatively early, like Little Women, Hans Brinker (which is later -- 1968), or in early translations, like Wilhelmine's memoirs or Schiller's Don Carlos.
b) interestingly, people writing about historical figures; this construction appears at least once in the biography I have of LM Montgomery, the biography of Nathaniel Bowditch, and Zinsser's Emilie du Chatelet -- and once in Blanning's Fritz bio!
c) modern SF that has a particular bent towards archaic construction: Duane's Rihannsu books, where the Rihannsu intentionally can have somewhat mannered/slightly-archaic/formal speech; and Bujold's Miles books, where the Barraryans also are coded as slightly-archaic; and the Silmarillion has it a bunch of times, which, well, yeah.
d) LDS books -- sadly, on one of the two with the most hits the search function seems to be a bit borked, so I'm having trouble seeing what's there exactly, but the other one (an official publication about the early days of the Church), holy cow, a good half of the uses of the word "resolve" are in this sense. (The other books I mentioned might have ~1 out of 10 in that sense?
But, yeah, I think I see why it didn't code to me as a weird LDS thing -- even though I guess it is! -- given that I did see it other places -- it just never occurred to me (since we use it as a normal modern construction) that all those non-LDS occurrences had a common factor, that they were concerned with the past.
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-22 06:50 pm (UTC)Here we have another linguistic problem. I read Lord of the Rings first as a young teenager, which means I read it in the classic German translation. (There is since a few years a new one, which is why I specify.) To this day, I haven't read it in English; when I go back to the book, I always return to my green three volumes of yesteryear.
Otoh, when the movies were released, I was living in Munich with its three cinemas showing movies undubbed and in the original language (in addition to the dozens of cinemas showing them dubbed), and I had long since started the habit of watching in the original to keep my own English fluent. So I watched the movies in English and never in German. Thus, unsurprisingly, I associated "You have my sword!" with the films, and didn't think whether or not the scene goes this way in the book, not least because in the book, Frodo Beutlin aus dem Auenland who does not quite sound like Frodo Baggins from the Shire gets talked to in language slightly associating Jacob Grimm's version of some German myths anyway but a sentence like "Mein Schwert sei Euer!" was not addressed to him.
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-22 07:52 pm (UTC)(You're the one I actually got "You have my sword" from, since I *don't* hang out much in most non-DW corners of the internet and thus it is purely a LOTR thing to me. If you hadn't said "You have my pen" when I suggested someone should write me a broccoli test fic *cough*, I don't think I would have come up with that solution for Wilhelmine's final line. So I owe you that one.)
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-23 06:44 am (UTC)Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-23 04:00 pm (UTC)Which Cahn did not, apparently! :D
But a present day Wilhelmine would definitely have read books, watched the films, argued about same and have opinions on the soundtrack as well, complete with regular "which movie has the best song for the final credit" debates.
Oh, most definitely. :)
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-22 08:38 pm (UTC)Hee, called it! :D
Hans Brinker (which is later -- 1968)
?? Hans Brinker was published in 1865, and the language very much fits that period. Also, I don't think Gutenberg should have anything from 1968--that's well after the public domain cutoff.
interestingly, people writing about historical figures
So people who've recently been reading a whole lot of archaic English, I see, I see. :D It reminds me of how, after I'd hung out with my dissertation advisor for about 3 years, I started catching myself saying "One does this" and "One does that," which is not something I would ever say on my own! (I quickly lost that linguistic ruboff after leaving grad school.)
But, yeah, I think I see why it didn't code to me as a weird LDS thing -- even though I guess it is! -- given that I did see it other places -- it just never occurred to me (since we use it as a normal modern construction) that all those non-LDS occurrences had a common factor, that they were concerned with the past.
I had no idea you guys had kept "resolve to" alive either, so this was very educational! (This is what happens when you get your fic betaed by someone who got their PhD in the history of the English language--you have these conversations. :D)
Re: Challenge Yourself to Relax
Date: 2021-09-23 04:00 am (UTC)