and wow, how fascinating if reading one too many ancient epics from a time of peace was the thing which led to him finally becoming too much of an embarrassment for his father to stomach and getting kicked out to play hunt-the-Avatar.
Yes! And oh, I can imagine him hearing about the university's library and Iroh looking at him sadly and Zuko just thinking if I can keep my mouth shut this time, everything will be okay.
*thought occurs* What if the courtly expression/euphemism for 'capture' is 'bring before me'? And Zuko, being Zuko, could chase Aang all around the world with his real motive being only to get him still long enough to talk with in private. (And of course he couldn't reveal this to his crew, and might not even tell his uncle. Ooh, potentially deadly misunderstandings!.)
So the idea of her speaking Old Fire, which might perhaps still have some half-dead metaphors, Water Tribe loan words, or whatever, from the good old days, with little Zuko and Azula seems like one way to have the best of both worlds.
Yessss. And maybe they heard it from Lo and Li, or some of the servants too.
Though I can see both usages developing in tandem, actually - with say the Fire Sages and Court poets hanging on to an increasingly rarified Old Fire, while grandmothers at home are still gossiping away in a version that becomes more and more of a pidgin through the decades as the younger generations become less and less fluent. But I really have no idea if that's plausible or not.
Sounds fairly plausible to me -- although I was thinking of Old Fire not being backwards as much as out of fashion. Like, in Japan, for a long time Chinese poetry was considered artistically to be the hot shit and Japanese poetry was just, you know, the stuff you wrote to tell your lovers you couldn't see them this week. If Modern Earth Kingdom or w/e was considered the artistic language, and the business language, and the political language, then Old Fire kind of retires to the backstage even if you're speaking it to your children at home. And then I could see young merchants' kids and nobles learning Old Fire poetry so they could make references the foreigners wouldn't get, which would lead to both the language and the works written in it becoming popular again.
Yeah, the nomads must have had a pretty heavy affect on things. I don't know what, though, unless Modern Earth Kingdom is actually derived from/is in fact Air Nomad, which would go pretty far towards explaining why everybody speaks it. Hmmm, this bears further thought.
I was worried that nitpicking an unwritten fic would be a step too far...
Quite the opposite! If I try and world build on my own I tend to come up with things that just don't work at all. Discussion helps a lot. :D (The only downside is that now I really *do* have to locate and study up on a bunch of Asian sayings and idioms and poetry. Which wouldn't be a downside at all if I knew where to start looking for ones that weren't about either romance or nature. /o\)
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2010-09-29 06:46 pm (UTC)Yes! And oh, I can imagine him hearing about the university's library and Iroh looking at him sadly and Zuko just thinking if I can keep my mouth shut this time, everything will be okay.
*thought occurs* What if the courtly expression/euphemism for 'capture' is 'bring before me'? And Zuko, being Zuko, could chase Aang all around the world with his real motive being only to get him still long enough to talk with in private. (And of course he couldn't reveal this to his crew, and might not even tell his uncle. Ooh, potentially deadly misunderstandings!.)
So the idea of her speaking Old Fire, which might perhaps still have some half-dead metaphors, Water Tribe loan words, or whatever, from the good old days, with little Zuko and Azula seems like one way to have the best of both worlds.
Yessss. And maybe they heard it from Lo and Li, or some of the servants too.
Though I can see both usages developing in tandem, actually - with say the Fire Sages and Court poets hanging on to an increasingly rarified Old Fire, while grandmothers at home are still gossiping away in a version that becomes more and more of a pidgin through the decades as the younger generations become less and less fluent. But I really have no idea if that's plausible or not.
Sounds fairly plausible to me -- although I was thinking of Old Fire not being backwards as much as out of fashion. Like, in Japan, for a long time Chinese poetry was considered artistically to be the hot shit and Japanese poetry was just, you know, the stuff you wrote to tell your lovers you couldn't see them this week. If Modern Earth Kingdom or w/e was considered the artistic language, and the business language, and the political language, then Old Fire kind of retires to the backstage even if you're speaking it to your children at home. And then I could see young merchants' kids and nobles learning Old Fire poetry so they could make references the foreigners wouldn't get, which would lead to both the language and the works written in it becoming popular again.
Yeah, the nomads must have had a pretty heavy affect on things. I don't know what, though, unless Modern Earth Kingdom is actually derived from/is in fact Air Nomad, which would go pretty far towards explaining why everybody speaks it. Hmmm, this bears further thought.
I was worried that nitpicking an unwritten fic would be a step too far...
Quite the opposite! If I try and world build on my own I tend to come up with things that just don't work at all. Discussion helps a lot. :D (The only downside is that now I really *do* have to locate and study up on a bunch of Asian sayings and idioms and poetry. Which wouldn't be a downside at all if I knew where to start looking for ones that weren't about either romance or nature. /o\)