Daggerspell. Katharine Kerr

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PRONUNCIATION NOTES

      The Deverrian language, which we might well call neo-Gaulish, looks and sounds much like Welsh, but anyone who knows this modern language will see immediately that it differs in a great many respects, as it does from Cornish and Breton. All these languages are members of that subfamily of Indo-European known as P-Celtic.

      VOWELS are divided by Deverry scribes into two classes: noble and common. Nobles have two pronunciations; commons, one.

      A as in father when long; a shorter version of the same sound, as in far, when short.

      O as in bone when long; as in pot when short.

      W as the oo in spook when long; as in roof when short.

      Y as the i in machine when long; as the e in butter when short.

      E as in pen.

      I as in pin.

      U as in pun.

      Vowels are generally long in stressed syllables; short in unstressed. Y is the primary exception to this rule. When it appears as the last letter of a word, it is always long whether that syllable is stressed or not.

      DIPHTHONGS generally have one consistent pronunciation.

      AE as the a in mane.

      AI as in aisle.

      AU as the ow in how.

      EO as a combination of eh and oh.

      EW as in Welsh, a combination of eh and oo.

      IE as in pier.

      OE as the oy in boy.

      UI as the North Welsh wy, a combination of oo and ee.

      Note that OI is never a diphthong, but is two distinct sounds, as in Carnoic, (KAR-noh-ik).

      CONSONANTS are mostly the same as in English, with these exceptions:

      C is always hard as in cat.

      G is always hard as in get.

      DD is the voiced th as in thin or breathe, but the voicing is more pronounced than in English. It is opposed to TH, the unvoiced sound in breath. (This is the sound that the Greeks called the Celtic tau.)

      R is heavily rolled.

      RH is a voiceless R, approximately pronounced as if it were spelled hr in Deverry proper. In Eldidd, the sound is fast becoming indistinguishable from R.

      DW, GW, and TW are single sounds, as in Gwendolen or twit.

      Y is never a consonant.

      I before a vowel at the beginning of a word is consonantal, as it is in the plural ending -ion, pronounced yawn.

      DOUBLED CONSONANTS are both sounded clearly, unlike in English. Note, however, that DD is a single letter, not a doubled consonant.

      ACCENT is generally on the penultimate syllable, but compound words and place names are often an exception to this rule.

      I have used this system of transcription for the Bardekian and Elvish alphabets as well as the Deverrian, which is, of course, based on the Greek rather than the Roman model. On the whole, it works quite well for the Bardekian, at least. As for Elvish, in a work of this sort it would be ridiculous to resort to the elaborate apparatus by which scholars attempt to transcribe that most subtle and nuanced of tongues.

PROLOGUE

       IN THE YEAR 1045

      Men see life going from a dark to a darkness. The gods see life as a death…

       The Secret Book of Cadwallon the Druid

      In the hall of light, they reminded her of her destiny. There, all was light, a pulsing gold like the heart of a candle flame, filling eternity. The speakers were pillars of fire within the fiery light, and their words were sparks. They, the great Lords of Wyrd, had neither faces nor voices, because anything so human had long since been burned away by dwelling in the hall of light. She had no face or voice either, because she was weak, a little flicker of pale flame. But she heard them speak to her of destiny, her grave task to be done, her long road to ride, her burden that she must lift and willingly.

      “Many deaths have led you to this turning,” they said to her. “It is time to take your Wyrd in your hands. You belong to the dweomer in your very soul. Will you remember?”

      In the hall of light, there are no lies.

      “I’ll try to remember,” she said. “I’ll do my best to remember the light.”

      She felt them grow amused.

      “You will be helped to remember. Go now. It is time for you to die and enter the darkness.”

      When she began to kneel before them, to throw herself down before them, they rushed forward and forbade her. They knew that they were only servants of the one true light, paltry servants compared to the glory they served, the Light that shines beyond all gods.

      When she entered the gray misty land, she wept, longing for the light. There, all was shifting fog, a thousand spirits and visions, and the speakers were like winds, tossing her with words. They wept with her at the fall that she must make into darkness. These spirits of wind had faces, and she realized that she, too, now had a face, because they were all human and far from the light. When they spoke to her of fleshly things, she remembered lust, the ecstasy of flesh pressed against flesh.

      “But remember the light,” they whispered to her. “Cling to the light and follow the dweomer.”

      The wind blew her down through the gray mist. All round her she felt lust, snapping like lightning in a summer storm. All at once, she remembered summer storms, rain on a fleshly face, cool dampness in the air, warm fires, and the taste of food in her mouth. The memories netted her like a little bird and pulled her down and down. She felt him, then, and his lust, a maleness that once she had loved, felt him close to her, very close, like a fire. СКАЧАТЬ