Posted by Irgend Jemand on 19:59 8/8/01
In reply to: Almea as an allegory posted by Panu Petteri Höglund on 5:31 8/8/01
Hey, when I first read the description of the ktuvoki- big; physically kinda invincible; enslaving people to impress their females- I thought Mark might have thought of childhood bullies or so when he invented them. But never mind; if you had followed my e-mail exchanges with Mark, you'd know that I've made far more wrong interpretations of Almean stuff than enough.
But when we're at it, Mark, I guess the Ilii are some kind of your Utopia, just unfortunately so perfect that you had to make them another species; and Cuzei is some kind of watered-down version of that which is suitable for humans. There are also a lot of hints of many things in Terran history throughout Almea, but as far as I can tell, most of them are value-neutral.
As for understanding why people are the way they are, that clearly beats just saying that they're evil, but you can even be biased there. For instance, you could just say that those people believe in (fill in some political/religious belief you don't like here) because they where programmed to believe that (fill in the same or something related to it here) nosense by our (and fill it in once more) society.
Or in Verduria, an Eledhe could say that "the pagans follow their wrong beliefs because they're so materialistic that they want a religion consisting of giving something to the gods and getting something back from them", or a pagan could say "the Eledhe follow their wrong beliefs because they've slept through their history classes in school and therefore don't know what the gods did for Cadhinas and Verduria".
BTW, is "shto" inflected (with the acc. "shtam") or not?
IJ
That's not bad! I can indeed imagine the Eledhi and the pagans saying that about each other. And of course you're right that explanations can easily be simplistic and arrogant.
I used to have fiercer religious views, which were reflected in Almea; I've modified some of that, but left much of it in, because it adds vitality. I tried to make the Cuzeian religion something that could actually exist, and that required bringing in some of my own understanding of spirituality. But you have to be careful; I invent some things and make everyone flawed in some respect!
Shto is inflected like eto; the accusative is the same as the nominative. (Genitive shtë; dative shton.)