Re: Perhaps Lan-fear meaning Night-Daughter would make more sense - Edit 1
Before modification by DomA at 18/06/2010 04:24:21 PM
The reason why the "lan" syllable in Lanfear is thought to be the one meaning daughter is because Siuan gave Min two aliases meaning daughter this and that, and the common syllable in all three is "la".
So it's possible Lanfear litterally translates as night-daughter, but the word order is different from English.
Bob's on the right track, I think. It's quite possible the "n" (and "m" in other words, it's probably a matter of phonetics) - it is pronounced with a short or long "am" sound in front of vowels, and with "n" sound in front of consonants, and becomes "an" in full, or "'an" when it's a suffi
at the end of syllable within a word mark the possessive and some other uses of "of" (as in "betrayer of Hope), a contraction of "an" used when the compound words are expanded into sentences.
It's as if you wrote "(for the) honor of the red eagle" (carai an caldazzar) as caraincaldazzar, which is probably grammatically incorrect, while compounding la'an'fear into Lanfear, or Sa an ael into Sammael, and Isha an ael into Ishamael and Har an into Haran, and are all correct, maybe because it's not a phrase). In languages that aggregate root words into compound like this, the rules are often fairly elaborate and not always intuitive to speakers of langagues derived from latin/greek that tends to use suffixes and prefixes more than root words (and those rules tend to vary from one level of language to the next, eg: between everyday use versus poetry vs religious use). If someone around know, for example, sanskrit (Fionwe?), he/she could explain it better than I could.
Where it gets a step more complicated is that where to use "of" or the possessive of the/'s doesn't follow the same grammatical rules as english (it seems the grammatical relationship between "Maidens" and "Spear" in Maidens of the Spear isn't the same as in English. It's tied by something else than "of the" in the OT (it appears to be the word far, or mai): the literal translation may be something like : brides/promised to the spear.
So it's possible Lanfear litterally translates as night-daughter, but the word order is different from English.
Bob's on the right track, I think. It's quite possible the "n" (and "m" in other words, it's probably a matter of phonetics) - it is pronounced with a short or long "am" sound in front of vowels, and with "n" sound in front of consonants, and becomes "an" in full, or "'an" when it's a suffi
at the end of syllable within a word mark the possessive and some other uses of "of" (as in "betrayer of Hope), a contraction of "an" used when the compound words are expanded into sentences. It's as if you wrote "(for the) honor of the red eagle" (carai an caldazzar) as caraincaldazzar, which is probably grammatically incorrect, while compounding la'an'fear into Lanfear, or Sa an ael into Sammael, and Isha an ael into Ishamael and Har an into Haran, and are all correct, maybe because it's not a phrase). In languages that aggregate root words into compound like this, the rules are often fairly elaborate and not always intuitive to speakers of langagues derived from latin/greek that tends to use suffixes and prefixes more than root words (and those rules tend to vary from one level of language to the next, eg: between everyday use versus poetry vs religious use). If someone around know, for example, sanskrit (Fionwe?), he/she could explain it better than I could.
Where it gets a step more complicated is that where to use "of" or the possessive of the/'s doesn't follow the same grammatical rules as english (it seems the grammatical relationship between "Maidens" and "Spear" in Maidens of the Spear isn't the same as in English. It's tied by something else than "of the" in the OT (it appears to be the word far, or mai): the literal translation may be something like : brides/promised to the spear.