Читать книгу Fleeting Snow - Pavel Villikovsky - Страница 19

1.f

First names work differently in native American languages. That’s not something I learnt from Štefan’s research but from books on the Wild West. Except that these days the West is no wilder than the East and nobody reads cheap Westerns anymore.

Native Americans have names like Sitting Bull, Cawing Raven, Morning Dawn or maybe Bungler Whose Arrow Missed a Hare – polysynthetic Indian languages such as Menominee don’t need as many words as Slovak to express this, they just stick all the bits together to make one long word. These names are quite picturesque and probably also unique, at least within a single tribe, but there is a problem with them similar to that of character. They tie a person permanently to a single phenomenon, action, or event, depriving them of the chance to change and evolve. Language is an unforgiving manacle.