The Telling (Hainish Cycle, #8)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

In the future... jet packs and kittypups

Advanced Exercises in Dovzan Usage and Locutions for Barbarians.

Ezid, a strange, romantic character who appeared sometimes as a beautiful, gentle young man and sometimes as a beautiful, fearless young woman, was called “the Immortal.” She added a note: “What about Immortal Ezid’? Does this imply belief in an afterlife? Is Ezid one person, two, or many?

Plurals:

when she first studied the languages of Aka, she had learned that all the major ones had a peculiar singular/dual pronoun, used for a pregnant woman or animal and for a married couple. She had met it again in The Arbor and many other texts, where it referred to the single/double trunk of the tree of being and also to the mythic-heroic figures of the stories and epics, who usually—like the producer-consumer heroes of Corporation propaganda—came in pairs.

Plurals:

from the interplay of the Two arise the triple Branches that join to make the Foliages, consisting of the Four Actions and the Five Elements,

The people of the old way placidly accepted new technologies and products, so long as they worked better than the old ones and so long as using them did not require changing one’s life in any important way. To Sutty this seemed a profound but reasonable conservatism. But to an economy predicated on endless growth, it was anathema.

When the maz put the mantle of their office—a flimsy length of red or blue cloth—over their shoulders, they were perceived as owning a sacred authority or power. What they said then was part of the Telling. When they took the scarf off they returned to ordinary status, claiming no personal spiritual authority at all; what they said then weighed no more than what anybody said. Some people of course insisted on ascribing permanent authority to them. Like the people of Sutty’s own tribe, many Akans longed to follow a leader, turn earned payment into tribute, load responsibility onto somebody else’s shoulders.

mandala of the One that is Two giving rise to the Three, to the Five, to the Myriad, and the Myriad again to the Five, the Three, the Two, the One. . . . A Tree, a Body, a Mountain, inscribed within the circle that was everything and nothing.

Plurals: