Hiro Protagonist

After The Holocaust

In Walter M. Miller, Jr.s, A Canticle for Leibowitz a post-Apocalypse world is going through a sort of second Dar Ages. The catholic Church again plays a role as keepers of knowledge. There's a bit in here the is the same as Bradbury's Farenheit 451, what with people who memorize books to secure them for the future. It's interesting that it is written before Vatican II and therefore the role of Latin is projected much more strongly than one might expect now. Also, since globalism becomes a thing of the past after World War Three in this book there is the allusion that English has either been replaced in some areas or that the regional dialects have grown into languages that are not mutually exclusive.

As Brother Francis readily admitted, his mastery of pre-Deluge English was far from masterful yet. The way nouns could sometimes modify other nouns in that tongue had alway been one of his weak points In Latin, as in most simple dialects of the reason, a construction like servus puer meant about the the same thing as puer servus, and even in English slave boy meant boy slave. But there the similarity ended. He had finally leanred that house cat did not mean cat house, and that a dative of purpose or possession, as in mihi amicus, was somehowconveyed by dog food or sentry box without inflection. But what of a triple appositive like fallout survival shelter? Brother Francis shook his head. The Warning on Inner Hatch mentioned food, water, and air; and yet surely these were not necessities for the fiends of Hell. At times, the novice found pre-Deluge English more perplexing than either Intermediate Angelology or Saint Leslie's theological calculus.

For some strange reason it was great fun to read of this character mistaking the term fallout for a type of demon from Hell. There is perhaps the small linguistic qualm that the writer means "languages" rather than "regional dialects", but over all it was an excellent read and I highly suggest it.