Christophe's post contained the clause "battling gods was not considered
unusual", which made me a little confused for a while: since when did it
become standard fare for humans to challenge the preeminence of deities?
Then it struck me, after approximately 5 milliseconds. It also reminded me
of the other thread about participles. I gave it a brief thought, and don't
think Latin, Greek or any of the Romance languages have such an ambiguity.
Neither do Chinese, Japanese or Korean. Does German? Or is English is only
language with such a muddle?
Eugene

On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 11:02 AM, Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Selon Lars Finsen <[log in to unmask]>:
>
> >
> > Atlantis seems to be really required content in juvenile fantasies.
>
> Seems to be. I have mine as well ;) . OK, this seems to have become a long
> post
> as well, you are warned!
>
> > My Atlantids also were interplanetary. And I traced their history
> > back to more than 30,000 years BP. They definitely could have met the
> > Neanderthals - and did, according to my still readily readable notes.
> >
>
> My Atlandids called themselves Dhastem (or Ddastem, depending on the
> transliteration scheme I used). They were humans, more advanced than we are
> now,
> but not starfaring. Their technology was also quite different from ours,
> with
> more advances in chemistry and biology than what we have right now, but in
> physics they were only slightly more advanced than us. They didn't have the
> global communication network we have, for instance, which might be because
> they
> mainly kept to their island in the middle of the Atlantic ocean.
>
> I know they called their language Astou, although I don't remember how they
> called their continent (it's somewhere in my notes). Unlike other
> Atlantis(es?),
> the history of the Dhastem can be traced no further than 10,000BC, and they
> were
> still around when Ancient Greece began using the Greek alphabet. Indeed,
> the
> only examples of Astou we have are artefacts found in Greece, and the
> language
> is written with an archaic form of the Greek alphabet. It seems the Dhastem
> thought their own writing system was somehow sacred, and wouldn't use it
> outside
> their island. On the small Dhastem colonies they had on other continents,
> they
> would only use indigenous writing systems to write their language, usually
> adapting them more or less efficiently (they didn't need perfect
> transliteration
> systems).
>
> The island of the Dhastem was destroyed somewhere around 700BC, a cataclysm
> suffered by the whole world (and probably the origin of various Flood
> legends).
> It was not moral corruption that destroyed the island, nor failed Dhastem
> experiments. The Dhastem were certainly imperialistic, and felt themselves
> superior to the primitive cultures around them, but they were not morally
> corrupt as such. They just thought it was their duty to protect the
> primitive
> people around them. And they did, against another technologically advanced
> civilisation based on a continent in the middle of the Pacific ocean, which
> I
> called Mu, for lack of a better name. The people of Mu were technologically
> advanced humans like the Dhastem, but through history they became a
> theocracy,
> which slowly began to take a turn to the fanatic, the xenophobic, until
> they
> started attacking the Dhastem who they considered sinners that were soiling
> the
> world and prevented it to reach true perfection. The Dhastem defended
> themselves
> with better technology than Mu had expected, and for decades a Cold War
> followed. Small battles happened here and there, but mostly the continents
> of
> the Dhastem and of Mu were spared. The "primitive" civilisations on the
> other
> continents could only watch, and many considered the Dhastem and Mu to be
> some
> kinds of gods anyway, and battling gods was not considered unusual, as we
> can
> see in various legends around the world.
>
> The Cold War was broken when Mu unleashed a weapon of unknown nature
> against the
> home continent of the Dhastem. Reason would have made clear that Mu was
> signing
> its own death warrant that way, but by that time people on Mu were so
> fanatic
> that the few people that tried to warn of their impending doom were
> attacked and
> slaughtered as infidels. The Dhastem knew Mu was developing such a weapon
> early
> enough, and knew very quickly what it could do, as they had developed
> something
> similar but had refused to use it, but their cover attempts to prevent Mu
> from
> using it failed. When they detected the weapon being used, it was already
> too
> late. As I wrote earlier, the Dhastem had this belief of superiority, and
> never
> even considered that their continent could ever be targeted itself by a
> weapon
> that couldn't be stopped by their defences. They had no recourse. Their
> continent, which was already straddling the Atlantic riff and wasn't the
> most
> stable place to live, was completely and utterly destroyed, and sank into
> the
> ocean. Only one small bit stayed above water level, once everything
> settled:
> Iceland, which unfortunately was completely uninhabited at the time of the
> Dhastem (being the top of a mountain too high for humans to inhabit it).
> The
> cataclysm caused giant tsunamis to sweep over the coasts of Europe, Africa
> and
> America. Shock waves across the Earth woke up volcanoes and caused
> earthquakes
> everywhere. Those shock waves ended up concentrating themselves on the
> opposite
> point of the Earth, which was where the continent of Mu was situated. They
> created a kind of super earthquake that shattered the continent and made it
> sink
> as well. Mu destroyed itself when they tried to destroy the Dhastem.
>
> It took months before things settled. Very few Dhastem survived (the very
> few of
> them who lived in colonies, a few hundreds at maximum). Even fewer Mu
> people
> survived (Mu was very centralist and didn't have colonies). The colonies
> didn't
> use much technological items (they didn't want them to fall into the hands
> of
> the "primitive people" around them), and certainly didn't keep many books
> (since
> they refused to have anything with their original writing system anywhere
> except
> on their own continent). So their technology slowly faded and the survivors
> themselves ended up mixing with the people around them, over the course of
> centuries, so that by the time of the Roman empire all that was still known
> generally were distorted legends. Some "secret societies" kept some
> artefacts
> that were miraculously spared, as well as some knowledge, and a few books
> written in that Astou transliterated using the Greek alphabet, and that's
> the
> only thing that reached us and allows us to know the Dhastem existed at
> all.
>
> I'll need to recheck my notes. I especially like the Astou language, which
> features an Indo-European-like morphology for nouns, but a more
> South-American-like morphology for the verbs.
> --
> Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.
>
> http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com
> http://www.christophoronomicon.nl
>
> It takes a straight mind to create a twisted conlang.
>