[Fic] "Pebble on a Mountain" -- original story, Firsthome

Here is some more Estarian history, this from... around the year 2235, I think, which means roughly five centuries before Ekanu's birth. The Three-Day Revolution that breaks the Estarin Empire erupts in 2250 FF, instigated by the Inner Ring in response to a summer of ratcheting tension, starting with an army draft, a rebellion in Merua, a tax increase, and a drought. Eventually a protest outside the Imperial Palace turns into a riot, in the course of which the Imperial Guard kills several dozen people. And the city explodes.

(There's a lot of other stuff going on in other regions of the Empire -- the draft was to suppress a rebellion in Kerabada, for example -- but the Revolution essentially decapitates the Empire by killing the Emperor, the High Priest of the Church of Three, and an awful lot of the nobility and high military bureaucracy. Nobody ever quite manages to get control again as the provinces break away and/or disintegrate, though the Empress Consort gives it a damn good try for several years.)

But this is about fifteen years earlier, when Tallo Nashialle and Svedanya sin Alar (two of the central figures in the Revolution) first meet as young teens in the slums of imperial Estara. (575 words)

( Pebble on a Mountain )

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Funny; I'd thought those two didn't meet until they were adults. Which goes to show you how little I know about my own world sometimes. *wry*

wherein Liz picks at a minor (and easily fixed!) point in a White Collar episode

I am continuing to watch White Collar, though this has to be done annoyingly late at night when the temperature has cooled enough that I can turn my fan down a notch and thus actually have a faint prayer of hearing the dialogue. As I result, I have only gotten through episode 5, "The Portrait."

I don't want to say anything about the show as a whole until I've at least reached the end of the first season (well, beyond saying that I am obviously still enjoying it *grin*), but there was a minor point in "The Portrait" that knocked my suspension of disbelief for a temporary loop.

Basically, there is a written note on the back of the titular portrait. The note is in English. The problem is that the artist was, if I heard the dialogue correctly, Hungarian, or at least painting in Hungary before "the war," which in context almost certainly means WWII. I am therefore extremely doubtful that he would have written his note in English.

Hungarian is, of course, the most likely language. German is also likely, since the artist's name (Haustenberg? von Haustenberg? something like that) is very Germanic, and Hungary was, of course, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire up until WWI. French might even be possible, since it was Europe's international language of culture and diplomacy for centuries. English, though? In that place and time, English is just weird.

I know the show runners needed the note to be comprehensible to the audience, but still, would it have been so hard to write it in a reasonable language and have a character verbally translate? That translation would both have been more accurate and would have made Neal (or Mozzie) seem even cooler for knowing a foreign language. (German or French would probably work better than Hungarian in that case, since... well, Hungary never had colonies and so didn't spread its language around the world, and Hungarian carries much less cultural prestige than the other two languages. It's also not an Indo-European language, so native English speakers have a much harder time learning Hungarian than learning French or German.)

Anyway, it's a minor point, but it annoyed me.