zompist bboard

Mark, you write that to Verdurians, poetry means "eloquent writing". But don't Verdurians have texts written in some kind of a regular way that are not eloquent? Like, say drinking songs, dirty poems written on toilet doors, rhymes used in children's games, etc?
This doesn't seem to fit in with those "rude" (is that a Verdurian word?) imported forms of poetry, either. So how would you translate poems written in something that Verdurians would count as iscuncrivát?

Raphael wrote:Mark, you write that to Verdurians, poetry means "eloquent writing". But don't Verdurians have texts written in some kind of a regular way that are not eloquent? Like, say drinking songs, dirty poems written on toilet doors, rhymes used in children's games, etc?
This doesn't seem to fit in with those "rude" (is that a Verdurian word?) imported forms of poetry, either. So how would you translate poems written in something that Verdurians would count as iscuncriv?t?

Basically, you'd translate them into eyurcriv?t. There are various ways to embellish or adorn your writing-- to make it eyure, 'lovely'-- but the most basic way is to write in sulirul?, generally two-accent phrases. Even dirty poems and children's games can reach this level of embellishment, and songs have to follow even more rules.

To put it another way, the eyure/iscun division isn't a matter of quality, but of approach. If you're chiefly interested in presenting content as cleanly and carefully as possible, you want iscuncriv?t. As soon as you start paying attention to the form for its own sake, it's eyurcriv?t.