Kraken
Robert Armin
Shipmate
in Purgatory
On other discussions about American politics I keep finding references to the Kraken. Google only gives me the sea monster or a bit coin, which doesn't help. It might be the idea of a vast liberal media conspiracy, working to steal a Trump victory, but I can't be sure. Can anyone elucidate?
Comments
I think in some circles it is synonomous to references to the 'deep state' (Krakens famously live in the depths).
It looks like Gen. Michael Flynn's attorney Sidney Flynn said she's going to "release the Kraken" about Democrats stealing the election. I don't know anything about this "Dr. Rich Swier" site; but it's got a summary, and says it's about the US seizing Dominion servers in Germany.
Dominion makes voting systems, and here's their site.
Just doing this quickly before I go to bed, so apologies for any flaws.
AP link explaining that what should have been obvious bullshit is, in fact, bullshit.
That is how they get you. It starts with a ride and that is a clear path to full communist control of your mind and the WORLD!
Wake up sheeple!
It should be Krah-ken - that's the closest English sound to the Old Norse.
We know how Old Norse sounded because of amazing 10th century recordings found in a peat bog.
No, but we can home in on the sounds of the phonemes with a reasonable degree of accuracy through comparative linguistics. It definitely isn't the 'a' of 'may'.
More accurately, the sounds can be inferred with more or less accuracy from descendant languages and borrowings into other languages.
I understood that Old Norse was actually closest to Icelandic.
It is in its written form, but the pronunciation, especially of the vowels, has changed. Modern Icelanders can read Old Norse pretty easily (think Shakespeare for modern English readers) but understanding the spoken form would be harder and would take some adjustment (think Chaucer - in original pronunciation)
Rather begs the question. How do we know they sound similar if we don't know what it sounds like? Surely Old English needn't sound at all like modern English.
Hence, appropriate term if you're claiming you'll release info and pull off a major...coup...so to speak.
BTW: In the movie, it was pronounced "CRACK-en".
Question: if it's a Norse beastie, what's it doing in the Mediterranean? Thx.
I suspect that these two are related, and are caused by the well-known desire for scrupulous accuracy exhibited by movie makers.
Ah. Cetus...Cetacean...whales and dolphins and such. I searched Duck Duck Go on "kraken cetus". If you got your info from an article at Grunge, that's the first hit.
A Greek mythology wiki says:
Isn't Lovecraft's Cthulu octopus-esque? Haven't read any Lovecraft, but maybe the COTT filmmakers had? And/or Lovecraft knew Norse mythology?
You can glean something of pronunciation from rhyme - if you know that a portion of verse is written in a rhyme scheme then you get hints as to which words rhyme and hence how they sound. Meter can give similar hints as regards syllables and emphasis. Presumably a linguist has other tricks to help piece together how things sounded (puns, for example: we can be fairly sure Shakespeare pronounced "country" similarly to us as he puns it with a coarse term for female genitalia).
That is certainly the basis of the running joke on Mad As Hell, where the scene always involves an interview with Rear Vice Admiral Sir Bobo Gargle discussing naval, defence and "on water matters". Whenever it gets to the point where Sir Bobo has painted himself into a corner, he raises his Trident and shouts, "Release the Kraken!" whereupon a bloke in a green octopus suit jumps out of a nearby metal stationary cupboard and starts bopping around to his signature music.
It's only one clue in a jigsaw.
Perhaps it sought warmer climes for a nice vacation and some good Mediterranean food...and then someone threw a prophet at it!
(Rather like the "Dr. Who" story line about the chloroplast being that was thrown into a pit, to be periodically gifted with individuals the ruler found inconvenient.)
I was mostly thinking that it indicated that it was unlikely that Shakespeare pronounced "country" with the same sound as "count".
They tend to use modern Icelandic pronunciation (cf Ancient Greek in modern Greece).
Did St. Brendan encounter a Kraken?
Do you really think whole departments of linguists are just making shit up when they postulate what ancient languages sounded like?
Not really. We have a document from the period which tells us how the writer's language was pronounced. It's one part of the evidence from which the pronunciation is deduced. No-one is claiming an exact reconstruction (it would vary by location and exact period anyway) but we can deduce a fair amount. The pertinent point here is the vowel of modern English "may" is not in there is not within the possible sounds represented by "a" in Old Norse; the Great Vowel Shift that assigned that sound to that graph is a distinctively English feature not shared by the Scandinavian languages.
Maybe I'm misreading tone but there is something almost creationist about some of these comments ('Were you there?'). I know enough linguistics to know I'm not a specialist, but if you want the entire discipline of historical linguistics to be derived from first principles for you in the space of a Ship of Fools post, I think you'll be sorely disappointed.
I don't know a huge amount about Old Icelandic. I know that the letter 'a' is pronounced pretty much the same across all Romance languages, which is a decent indication that that's how it was pronounced in Latin. When non-Romance languages were Romanised (i.e. spelt in Latin characters), the monks (or whoever it was) didn't just pick random letters out of a hat; they would choose the letter(s) whose pronunciation in Latin most closely approximated to the sound they were trying to represent. If they wanted an 'ay' sound, the most obvious candidate would be 'ei' or 'ej' as in ejus (his/her/its).
Well...
(Emphasis mine.)
"UW expert: Kraken are undefeatable; few who see the beast live to tell the tale" (UW News).
This is an interview with Lauren Poyer, a professor of Scandinavian studies at the University of Washington. She was consulted for background info after news of Seattle's new Kraken hockey team. She seems fun. And I like the final paragraph.
This was 1000 years ago. It wasn't a department of linguists.
Hmm. Maybe there's a Kraken in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle?
"Kum ba yah, my Lord, kum ba yah...."
(FYI: "Kum ba yah" is an African (-based?) song Americans sing in youth groups, etc. Generally, when everyone's a little emotional, and maybe towards the end of an evening gathering.)
https://tinyurl.com/y2gxp9qa
Lots of inept politicians in this story - and a foreseeing if climate change type disaster.
It's mostly a feature of comedic sketches about 1970s style trendy vicars with rainbow guitar straps and sandals over here. John Bell (WGWG) reckons it can be used non-ironically but I think most people would struggle.