Leftovaz

Some things I forgot to put in that last random thoughts post. Strictly speaking, I only confirmed one of them today. But, anyway.

• If you watch the cutscenes in Skyward Sword, you will of course notice that whenever Fi says "master", the actual sound you hear is "mari"—presumably the Hylian word for same. But did you notice that, the first time you ever see her (when Zelda vanishes), she addresses Link by name—and the word she says is "Matas"? Presumably a translation convention, like the one that renders Banazir Galpsi as Samwise Gamgee, is in effect. Now I need to pore over every second of Fi's dialogue and find out what Zelda's real Hylian name is (and Hylia's, for that matter).
• Turns out, I was giving a lot of people—writers, historians, whole civilizations—too much credit. At some point (ain't bothering to check), I said the Moors first used the pointed arch—or rather its precursor, the horseshoe arch—but the Europeans were the ones who noticed the things were more stable than round ones.
  
  Only, turns out, actually, they were using horseshoe arches in Visigoth Hispania at least a century before the Moors...and in pre-Islamic (i.e. Christian, specifically Maronite) Syria in the fourth century AD.
• Speaking of giving people (and peoples) too much credit, you know how the West is supposed to have gotten its Aristotelianism via Avicenna, Averroes, and Maimonides?
  
  Yes, well, none of them would've had a lick of Aristotle to their names if not for a guy named Isidore of Seville, who predates the lot of them by half a millennium. And as if being snubbed by history (in the name of Orientalist self-hatred) weren't bad enough, poor Isidore is now patron saint of the Internet. Seriously, you can just see Thomas More, patron of lawyers and politicians, who got beheaded by a close personal friend, slapping Isidore on the back and saying, "Damn, man. I mean, seriously. Rough break."
• It may've been changed by the wiki-magic, but TV Tropes used to claim that Vikings couldn't understand why Christians' god wanted them to kneel—supposedly their gods would want followers who were bold enough to stand in a god's presence, or something.
  
  Only, skít tarfs. Has, uh, anyone ever discussed the issue of kneeling with a representative of an Eastern church, Orthodox or Uniate? We Latins do it a hell of a lot more than them. Why? Well, let's just say that certain Germanic tribesmen felt it, as Jeeves would say, "a liberty", to remain standing in the presence of a holy being—while the Churches of former Byzantine territories (even the one founded by the Danish clan of Rus) retain the old Roman pride in bending the knee as little as possible.
  
  In other words, it is truer to say that Vikings (and similar) are the reason for all the Christian kneeling.