Language Usage
The name "Haplo" is said to mean "single" in the Patryn language, and "haplo-" is a Greek root word with the same meaning. Haplo and Marit's daughter is named "Rue", which in English is a verb meaning "to regret".
The term "mensch" is used by both Sartan and Patryns to refer to humans, elves, and dwarves, both collectively (all three races) and individually (one particular mensch person). Mensch is the German word for "human," but it is used in the books as a derogatory term.
The names "Sartan" and "Patryn" are defined in the books as "Those Who Bring Back Light," and "Those Who Return to Darkness" respectively.
A footnote suggests that the Lord of the Nexus took the name "Xar" from the Russian word tsar, which itself is a corruption of Caesar.
The Patryn city of Abri takes its name from the French word for "shelter".
Read more about this topic: The Death Gate Cycle
Famous quotes containing the words language and/or usage:
“This is of the loon—I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,—is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,—hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.”
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