What do Safeholders think about Bédard?

Since it seems like I have a little time before the next novel comes out I thought it might be appropriate to wonder about remote concepts. The one that occurred to me is to wonder what Safeholders think about the word "Bédard." Supposedly Safeholders speak English, and, unless they have words like rôle, façade, and naïve, no other words have an accent, much less an acute. I wonder what their explanation for it is, and whether other Safeholders name their children Bédard.

~Tonto

Tonto Silerheels wrote:Since it seems like I have a little time before the next novel comes out I thought it might be appropriate to wonder about remote concepts. The one that occurred to me is to wonder what Safeholders think about the word "Bédard." Supposedly Safeholders speak English, and, unless they have words like rôle, façade, and naïve, no other words have an accent, much less an acute. I wonder what their explanation for it is, and whether other Safeholders name their children Bédard.

~Tonto

Plenty of Safehold names among Adams and Eves came from sources other than English and have survived in altered form by now. I do imagine that characters that don't feature in English probably tended to vanish from current spellings, but they can still spell the names of angels, archangels, Adams and Eves, and the first generations, the way they were spelled originally. Pronunciation, on the other hand, is probably a total hash.

Judging from (e.g.) Bedard Bay and North Bedard Bay, the accent just gets dropped when it's not being used to refer precisely and exactly to the name of the Archangel.

It must be a pain for printers; it's not like they can mangle the spelling for simplicity's sake when they are printing the Holy Writ. It'd be inviting a mob with torches and pitchforks.

JeffEngel wrote:

Tonto Silerheels wrote:Since it seems like I have a little time before the next novel comes out I thought it might be appropriate to wonder about remote concepts. The one that occurred to me is to wonder what Safeholders think about the word "Bédard." Supposedly Safeholders speak English, and, unless they have words like rôle, façade, and naïve, no other words have an accent, much less an acute. I wonder what their explanation for it is, and whether other Safeholders name their children Bédard.

~Tonto

Plenty of Safehold names among Adams and Eves came from sources other than English and have survived in altered form by now. I do imagine that characters that don't feature in English probably tended to vanish from current spellings, but they can still spell the names of angels, archangels, Adams and Eves, and the first generations, the way they were spelled originally. Pronunciation, on the other hand, is probably a total hash.

Judging from (e.g.) Bedard Bay and North Bedard Bay, the accent just gets dropped when it's not being used to refer precisely and exactly to the name of the Archangel.

It must be a pain for printers; it's not like they can mangle the spelling for simplicity's sake when they are printing the Holy Writ. It'd be inviting a mob with torches and pitchforks.

Hope that the printing press is in perfect shape - otherwise ...

"But your Grace, I can't help it if the press developed a problem right there ..."
"Makes no difference - Punishment of Schueler for you!"

Sudden influx of printers to Empire of Charis.

You know, it's entirely possible that Safeholdians just don't spell Bedard's name with the accent. Any accent used in the text is because Bedard's name is for the same reason EVERY Safeholdian's name is creatively mispelled despite such spellings having no reason to exist in-universe.