The Wekht of Jandola?

[SandChigger]

Anybody got any clues about this one? Unless that Chapterhouse quote I've asked about in the other thread turns up, this is only mentioned twice (that I can find) in FH's books:

Waff closed his eyes and waited for the others to leave. Masheikh! How good it was to name themselves in kehl, speaking the language of Islamiyat, which no Tleilaxu spoke outside his own secret councils; not even to Face Dancers did they speak it. Nowhere in the Wekht of Jandola, not to the farthest reaches of the Tleilaxu Yaghist, was there a living powindah who knew this secret.

Yaghist, Waff thought, rising from his bench. Yaghist, the land of the unruled.

"The Wekht of Jandola is no more," he said. "Billions of us slain by those whores. To the farthest reaches of the Yaghist, we are destroyed and only I remain."

Yaghist, she thought. Land of the unruled. It was a revealing word in Islamiyat, the Bene Tleilax language.

FH appears to have been using it as synonymous with Yaghist, the realm of the Tleilaxu. (The variant passage in the other thread pretty much equates it to "Tleilaxu hegemony".)

Jandola is an actual place in Pakistan, but there's nothing online (other than Dune references) that associate it with something called a "wekht". (It doesn't appear to be a famous archeological site or architectural object, for example.) I've wondered what "wekht" derives from, but have never been able to find anything. The word isn't in the Graham and Doughty books, either.

What's brought this up all of a sudden is a couple of google hits on HToD that I noticed in the access logs. Seems a guy named Rick Wakely (ring any bells for anyone?) has been tooling around the Web looking for the origins of wekht, kehl, Yaghist, and a couple other Tleilaxu terms. (Not with much luck, it appears.)

I guess I need to check the lists of FH's books to see if there were any old travelogues for Persia, Afghanistan and India.

[MrFlibble]

Well, seeing as how you've been able to find sources for so many words already, we can hope that sooner or later, this mystery will be solved as well BTW, what about the Yaghist? Have I missed the explanation for that one?

[SandChigger]

We can hope. I think I pinned down another one last night in a totally unexpected place.

(Not a source, but another pointer in a direction we're already familiar with. Gonna blog it up tonight after I get home.)

Yaghist I haven't really looked for yet. But it's one of those words that Rick Wakely guy is also looking for. (Wekht, Yaghist and kehl were others.)

(On one forum, some dimwit told him that the words were meaningless outside the novel he referenced. We've seen how foolish that opinion is! )

[Aquila ka-Hecate]

I look forward to your blog post Chig.

Wekht appears to be Afghani.

[SandChigger]

It's going to be tomorrow morning, now, on the post.

Did you find something for wekht online then?

[Aquila ka-Hecate]

It's going to be tomorrow morning, now, on the post.

Did you find something for wekht online then?

Ya - I was idly googling the word and came up with mostly Afghani sites.

I have no idea what it means, although the word is demonstrably there. I had to go write some code about then, to earn my daily bread.

[A Thing of Eternity]

If I was FH I would have totally just made a few up to mess with people researching the stuff.

[SandChigger]

Ya - I was idly googling the word and came up with mostly Afghani sites.

I got a lot of copies of some poem/song lyrics. Not being able to tell Pashto (I assume) heads from tails, it's kinda hard to tell what it means, even with the translation.

[muddism]

Lowland Scotch as spoken in the lower Strathearn district of Perthshire...

Wekht - 1) weight
2) a round vessel for holding corn
3) balance


hope that helps some, it's the only reference to wekht that I would find.



-The clear path leads ever downward into stagnation-

[lotek]

That's interesting !

(imagine a Scots on Arrakis though, "Feckin' heel it's as dry as a worm's gob here .!")

Anyway...

It reminds me of the "sevagram" at the end of Van Vogt's Weapon Makers

What we'll wind up ruling, by inevitable historical process. At the end of The Weapon Makers a casual super-race intruded, observed humanity briefly, and pronounced it the race that would rule the Sevagram. It was finally revealed that the word came from a speech by Gandhi; the Hindus believe that the village is the center of the universe, and their word for "village" is "sevagram".

http://fancyclopedia.wikidot.com/sevagram" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Nowhere in the Wekht of Jandola, not to the farthest reaches of the Tleilaxu Yaghist,

that sentence structure makes me think the two concepts are either opposed as in "from the south to the north" kind of way, or that possibly one is just a smaller secret part of the other.

[muddism]

Hmm...possibly wekht means city...wekht being the vessel that holds tleilaxu, instead of corn.

The city of Jandola

Does that sound likely?

[SandChigger]

Thanks for the input! It would be really odd (but not impossible) for FH to have mixed something Scottish into the mix....

[Ampoliros]

Sounds like its something like the Fremen Tau. Wekht = Tau and Jandola is either the person or location that first spread this idea. Something like Augustine's "City of God".

That's my interpretation, at least. Wekht is the body/society created from the community of the Tleilaxu religion. As Waff is the only one left, it no longer has meaning.

[SandChigger]

Ahp.

I was more interested in the etymology of the name. The Scottish origin idea makes less and less sense.

[muddism]

You're probably right but that was the only definition of the word that I could find in any language so I thought I would post it.

[Omphalos]

Thanks for the input! It would be really odd (but not impossible) for FH to have mixed something Scottish into the mix....

Why? The "Orange" of the OCB is an Irish reference that has Scottish connections

[Serkanner]

Thanks for the input! It would be really odd (but not impossible) for FH to have mixed something Scottish into the mix....

Why? The "Orange" of the OCB is an Irish reference that has Scottish connections

Or it is a reference to the name of the Dutch royal family. This would make sense because it was Stadhouder Willem III who became the protestant King of England after he married Mary. The Irish "Orange" are named after the Stadhouder-Koning.

[Omphalos]

I took it as something that came out of the C.E.T. The melding of Catholics and Protestants.

[Serkanner]

I took it as something that came out of the C.E.T. The melding of Catholics and Protestants.

So have I. But the "Orange" part is hardly just an "Irish" thing. The Protestant movement eventually reached Ireland after half of Europe was already converted to one of the many Protestant movements. The Dutch variant ... not really Dutch but it stuck ... was the teachings of Calvin. The Protestant ( Calvinist ) part of The Netherlands revolted against the Spanish empire in the 16th Century under the leadership of the noble family of Oranje Nassau ... we won and became a Republic in which the Oranje Nassau family gained a lot of power. This resulted in the invitation to Stadhouder Willem III to invade England because he was married to Mary Stuart. He was proclaimed King of England and Ireland ... The use of the protestant Irish people of the colour Orange is related to the house of Orange. The Orange marches in Northern Ireland are a celebration of the landing of Willem III in England and the defeat of the last Catholic king of England James II Stuart.

[Omphalos]

I took it as something that came out of the C.E.T. The melding of Catholics and Protestants.

So have I. But the "Orange" part is hardly just an "Irish" thing. The Protestant movement eventually reached Ireland after half of Europe was already converted to one of the many Protestant movements. The Dutch variant ... not really Dutch but it stuck ... was the teachings of Calvin. The Protestant ( Calvinist ) part of The Netherlands revolted against the Spanish empire in the 16th Century under the leadership of the noble family of Oranje Nassau ... we won and became a Republic in which the Oranje Nassau family gained a lot of power. This resulted in the invitation to Stadhouder Willem III to invade England because he was married to Mary Stuart. He was proclaimed King of England and Ireland ... The use of the protestant Irish people of the colour Orange is related to the house of Orange. The Orange marches in Northern Ireland are a celebration of the landing of Willem III in England and the defeat of the last Catholic king of England James II Stuart.

I was aware of the war (the second SF book ever was set during it) and only vaguely of the connection, so thanks for the info! But FH was of Irish on his mother's side and after reading The White Plague I'm afraid I've let Irish history and politics color all of the wool-gathering I do about FH.

[SandChigger]

I meant odd in connection with something so obviously Muslim (& Pakistani?).

Besides, wekht = weight makes no sense in context.

[leowgginsvo]

In case anybody else stumbles upon this, I'll share something I found today.

tl;dr it seems like wekht means "time" in Hindi. So the Wekht of Jandola is "The Time of Jandola" (and Jandola was the capital city of the Pashtun Bettani, who seemed to inspire a lot of the Tleilaxu)

Okay, here's the path I took.

There's a singer Riaz Sahar who has a song "xue Imon wekht khatra"
Language detection shows a match for Hindi and writes it as "सुए िमों वख्त खतरा" and within those characters "वख्त" corresponds both with the word Time and the romanization vekht (which could explain why it's been hard to track down). Clearly Riaz Sahar chose to romanize it as Wekht, and the Time of Jandola makes a lot more sense than the "weight" or the "corn holder", although huge props to previous searchers because finding that definition from lowland Scotch is so obscure and cool

As another note, I found this post https://hinative.com/questions/12485316 asking about the "difference between समय and वक़्त ?" and the second word there romanizes as vaqt, an apparent THIRD romanization of Wekht

I'd be interested to hear a Hindi speaker's perspective on the nuance of वख्त / वक़्त over the other words that pop up when you translate "time" from english to Hindi. Maybe something in the nuance there gives us more understanding of why Frank chose Wekht over Samay or something

[georgiedenbro]

Well, I have to say I have no idea what to make of that...