boucher book oct28.pdf - Index of

The Greatest Tertian 369
The Greatest Tertian *
One of the outstanding characteristics of the culture of the third planet from the Sun
is, as I have stressed earlier, the tendency toward onomatolatry, the worship of great
names all but divorced from any true biographical or historical comprehension.
Many of these names, employed with almost magical significance, must be investigated
in later chapters; they include (to give approximate phonetic equivalents)
Linkn, Mamt, Ung Klsam, Staln, Ro Sflt (who seems to have appeared in several
contradictory avatars), Bakh, Sokr Tis, Mi Klan Jlo, Me Uess-tt, San Kloss, and
many others, some of them indubitably of legendary origin.
But one name appears pre-eminently in every cultural cache so far investigated.
From pole to pole and in every Tertian language, we have yet to decipher any cultural
remains of any sizable proportion that do not contain at least a reference to what
must have been unquestionably the greatest Tertian of all time: Sherk Oms.
It is well at this point to settle once and for all the confusion concerning the two
forms of the name: Sherk Oms and Sherk Sper. A few eccentric scholars, notably
Shcho Raz in his last speech before the Academy, † have asserted that these names
represented two separate individuals; and, indeed, there are small items in which
the use of the two forms does differ.
Sherk Sper, for instance, is generally depicted as a writer of public spectacles;
Sherk Oms as a pursuer of offenders against society. Both are represented as living
in the capital city of the nation ** of In Glan under the unusual control of a female
administrator; but the name of this female is generally given, in accounts of Sherk
Sper, as Li Zbet; in accounts of Sherk Oms, as Vi Kto Rya.
The essential identity of these female names I have explained in my Tertian
Phonology * . The confusion of professions is more apparent than real; the fact of the
* Excerpt from Rom Gul’s Teritian History and Culture. Translated by Anthony
Boucher. 12 vols. Kovis, 4739.
† See my refutation in Academy Proceedings, 2578: 9, 11/76.
** For a full discussion of this extraordinary word, meaning a group of beings
feeling themselves set apart from, and above, the rest of the same type of beings (a
peculiarly Tertian concept), vide infra, Chapter 127.
369