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ma2kx

The MacLeod Life Cycle reminds me on the 5 seasons of the illuminati calendar:

Verwirrung Season of Chaos January 1-March 14

Zweitracht Season of Discord March 15-May 26

Unordnung Season of Confusion May 27-August 7

Beamtenherrschaft Season of Bureaucracy August 8-October 19

Grummet Season of Aftermath October 20-December 31

From the book Illuminatus!

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The translations make no sense to a German native speaker. The list even swap meanings, i.e. between confusion and clutter.

Accurate translations are:

Verwirrung = Confusion

Zwietracht = Discord

You swapped i and e; somehow English speakders do this to German words all of the time. The 'ie' in here is a long 'i'.

Zweitracht on the other hand would mean a "double traditional costume", if that word existed (it does exist in theory, it is just then number two [Zwei] and the noun for a traditional costume [Tracht] strung together; would be a great name for a German shop that sells used/pre-owned traditional costumes btw.)

Unordnung = Clutter

Beamtenherrschaft = Rule of the public servant class

Grummet = Second hay harvest

Illuminatus! is one of those works where there's a decent chance this is just a mistake or oversight, but also a decent chance this is exactly what the authors intended. You never can quite tell, and they definitely liked that.

I think the reason that English speakers swap ie/ei is that the pronunciations of these is not really consistent in English (at least in the American accent I speak), and I can't think of any words where both orderings exist but have different meanings. So the general impression I have about this is that I know there are supposed to be rules about it, but it seems pretty arbitrary and unimportant semantically.

Frahnken-STEEN vs Franken-STINE

Right, we truly don't have a strong rule about differentiating these in the standard American dialect! Most people say STINE for this one, but if you say STEEN, nobody is gonna be confused or tell you that it's wrong.

Exactly, Americans do use both pronunciations .

But Beamte are heavily linked to bureaucracy.

Chaos is the opposite of order and the opposite of Ordnung is Unordnung

TIL

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