Tintin Forums

Here's a question a trifle easier than the previous one!
Flight 714 'to Sydney' is connected with The Black Island via:

- similar UK aircraft registrations such as G-CATF & G-AIRJ (see Trivia Challenge Q45).
- the same martial (somehow military*) art practised by Calculus and Tintin (see Trivia Challenge Q3).
- a sound-barrier crossing (in the Carreidas that flies Mach-II) versus language-barrier crossings (in the UK).
- the original title L'Ile Noir*, that can operate as a childish password to the 'East Indies' or Sondonesia (via the languages successively met by Tintin in The Black Island).

Which data -mentioned in those books- is liable to mirror the languages virtually met by Tintin in the UK, namely Scots (in Kiltoch) and Gaelic (in Craigh Dhui)?

language-barrier crossings
I think most people here will need to cross the ‘yamilah language barrier’ in order to understand the question. “... is liable to mirror the languages virtually met by Tintin” - what does that mean exactly?

I have a funny feeling that this is another “theory-based” question and therefore impossible to answer.

The only thing I can think of which fits the "down-to-earth" reference of your question's title, fits the word "data" and fits the Gaelic/Scots language divide, is altitude. (This would also fit with the possible hint towards aviation that you're maybe giving in one of your examples of links between the two books.)

In both books, I think that aircraft's altitudes are referred to. (I don't have the books in front of me right now.) In Flight 714, I think the baddies give their altitude and position to the control tower, before descending very low to evade radar. In The Black Island, the airshow commentator maybe refers to the low flying of the Thompsons' unqualified pilot. Does Tintin's pilot refer to their altitude when they hit the fog? In any case, altitude (or the lack of it!)is generally critical in Tintin's fogbound crash in Scotland, and in the baddie's pane crash near Eastdown, and in the Thompson's desire to be taken down to earth again.

Anyway, the way that altitude mirrors the languages Scots and Gaelic is that roughly speaking, Scots tends to be spoken in the Scottish Lowlands (some Scots dialects are known as "Lalands", though I'm not sure if I'm spelling that right) and Gaelic tends to be spoken in the Scottish Highlands.

Is this what you had in mind?

Well, I guess Balthazar’s answer kind of shoots my “impossible to answer” theory down to earth...

We don't know whether I'm right yet!

I vote you get the point. Let's move on... quick, ask a question Balthazar!!

Balthazar
Anyway, the way that altitude mirrors the languages Scots and Gaelic is that roughly speaking, Scots tends to be spoken in the Scottish Lowlands (...) and Gaelic tends to be spoken in the Scottish Highlands
Sorry I wasn't around yesterday.
You've found a good clue, Balthazar: the 'down-to-earth' data is indeed connected with Scottish geology rather than with altitude.
And it is rendered by a liquid avatar.

Ranko
I vote you get the point. Let's move on... quick, ask a question Balthazar!!
Thanks for that - that’s the funniest post I’ve read in ages anywhere…!

I'll resist Ranko's naughty suggestion to set another question quick, and instead have another go at unravelling yamilah's. (Are you sure it's a trifle easier than my last one, yamilah?)

I guess you could say that the cave tunnel Tintin crawls through on the Black Island has probably been "rendered" by the liquid "avatar" of sea-water (especially if we're also taking "avatar" to means a force of transformation), whereas the cave tunnels of Pulau Pulau Bompa were probably natural vents for the liquid "avatar" of lava (if we're taking "avatar" to mean a substance that itself transforms - ie: solidifies as it cools.)

And the West Highland landscape that Tintin walks to to reach Kiltoch would have been "rendered" into its form by glaciers during the last ice age. Not sure if you could descibe ice as a "liquid avatar" though. If we're taking "avatar" to mean a substance that itself transforms, I'd describe ice as the solid "avatar" of liquid water, and liquid water as the "liquid avatar" of ice . But maybe you could describe water as an "avatar" generally since it metamorphoses between different states - gaseous, liquid and solid. (But then so do most elements and compounds, I'd have thought.)

Of course, much of the Scottish landscape was also formed by volcanic geology, such as here in my adopted home city of Edinburgh. Maybe you could speculate that the black rocks of the Black Island are also igneous (volcanically formed) due to being black and granite-like, so maybe that tunnel is a lava vent too. I don't know. (Where's that Swiss/French possible-geologist Professor Cantonneau when you need him?)

By the way, all this is assuming that you're using "avatar" in one of its French meanings (a definition I finally tracked down in an earlier thread), rather than in any English definition of the word (the chosen language of this forum), but for the sake of getting to the bottom of this question, I'll let that pass!

Not sure how any of this geological stuff mirrors the two languages within the context of the Tintin books. There is a geological division line in Scotland called the Highland Boundary Fault Line, which traverses the country diagonally between the isle of Arran in the west and the town of Stonehaven in the East, and this does approximately mark the boundary between general rock-types and between languages, with the traditionally Scots-speaking area and sedimentary (often sandstone) geology lying to the south-east of the line and the traditionally Gaelic-speaking area and metamorphic geology (I think) lying to the north-west of the line.

Tintin crash-landing in Scotland is well to the north-west of this line, I'd say. Hergé based Craigh Dhui castle on Lochranza castle on Arran, but the island is clearly not supposed to be located where Arran is. Arran lies in the Clyde Estuary, some way to the south-west of Glasgow, whereas the location of the fictional Kiltoch (from its West Highland architecture, carefully researched by Bob de Moore) doesn't look like a town on the Ayrshire coast, but on some part of the west coast to the north of the Kintyre penninsular, making the Black Island a small island in the Inner Hebrides.

As you say, Kiltoch (in spite of being located within traditional 'Gaeldom') looks like a non-Gaelic place name (kilt being a word imported into Scots from its sister dialect of old-English, I think), though I think the prefix Kil (quite comon in Scottish place names) may be Gaelic - I'm not sure. In any case, many Scottish place names are quite mixed up liguistically and their language origins don't always follow any neat boundary line between traditional Scots and Gaelic areas. Since Gaelic is now spoken mainly on the islands, rather than in mainland West Highland areas, you could argue that Tintin is crossing a modern language line as he crosses the sea to the island, but this would only work if the Black Island was inhabited by Gaelic-speaking islanders, rather than by a gang of international forgers!

Anyway, as my earlier example of volcanic Edinburgh shows, Scotland's geology doesn't always follow the neat boundary line, any more than place names do, so maybe your answer has nothing to do with geology-language connections! Is any of this ramble getting close to the answr you had in mind, yamilah, or am I barking up the wrong avatar?

Sorry about 'avatar', I was always based on Herge's word and on http://www.wordreference.com/enfr/AVATAR

Balthazar
There is a geological division line in Scotland called the Highland Boundary Fault Line, which traverses the country diagonally.

You're almost at it!
What is the link between this geological Fault connected with both Lowlands/Scots and Highlands/Gaelic & a large amount of water & a bottled small amount of liquid, named in the two books?