Talk:Hythloth

Just a quick note, that Hythloth is a very old English word meaning Pride. This being the case, it technically is the opposing Dungeon to Humility, although it can potentially also oppose Spirituality.

However, Spirituality should technically be opposed by Doom, as the word doom means an unescapable destiny or fate, while spirituality is the one thing (at least on Britannia) that allows for an individual to ignore Fate and make their own path.

Although this could be argued against (and there are a plethora of good points to say it is wrong), there is no Dungeon named Pride (which technically there should be if every Virtue has an opposite), and as Hythloth is what it is, then it must oppose Humiliy.

This is issue is further confused by the Shrine of Humility being situated on the Isle of the Avatar, although this is also the entrance the original Stygian Abyss, a dungeon which more than likely connected to Doom when they were both still open.

However, the point is still up for debate, as Ultima IV seems to have complicated matters with its description of Humility versus Pride.


 * "Hythloth" is not a "very old English word". Not. Wrong. You might be confusing Anglo-Saxon (sometimes called Old English) with a version of English which is old, but Anglo-Saxon is not English. Second, as far as I can tell, it's not even an Anglo-Saxon word at all. If you can provide a dictionary which contains it, that would be great. I've consulted several Anglo-Saxon dictionaries, and it appears in zero of them. I can't even imagine a possible etymology for it. "Hyht" however would mean "hope", "hyt" would mean "heat", "hyð" would mean "harbor", "lot" would mean "fraud", and I can't find entries for anything like "loth" or "loð" or "loþ". The word "hythloth" it seems to me was just made up out of Garriott's imagination, perhaps based on some half-remembered childhood lesson in Anglo-Saxon etymologies, but more likely he just randomly pieced together syllables that sounded Saxony. --76.202.225.205 23:05, 12 September 2008 (UTC)
 * PS -- the above definition of "pride" is totally unlikely also on the premise that "pride" itself derives from Anglo-Saxon "prȳde". There are several poetical ways to say "pride" in the language of course, but they tend to begin with the prefix of "ofer", which means "over" or "excessively". I.e., "oferhoga" proud man, "oferhygd" pride, "ofermede" pride, "oferprut" excessively proud, etc. --76.202.225.205 23:24, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hylotheism