[ANSTHRLD] Bard's hall

[Tim McDaniel]

On Thu, 14 Jul 2011, Brett Chandler-Finch <naturemakeswell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Bard's hall  conflicts with Bard's Keep as their descriptive elements
> are equivalent.

I think not.  The applicable conflict rule in the Rules for Submission
is <http://heraldry.sca.org/laurel/rfs.html#5.2>.

      A descriptive element is a word other than a designator, an
      article, a preposition, or the name of a branch of the
      Society. Two descriptive elements are considered significantly
      different if they differ significantly in both sound and
      appearance. Descriptive elements that are not significantly
      different are said to be equivalent .

There's no question about parsing the branch name, "Canton of Bard's
Keep", the proposed conflict.  "Canton" is unquestionably a
designator, transparent to conflict, but a name has only one
designator.  (For example, if you could have registered "Baron's Burgh
Canton" ("Burgh" is an alternate designator for "Shire"), the
designator is "Canton" but neither of the other two are.)

I see two possible ways to parse the proposed submission: (1) it's
"Bard's Hall" and "Hall" is the designator, (2) it's "[designator] of
Bard's Hall" so "Hall" is NOT the designator.

Considering them in reverse order:

(2) If it's "House of Bard's Hall" versus "Canton of Bard's Keep"
     Designators are transparent: House and Canton drop
     Prepositions are transparent: of and of drop
     Drescriptive elements remaining: Bard's Hall
                                      Bard's Keep

"Two non-personal names with the same number of descriptive elements
conflict unless at least one of the following conditions is met.
i. Change of Elements - Two such names do not conflict if each of them
contains a descriptive element significantly different from every
descriptive element in the other. ..."
The household has "Hall" and the canton has "Keep", and they differ in
"sound and appearance", so they don't conflict.

(1) If it's "Bard's Hall" versus "Canton of Bard's Keep" -- I don't
know whether "Hall" is a permitted designator, but let's see what
happens anyway -- then the comparison is "Bard['s]" versus "Bard's
Keep".

"Two non-personal names with different numbers of descriptive elements
conflict if the only difference in the descriptive parts is the
addition of one or more modifiers to a single, already modified root
element."  But the root elements are "Bard" and "Keep", respectively,
so there's no conflict here.

So as far as I can tell, whichever way you parse it, there's no
conflict.

Denyel de Lincoln
-- 
Tim McDaniel, tmcd at panix.com