What is "folkish"

Usage examples of "folkish".

It was hard for Joseph to make out what they were saying, for, although like all Masters he was fluent in Folkish as well as the Master tongue and the Indigene language also, the northern dialect these people used was unfamiliar to him and when they spoke rapidly and more than one was speaking at once, as they were doing now, he quickly lost the thread of their words.

Could a few Folkish malcontents actually cut him off from contact with his family with a couple of bombs?

Instantly a burst of hopeful conviction grew in him that this must be a punitive force sent by one of the local Great Houses to put down the uprising that had broken out on the Getfen lands, but then he realized that the motorcycle outriders, though they were helmeted and carried rifles, did not wear the uniforms of any formal peacekeeping-force but rather were clad in a hodgepodge of Folkish dress, jerkins, doublets, overalls, tunics, the clothing of a peasantry that had abruptly been transformed into an improvised militia.

But no, no, the man rode on and did not reappear, and a few moments later one final truck, open-bodied and packed front to back with Folkish troops standing shoulder to shoulder, went rolling by, and the road was empty again.

It was only a matter of luck that he had not sauntered out onto that highway just as those Folkish troops passed by, and very likely they would have shot him on sight if they had noticed him standing there.

Aboard them, or in some cases pulling or pushing them, was a desperate-looking raggle-taggle horde of Folkish refugees, people who had piled their household belongings and their domestic animals and anything else they could take with them into this collection of improvised vehicles and were, plainly, fleeing as hurriedly as they could from some horrifying catastrophe that was happening in the west.

A vision rose before him of a chain of charred and desolate manor-houses stretching all the way south to the Isthmus, triumphant Folkish rebels controlling the roads everywhere, the last few surviving Masters hunted down one by one and given over to death.

He wondered just how much the Ardardin actually knew about the reach and success of the Folkish uprising.

None of the Folkish girls of the House would have dared refuse a young Master.

Helikis, where the Masters were absentee landlords and the farms were operated in their name by bailiffs who were themselves of Folkish blood.

Sometimes Joseph would catch sight of curling white plumes of smoke far away, rising from what he suspected were the chimneys of a Folkish village along the edge of some high slope.

But of course this was a large continent and much of it, even after all these centuries of the human presence on Homeworld, was still as it had been when the first Folkish explorers had landed here.

He still clung to the fantasy that if only he kept walking at this steady pace, ten miles a day, fifteen, however much he might be able to cover, he would come to the bottom of this continent sooner or later and cross over into Helikis, where, he wanted to believe, there had been no Folkish uprising and he would find people to help him get the rest of the way home.

Without much hope Joseph tried Folkish and then Master, with the same result.

But his beard was an untidy straggling thing and he was a short, heavy-set man wearing a tight yellow jerkin and loose-fitting trousers that flared at the cuffs, Folkish clothes, and his face, framed by his long unkempt grayish hair, was a pure Folkish face, coarse-featured, heavy-jawed, bulbous-nosed.