Minor Apologia (Chapter IV) · 9:11pm May 23rd, 2016
...for skipping over most of the process of language learning and translation that would have been necessary to get communication going. (Bad SF author, no cookie for you.)
Strictly speaking, there should have been an awful lot more clapping, pointing at things, exchanging words, trying to decide if that was a noun or a verb or a proper name, swapping notations, etc., etc. in an attempt to build some kind of translation matrix before there was any actual talking going on. And in another time, and another place, I could easily have blown chapters 4-30 on that, no problem, rather than solving the problem by, since it was Luna's dreamscape powers that let the magic translator amulet be constructed, deus ex dea.
But, much as the Stargate writers concluded that having Daniel Jackson spent the first half of each episode figuring out the local language would not be a good use of screen time, that particular problem is not really what this story is about. (And, conveniently, pulling linguistic knowledge right out of people's heads is exactly the kind of 'big angelic powers' Cordelia would expect the Power(s) behind the Equus system to have.) Thus, I choose to elide it, without relying on the truly plausibility-breaking "Equestrian Just Happens To Be Identical To English" clause, which only gets less plausible when your deuteragonist doesn't speak English either.
(Incidentally, those who are looking for a good example of language acquisition in a story might care to direct themselves to Admiral Biscuit's excellent Celestia Sleeps In.)
No cookie for you.
You do get a biscuit.
No cookies for you for now, at least not until you've run them through biological assay. No telling how compatible those Equestrian proteins are with your off-world biochemistry.
Actually, I thought it was kind of a neat demonstration that "magic" is really magic. Cordelia is a first-contact specialist who is familiar with the state of the art in alien language translation, and she was thinking about how it was necessary to go through all those steps even with the very best technology had to offer. Then Twilight pulls out a magic rock and bypasses it all.
Makes no sense. It worked anyway.
So, these ponies have something that not only outdoes the best technology the Associated Worlds has to offer, but does stuff they didn't even know you could do. And yet their roofs are made of straw thatch and the state of their art in ground transportation is steam locomotives. It will be quite the puzzler.
3967823 Good observation there. Equestrian magic or magitech seems pretty orthogonal to mundane science-based tech, with the consequence that each finds different things easy or hard to do. Even disregarding the high-level benefits of interstellar fleets or star-tossing Alicorns, that's a pretty compelling reason for both sides to invest in this new friendship.