Chapter 17 - Corpus Dialecti
“Well, well! That is very interesting.”
Commander Darcy turned around at Elena’s words. “What’d you find, Weiss?” he asked.
“I’m not sure if you would understand it,” she replied, “even if you did overhear me talking to Dr. Konstantinov about it.”
“Oh, the genetics?” He chuckled. “I got the gist of it, no need to worry. So tell me, what did you find just now?”
“As you might remember from school,” she started explaining, “DNA as we know it is based on four nucleotides, each pairing with one specific one and – ideally, at least – not with any of the others. Adenine goes with thymine – or uracil, with RNA – and cytosine with guanine. With me so far?”
“Yes, go on.”
“Furthermore. . . .” She paused for a moment to recall the words in English. “Adenine and guanine are known as purines – meaning they are a pair of molecular rings fused together. Cytosine, thymine, and uracil are pyrimidines – a single ring, by itself.”
“Are they pyramid-shaped at least?” he asked.
Elena burst out laughing – something she sorely needed after analyzing xenobiological data for so long. “Good heavens, no! No!” She took a moment to catch her breath. “It just means, the name, that it’s similar in structure to pyridine – which, in turn, is a benzene ring with a nitrogen atom replacing a methine group.”
“Ah well, thought I was onto something.”
“No need to worry, I got that from my family as well.” She cleared her throat. “So in essence, each purine goes with a pyrimidine. Adenine goes with thymine because it forms two hydrogen bonds, and cytosine with guanine, since it forms three bonds.” She sighed. “Oh, if only I had something to draw it – oh!” She looked down, remembering the pad of paper by her terminal.
Grabbing a pen, she started sketching out a review lesson for the commander, insisting that each molecule be marked correctly. “Here is cytosine, here is thymine, here is uracil,” she told him, pointing to each one as she named them. “Notice how, despite their similar shapes, each of them have a different arrangement of atoms.”
“I can sorta see it,” he said. “Mostly between thymine and uracil – it’s just that one thing sticking out there.”
“Correct.” She nodded. “And here is adenine and guanine. Two rings, of different sizes, linked together, like so.”
He squinted. “The smaller rings are identical – I guess they’re not as important.” He put a hand up to his chin. “Would it be possible to make some sort of DNA using only pyrimidines?”
“An interesting question, Commander – but one I cannot answer readily.” She glanced over to her terminal. “However. . . that is not what I expect we will be dealing with on Rhysling.”
He arched an eyebrow. “How so?”
“As you might have heard – ” she traced her finger across the terminal screen – “genetic interaction between our sort of life and theirs is flatly impossible. How exactly is very simple, yet yields some surprising benefits, which I will get to. First – those bases I mentioned?” She ‘swept’ them aside with her hand. “Forget them – we are seeing other bases on Rhysling.”
“Other bases, huh?” He leaned into the monitor. “Are you sure of this? Perhaps they’re some sort of contaminants the probe recorded by mistake.”
“Not a chance, Commander.” She tapped one part of the xenogenetic strand. “That is solidly attached to the strand. I cannot say for sure what that is – I have several different ideas – but I can conclude that it is, in fact, not cytosine.”
“And I can imagine you have no idea about the other three bases,” he surmised. “Three, right? There aren’t more or fewer?”
“No, there are four bases,” she explained. “Just like ours. Which leads me to another benefit.” She snapped her fingers. “Viruses. If they have viruses like ours, or even any at all, they cannot effect us – nor the other way.”
“Maybe not right now.” He paused to think for a moment. “But what if they mutate into something that could infect us? Our crops? What then?”
“Fundamentally speaking, that is not possible.” She tapped the screen. “Different bases, remember?”
“Right, right.” He sighed. “If you say so. Still. . . .”
“Think of it this way,” she added – “it’s like trying to open a tubular lock with a skeleton key.” After the commander chuckled at the analogy, she continued. “But what I was also thinking of was that we may be able to digest some food grown on Rhysling. Not what we’ve brought – I mean natively-grown, natively-bred, natively-evolved. The similar yet different genetic bases means the analogue proteins they yield are useful to us.”
“And vice versa?” He tilted his head.
“That remains to be seen.” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “But this I can confirm: if Terrestrial DNA were to meet Rhyslinger DNA, they might have a few lucky places to connect base pairs – but there would be no way to connect fully with something so fundamentally different to us. Those already chance links, weak as they are, would fall apart as soon as they connect, ensuring a lack of consequences for interaction.”
He nodded. “I could see that happening; interesting stuff.”
Then it was her turn to chuckle. “Funnily enough, my initial findings had me thinking we were looking at an opposing chirality.”
“Opposing, huh?” He raised an eyebrow. “What’s the difference? What would that have meant for us?”
“It’s the way they’re twisted.” She held down the shift key and hit the minus repeatedly, zooming out of the genetic structure. “Ours twists to the right – if Rhyslinger DNA twisted to the left, it would be a much more sure way to avoid interaction. But on the other hand – ” she snickered – “it would mean any proteins they produce would be useless to us.”
“Even if that were the case,” he asked, “couldn’t it, I dunno, flip over and interact with us?”
“Not possible.” She shook her head. “That is what ‘chiral’ means – it’s as if you want to cut off both of your hands, then reättach them on opposite limbs.”
“. . . let’s not bring that up again.” He held up his right arm and rolled up his jumpsuit’s sleeve, exposing a large violet band around his forearm. “Brings back bad memories of Maritime Command.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.” She turned her face away, her cheeks flushing red in embarrassment.
“That’s alright, you didn’t know.” He rolled his sleeve back down.
··–··
The sun started to disappear over the Rhyslinger horizon. Its golden glows gave their last to illuminate the final moments of the day, and all that were there to see it – be they the houses of the town, the shrubs that lined the road. . . and one glistening white bipedal figure, running out of the town as fast as possible with a book clutched under an arm.
Adam couldn’t believe his good luck. Not only did the Indigenous Rhyslingers study their own language, they had also apparently codified it in such a way that it could be written in a textbook and be taught to students – in such quantities, not to mention, that he could buy it, and it only cost him just a few coins!
His mind went back to those who came before – the first explorers of new and uncharted lands, like Plymouth, Hawai’i, and Zanzibar – and realized just how easy he had it to be able to study the language indigenous to Rhysling from printing, a benefit denied to those early explorers. His heart was racing, he found himself short of breath – and not just from the running, either – and though his legs started to tire out from having to carry thirty kilograms of equipment on a dusty road and across a bridge, he didn’t care. He couldn’t care, not when he was this close to a breakthrough.
The scrubber alarm went off just as he stepped off the bridge, but he ignored the piercing noise and kept on jogging back to the lander. He didn’t have time to panic – not to mention he knew what the symptoms were of carbon dioxide poisoning, as he had gone through it before. He could stand a few minutes of waiting on the last of the scrubber.
Keeping the book clutched tightly under his shoulder, he practically leapt up the ladder onto the scaffolding. He threw open the sterile locker, gently set the book inside to avoid damaging it any more than he may already have had, then shut its door and started sterilizing the book. Then he slammed his back against the suitport. The life support backpack clicked firmly in place, and he slammed the sterilizer button.
Two minutes – the same two minutes as they had always been, but his patience was at an all-time low. He flipped up his display, to check the time remaining – 1:45, not to mention that scrubber capacity remaining was at eleven percent. He thought it’d be lower – at least I won’t suffocate during my wait.
He decided to kill the time thinking about the possibilities of the language. From the outset, from the moment he first landed and made contact with Antir, Ukhǃerr contained phonemes that the human mouth could be trained to replicate – though if there was anything else, like unviewable colors, he would be in trouble. What if they use vibrations? Any luminescence? The unicorns might give him trouble in that department. To say nothing on their body language, either – so far, he had been blessed with the fact that their facial expressions were remarkably. . . human. Ones he could understand with near-perfect clarity. He could easily recognize joy, anger, sadness, and all the shades in between – and he reckoned they could see the same from his face, if they could see through the glass.
He looked down into his hands – and knew how well they had served him for this long, but realized all the same that they only managed to convey simple ideas. Sooner or later, he knew, there will come a time when he would need to describe something, he would not be able to sign it, and he would be lost. And in all likelihood, it could be something vital to the mission.
. . . :30. . . :29. . . .
He remembered reading somewhere that equine body language – at least, for those from Earth – worked primarily on ears. Different ear positions, no matter how minute the difference, could convey an entirely different message. Adam knew some people could wiggle their ears, but he wasn’t one of them. Nor, he realized, could he replicate it with his hands – in case of hoof-based language. And good luck with the pegasi, he realized, if they used a wing-based body language. As far as he had come, he still had much further to go. Not just orally, either – certain motions, intonation, and other minutiae, these would prove to be the great roadblocks in mankind’s contact efforts.
. . . :14. . . :13. . . .
At ten percent capacity remaining, he simply shut his chest display, crossed his arms, and started tapping his foot. By now, the sterile locker must have finished its job, and stood by waiting for someone inside to come and collect it. He sighed – he was so close now, he could just taste his success – as sweet as the champagne from his graduation party. . . .
. . . :06. . . :05. . . .
Time to make history.
. . . :02. . . :01. . . :00!
At long last, the alarm shut up, and the rear hatch swung open, and the cooler air inside the lander melded with his sweating skin. He slithered his arms out from those of the suit, reached up to the metal bar, and swung himself out, just as he always did each and every time. Planting both feet firmly on the floor, he quickly brought himself over to the sterile locker, unlocked it, and threw open the door.
There it was – perfectly intact, and ripe for his eyes.
But before he reached out to grab it, he looked down at his hands – how wrinkled they were, from all the sweat he’d built up, and how cold they were as well, as it evaporated off of his skin. No, no this would not do at all. The sweat could damage something important. I need to wash up first.
He grabbed the bottle of shampoo and liquid soap from under his cot, and started stripping off his garments – quickly glancing at the window to make sure the shutter was closed, so none of the Indigenous could possibly be watching. Good – don’t want a repeat of that incident. He threw off his cooling garment, and pulled off his waste garment, binning it immediately.
–··–·
Once his hands were cleaned and dried off, he pulled on his international orange jumpsuit – its rough Nomex fabric dry and cool against his skin – and stood back up. This time, confident that he could not possibly harm the pages or ink with his sweat, he grabbed the book from the locker – noting the finely-textured linen cover, with thick yet crisp pages bound between the cover boards – and brought it over to the desk. He cleared off everything save for the things he thought he would need – pen and paper, most certainly. Coins, that gem, and other whatnot, those could wait.
But I should probably announce the news. They should all see. He set down his pen and grabbed the radio. “Zulu-Alfa, this is Somerset,” he opened, restraining his excitement. “I have some fantastic news regarding the mission! Please acknowledge, over!”
He did not have to wait long. “This is Zulu-Alfa,” Louis would reply. “What happened, did you get a divine message from the Lord Himself, showing you how to speak it? Over.”
Adam threw his head back and laughed – yes, it certainly seemed that way! “That might be true,” he replied, “with how convenient it happened to me. But no, just today I learned about the existence of an Indigenous-language textbook – and more, I bought one such copy from a local schoolteacher. This is it! This is the breakthrough I’ve been looking for – the breakthrough all of you have been waiting for! Over.”
No reply. Perhaps they too were elated at the news? he pondered. I wouldn’t blame them – I would be too. He set the radio down and opened the book – to just the inside cover. Blank. Okay. . . . The next page was some sort of title page, with a horse’s silhouetted head, the author named below that, and right at the very bottom. . . Adam had to squint, but it was even more text. If he had to guess, it was the name of the publisher or a copyright notice.
Then the radio lit up again. “Anton here’s just wondering, Somerset, are you sure that’s right?” Louis asked. “To him, even with the books you have from the library, it seems far too convenient for you to have come across the answer key to such a difficult test. Over.”
. . . not the reaction I was expecting, but I’ll take it. “It’s completely right, Zulu-Alfa, so far as I can see,” he answered. “I can’t even imagine the wealth of knowledge that is at my fingertips!” But I won’t have much longer to imagine. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll need all the time I can get to completely go over this book. Tango-1 going dark.” Now that he was sure the others wouldn’t interrupt his studies, save for something equally important, he set the radio down and took another look inside the book. A few more flips of the pages showed what he figured to be a table of contents. He chuckled to himself – better get started with the basics.
He clicked his pen, and opened the book to the first section.
–·
“. . . meaning we can grow Terrestrial crops in Rhyslinger soil,” Louis concluded with Dr. Weiss, “without having to isolate greenhouses from the biosphere.”
“Is that not what I said?”
He turned around, and saw Dr. Konstantinov hovering at the bridge’s entrance. “Was it?”
“It was.” He pushed off the edge of the entrance, and bounded to the wall between Louis and Weiss. “Did I miss anything?”
She shook her head. “No, nothing at all – ”
“Zulu-Alfa, this is Somerset!” The linguist sounded like he was straining to contain some great emotion. “I have some fantastic news regarding the mission! Please acknowledge, over!”
“This better be good.” Louis grabbed the radio and replied, “This is Zulu-Alfa. What happened, did you get a divine message from the Lord Himself, showing you how to speak it? Over.”
Adam took a moment to reply, which the commander found odd. “That might be true,” Dr. Somerset would respond, “with how convenient it happened to me. But no, just today I learned about the existence of an Indigenous-language textbook – and more, I bought one such copy from a local schoolteacher.” As Louis’s eyes started threatening to bug out of their sockets, Somerset continued, “This is it! This is the breakthrough I’ve been looking for – the breakthrough all of you have been waiting for! Over.”
And indeed it was. “C’est quoi cette merde,” Louis muttered under his breath, “est-ce-qu’yé sérieux?” He glanced around the bridge. “You two did hear that, right?”
The biologist nodded vigorously – but the cryogenicist arched an eyebrow. “Somehow it should not seem so easy,” he said. “From my own experience, if Fortune should offer you something you want, is always a trap.”
“Is that so?” Louis asked – then, “Right, right, you’re from the Soviet Union. I wouldn’t blame you for being so cynical.”
“What is ‘cynical’?”
“It’s. . . .” Louis had to pause to gather his thoughts, to find a suitable way to define the word. “It’s when you’re distrustful of other people, of their honesty or their honor. Does that make sense?”
“I suppose.” Konstantinov shrugged. “So, is Somerset absolutely certain that he found what he needed?”
“Only one way to find out.” With the radio still in his hand, he transmitted “Anton here’s just wondering, Somerset, are you sure that’s right? To him, and to me as well, it seems far too convenient for you to have come across the answer key to such a difficult test. Over.”
“It’s completely right, Zulu-Alfa, so far as I can see,” Dr. Somerset answered within the moment. “I can’t even imagine the wealth of knowledge that is at my fingertips!”
The cryogenicist just scoffed.
“If you’ll excuse me,” the linguist closed, “I’ll need all the time I can get to completely go over this book. Tango-1 going dark.” And no further message came, nor went.
“I am willing to bet my personal kit that Dr. Somerset’s ‘breakthrough’ will amount to nothing at all,” Dr. Konstantinov announced. “Will anyone take it?”
Louis turned to face him, eyebrow raised. “You know that gambling during the mission is against code, right Anton?”
“Is it?” He seemed genuinely confused. “I do not remember reading it. Memory loss is one symptom possible of cryostasis.”
The commander maintained his steely skeptical stare at him – before he burst out in laughter. “No, there’s nothing that doesn’t allow gambling once we’ve left Earth.” He regained his composure, making sure he was still oriented properly. “But I’m not taking you up on it. I have other things to worry about at the moment.”
“Neither shall I,” Dr. Weiss added. She started getting up. “If anyone needs me, I will be in the. . . gallery? To eat something.”
“Galley,” Louis corrected.
“Right, merssi vilmal.” She shoved herself off the wall and over to the bridge’s exit, and disappeared down Altair’s central spindle.
Dr. Konstantinov looked back to Louis. “Anything else new?”
“No, nothing at all.” He turned back to the terminal. “As you were, Doctor.”
The cryogenicist shrugged and left the bridge as well, leaving Louis alone with his work.
··
Cold pressurized water entered the packet of greens. Once Elena dispensed eighty milliliters, she grabbed it and the now-rehydrating packet of goulash and sat down by the window. The galley had enough seating for the crew of fifty, though if the colony were to expand they would need much more housing – not to mention that the rations they had were limited in supply, so they would need to grow crops or perhaps source local edibles – if they were edible for them at all.
That was also another key component of her role on Zodiac-Altair – local crops could fail, as any farmer on Earth could testify. Even with proper precautions taken, the seeds they had packed aboard could have rotted away, or been irradiated to the point of nonviability, in transit. Or both. They had to have a viable backup plan if they were to survive on Rhysling – and none of the three could so easily ignore the option of local crops at this point. All she had to do was figure out if human beings could find any nutrition in them.
First of course was to avoid any risk of interplanetary contamination – but once Elena demonstrated that such an event was improbable, then would come the challenge of making sure the crops could be made safe to eat. The obvious solution was to make sure that none of them would be eaten fresh – right off the branch, vine, root, what have you. At minimum they would have to be washed, at the most they would have to be subjected to complex chemical processes, the likes of which she couldn’t fathom at the moment.
As Earth’s newfound twin swept past her rotating view, she looked down at the Hungarian staple and also realized – humans need protein as well. Odds were one in a billion, even with a generous estimate, that native Rhyslinger resources produced the proper proteins that people needed to function properly. It demanded study. It demanded investigation.
But she couldn’t do it on an empty stomach – she needed the energy to focus, so she in her haste wouldn’t miss any vital details. Not to mention that, as useful as the probe was, it wasn’t mobile at all – and the best way to know the answer to her current questions was to sample those items directly. For such a task, she especially needed Dr. Somerset’s help, as he was the only human so far on the ground. And right now, he was far too busy engrossing himself with the contents of the language text book – allegedly for language, per Dr. Konstantinov’s insistence – and couldn’t be contacted at the moment. But she didn’t give up hope – their books should also reveal which of their plants and animals they knew to be edible – definitely the ones they had domesticated, as any civilization as complex as theirs would need to have a steady, guaranteed food supply to keep running.
Then she had another thought – since they were equine analogues, these Indigenous, surely they wouldn’t eat meat. Right? She hadn’t been around horses very often in her life – though she knew they were herbivorous, they were not above eating meat, as she remembered from visiting her grandfather’s ranch in Appenzell. That poor chicken.
And even assuming these Indigenous equines did eat meat as well, and therefore farmed the appropriate animals, there was the matter of sampling them. Ideally, a sample of meat should be as fresh as possible – a punch biopsy of a carcass should provide the best clarity to work with. And knowing what Dr. Somerset was trying to do on the surface, it would be counterproductive to maintaining good relations with the Indigenous. Watching one of their animals get slaughtered by an unknown machine might give them second thoughts about allowing mankind to inhabit the surface with them.
She sighed. “Wieso muess das so schwer sii?”
“Prosti?”
She turned around and saw Anton on the ladder. How she hadn’t heard him climb down to the floor was beyond her. “Have you come me to join again?” she asked.
“I suppose.” He didn’t bother grabbing any food packets from storage for himself – he simply strode over and sat down across from her. “I think you are worried about something.”
“Many things, really.” She squeezed both packets – neither of them were fully rehydrated yet, though the greens were very nearly so. “Commander Darcy is putting his faith in me to find a way to ensure our survival on Rhysling, either by our own means or theirs – and I’m sure you are, too. No?”
“Admittedly,” he replied, “I am. . . what is word? – anxious about the same thing myself. I am not botanist, so I cannot say if the seeds and such we brought can still be used.”
“And I am far too busy to check.” She propped up her head in her hand. “What with the wealth of information we have gotten so far – and yet, it’s not enough. And of course Dr. Somerset just happened upon a breakthrough of his own.”
“Or so he says.” He leaned back against the table. “I am still cynical about the whole thing, but I am certainly hopeful that he did indeed happen upon the key to the language.” And then he had a thought. “Did he say he bought this book?”
Elena came to much the same conclusion herself. “Yes, yes he did. Does that mean – ”
He nodded. “Let’s hope they are as good at negotiations as they are about developing advanced technology.” He glanced down at the packets of food in front of her. “I think your food is ready.”
“Huh?” She felt both packets. “Yes, they are now, thank you.” She started on the goulash – but the first sip from the packet overwhelmed her with such strong spicy flavor that she had to stamp her foot to distract her from the pain on her tongue. “Wieso isch das so scharf!?”
Anton tipped his head back and started laughing. “You had not goulash before, have you, Dr. Weiss?”
She swallowed her food, then swirled her tongue around the interior of her mouth to get rid of the painful spice. “Admittedly not,” she eventually said. “Scheisse! How does one get used to it?”
“Ask Dr. Somerset,” he answered. “As I remember from the lander cargo manifest, there should be quite a bit for him. From my own experience, it works wonders to dull the taste of spinach.”
“Hmm. . . does it now?” She tried a mouthful from the other packet, and gagged at the taste. Another, more cautious, taste of the goulash, and she seemed surprised – they canceled each other out. “I’ll have to remember that for later,” she commented. “Thank you.”
Anton simply nodded. “Somerset has enough rations to last himself a month – an Earth month. He should have learned about this trick by now.”
Elena swallowed her bite. “Somehow,” she offered, “even with his expertise, that might not be enough time to learn a language – especially one completely alien to us, as alien as their biology.” She shifted her view to the window. “And surely he has already started to deplete those supplies. . . .”
··–·
Marvelous! Simply fascinating!
As Adam was looking through the book – for ‘reading’ was far too generous a term at this stage – he came across a page where it seemed to explain how the script worked. Just what I needed! He felt himself grin without restraint as he noted the IPA-like diagram on the page, coupled on the right with a black silhouette of an equine’s head, in turn with the oral cavity delineated. Five places of articulation were marked along the silhouette, each in a different color – purple for the throat, red for the velum, yellow for the hard palate, green for the front teeth, and blue for the lips. Below the chart and head-diagram, he saw five shapes in those same five colors – a violet circle, then four U-shapes pointing four different ways. From left to right, there was printed a red U lying on its left, a yellow U upside-down, a green U lying on its right, and a blue U upright.
Already Adam was outlining some proper IPA charts on the pad of paper. Four of the five were easy for Adam to remember – he pictured the silhouette of the head within his mind, and placed the shapes within the oral cavity. The circle looked like the opening of a throat, and three of the Us were easy to place in the mouth – wherever the loop was was meant to be where the tongue was supposed to flex up to the roof of the mouth. The last one, the upright U, gave him pause. Surely this should be a null consonant. Yet it was blue – and blue meant labial. How am I supposed to – oh, wait, wait a minute. Duh! The last one, he guessed, was derived from a smile. And just like that, he had half the consonant chart marked out – the places of articulation: glottal, velar, palatal, dental, and labial. Now it was just a matter of getting the manners of articulation. But how could he tell?
Another part of the page indirectly answered that question. There were printed a series of four grayed-out velar Us. The top one was plain, and the other three had a few marks within the shapes – a circle, a vertical line, and a horizontal line. Each one was accompanied by another silhouetted head, each articulating that sound described on the left.
The blank velar sound appeared to be a stop, if the head-diagram was anything to go by, with the rear of the tongue striking that part of the mouth, both of which in turn were marked in green. Any pharyngeal variation to it? he wondered. Voiced versus voiceless? Plain versus aspirated? Versus ejective? Most languages from Earth made such distinctions, in particular Indo-Aryan languages. And to say nothing about those clicks – just where did they come from? Adam assumed that this sound was voiceless – an educated guess at the moment, given that stops tend to be predominantly voiceless – and pronounced it [k]. No aspiration, no ejection, nothing else. It was a good place to start.
Then there was the circle. The head-diagram demonstrated that it was another stop, again in the same place – but the key difference, again outlined in green, was that the velum was lowered, which allowed air to escape through the nasal cavity. A nasal stop, therefore – [ŋ]. Unlike stops, nasals were predominantly voiced, meaning the larynx vibrated with the articulation to produce noise. English made such a distinction, as did hundreds of other languages, if not thousands.
Then the vertical line. The head-diagram showed that it was not a stop – the tongue did not reach all the way up to touch the velum, though it seemed like it was. After a bit of thought, Adam realized he was looking at a velar fricative – [x]. The fact that it was voiceless was another assumption – as, like stops, they tend to be that way. Velar fricatives were not common sounds, though they were present in European language. Technically it was present in English, but it was exceptionally rare – loch was the only example to come to his mind, and even that was dialectal. There was a good chance, in fact, that [h] was also present in the language, with [x] as an allophone. Or is it the other way around? It could just as easily be free variation.
But the last mark cleared up a few things. The horizontal line within the velar shape also indicated a stop – huh? That can’t be right, he thought. So he started looking more closely at the corresponding head-diagram, trying to pick out even the most minute difference between it and the first one. The task seemed impossible with his naked eye, so he had to resort to using a magnifying glass – one he found packed away on a nearby shelf.
He brought it up to his eye, taking care not to set the page on fire inadvertently. Even then, he had to squint – but when he looked at the throat in the first one, he thought he could see an indentation in the throat. Is that right? He took the magnifying glass away, and looked again. Yes, now that he knew it was there, the indentation was visible even with the naked eye. Could’ve sworn that was a printer’s defect. He looked again with the glass – no, there was no way it was a defect, it clearly defined some sort of pharyngeal action – tension, perhaps? When he looked at the fourth one, there was no such tension. Curious. . . .
Just to make sure, he also observed that the throat in the second and third one were also similarly tensioned. Meaning [k] and [x] are really [ɡ] and [ɣ], his mind started to race – meaning this mark functions more as a modifier, to devoice these two sounds. And the nasals, too – to produce clicks. Nasal clicks! But descended from devoiced nasals? Is that right? Click genesis was poorly known and worse studied, but Adam assumed that the process was much more complex than that – the usual assumption was that they were derived from sequences of consonants. For instance, [mʷ] was just a stone’s throw away from [ʘ].
But then he remembered something – namely how ubiquitous nasal clicks were. Every known click language had nasal clicks; what was more, if a single type of click was found in a language, it was always nasal. Damin, the only known click language found outside Africa, though it was now extinct, had only nasal clicks. Well, the only known human click language outside Africa, Adam silently corrected himself.
In conclusion, all consonants were prototypically voiced, with devoicing marked explicitly. Adam thought that such an arrangement was strikingly odd – but then recalled his linguistics studies before he got his doctorate, and remembered that Australia had one such language, Yidinʸ, where all of its stops were voiced. No voiced fricatives – but then, it didn’t have any fricatives at all, which was par for the course for the Australian continent.
And down at the bottom of the page were three more consonant shapes – neither circles nor Us, but Ls with rounded bends. None of them had any color, so he couldn’t easily figure out in which part of the mouth they were articulated. I guess they tie into something else. . . . The first one was upside-down, the second was backwards, and the third was an L without any changes. Each had their own head-diagram, but were printed smaller than Adam was used to. Good thing I have this magnifying glass. . . .
Bringing it up to his eye, he still had to squint to make out the more important details. First thing he noticed was that all three throats were tensed – voiced sounds. The next was that the tongues were all flexing within the mouth, but none of them were making proper contact with the roof of the mouth – not even close, so these weren’t fricatives. And I haven’t seen these shapes before. They must be the liquids. With this in mind, it was simple to figure out the first one, its head-diagram showed a gentle flex right in the center of the tongue, highlighted in yellow, reaching up to the palate, but not quite making any meaningful contact – neither for a stop, nor for a fricative. A voiced palatal approximant, he concluded – [j].
The second and third were trickier. Both of them were approximants as well, both were voiced, and both of them were dental, with that part of the tongue highlighted in green. Beyond that, he couldn’t easily deduce the difference between the two. No, wait a second – one tongue was just barely tilted upward, while another was pointed flat against the teeth. He tried imitating the positions himself: “Ra, la, rrra. . . llla. . . .” Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. The second one reminded him of an upside-down lowercase r – which, conveniently, may perfectly represent itself in the IPA: [ɹ]. And the third one, the one that looked like an L, represented just that: [l]. Going back to the first one, the palatal liquid – Adam couldn’t remember, off the top of his head at least, what sort of letter shape would help him associate the glyph with the sound. He simply shrugged and moved on, finishing the consonant chart on the pad of paper.
Now let’s move on to the vowels. What about those? The next page was all about the marks surrounding the outside of the base marks. Their sweeping appearance reminded him faintly of the Brahmic scripts – though of course, he had to remind himself, they bear no genetic relationship to one another. I wonder what the inherent vowel is. – Is there one? The only trouble was, this time, there were not as many head-diagrams to guide his pronunciation. This is probably one part of the book where a teacher is supposed to point out to the student which vowel goes with which mark. But damn if I won’t try!
Hold on just a moment. . . . He tapped the back of his pen against the page. One, two, three, four, five, six – that can’t possibly be right. There should be way more vowels in the language – why aren’t they all written? Why omit something so important as how to pronounce a vowel? Is their script an abjad? No, can’t be – vowels are always explicitly marked, from all the writing that I’ve seen. It’s an alphasyllabary, it’s got to be. Unless. . . ?
He had a stark realization. Vowel harmony. Ukhǃerr is optimized for a vowel harmony. His eyes darted back to the consonants page – to the horizontal mark inside the placement glyph. Could they have a consonant harmony as well? Their consonants must have a pharyngeal harmony – voiceless versus voiced, and the approximants must be neutral. But are they transparent or opaque? Adam jotted down his question on the pad of paper, next to the notes he made so far about the phonological harmonies: Vowel harmony + Consonant harmony; There are neutral consonants. Transparent? Opaque? Ask Antir later.
And how would the vowel harmony work? A question for later – first he had to figure out how to pronounce each vowel. He tapped the page with the back of his pen, deep in thought. Wait. . . if the consonant harmony requires a special mark to shift it from voiced to voiceless – then the vowels should have a similar mark of their own! But which is it? After searching along the page, he found a moon-shaped mark over a glottal consonant. No, not just that – it’s blue. And it even came with a head-diagram of its own. Under the magnifying glass, he saw that the lips, marked also in blue, were rounded. Aha, a rounding harmony! But what sort of vowels would exist in such a place?
His mind immediately drifted to the Hungarian language – which, back when he was teaching classes at MIT, was his go-to example for vowel harmony. Hungarian had fourteen vowels – seven short, seven long, grouped into a backing harmony – though the specific categories they used were ‘low’ and ‘high.’ (“Height harmony does exist,” he would often add at the end, “but that’s a whole other can of worms!”) The ‘low’ – back – vowels were a, á, o, ó, u, and ú, and the ‘high’ – front – vowels were e, é, i, í, ö, ő, ü, and ű.
As for how they harmonized, that was a little tricky to figure out if one had no experience with the language. Even though i and í were placed in the ‘high’ vowel group, single-syllable roots containing either of those two vowels took suffixes that harmonized with ‘low’ vowels instead. Adam knew that such a phenomenon was leftover from a more archaic harmonization process, but it did help establish them as the truly neutral vowels – as opposed to e and é, which merely directly opposed a and á in the modern Hungarian vowel harmony.
Once he had the Hungarian vowel harmony in mind, he decided to flip its chief harmonization factor – backing – on its head. Ukhǃerr’s is a rounding harmony, right? That should mean the harmony is based on rounding instead of backing. I think I know how that might work. Once Adam sketched out a crude vowel trapezoid next to the consonant chart, he concentrated most of the vowels towards the back – [u] and [ɯ], ones he had heard, were the obvious first choices – two diametrically opposed vowels. And from practicing speaking Antir’s name, he also went ahead and marked [ɑ] and [i] as well. But while it was a start, the trapezoid was obviously incomplete.
So he went back to his primary source – the page. He saw how the vowel markings were simple lines – for one, there was a single line curving up on the right; for another, a single line curving up on the left. Then he saw how one vowel was marked with both of those lines. A historical mutation of sorts? he pondered. But he put that aside for the time being, as he focused on what the other markings could mean.
Then he noticed something he hadn’t considered – slight outlines of head-diagrams, so exceedingly slight he thought they never existed in the first place. Ah, so this is a misprint after all! he realized. Just in the worst way possible. Now more than ever, that magnifying glass was important. He brought it up to his eye, squinted close at the page, trying to find even the slightest traces of the print. As he looked closely, it was there, just so incredibly faded that it may have never made an impression on the page when it was first printed. If I had to guess, he thought, their printing plate was wearing out, and they didn’t notice until later down the line. And since this kind of problem isn’t limited to my own book – especially if they didn’t pulp it, since it’s right in front of me – Khayay must have an answer key back at the school, and simply instructs the students either to fill it in themselves, or puts it up on the board. I don’t get either luxury here, unfortunately. The answer was right there, just out of reach for him. But maybe it’s printed elsewhere in the book.
Keeping a finger on that spread, he flipped to the next page. It was full of sentences, describing pictures that were also printed there. On the right track. . . . But there weren’t any head-diagrams to help him along. Say, what if. . . ? He flipped back, placed his whole hand on the page, and flipped all the way to the inside back cover. Aha! Another vowel-consonant chart! Except this one came with head-diagrams, and intact ones at that. Are they printed separately? Maybe at another printer? Would be a strange practice. Nonetheless, he was glad for the fortune of finding the answer here.
But I am going to need another free hand for this. Not daring to dog-ear and thus risk damaging the pages, he instead opted to flip back to that spread, insert a bookmark – which he made crudely out of a torn-off page from his notepad – and then, with both hands free, flip back to the rear inside cover to study it further. Grabbing his trusty magnifying glass, he located the vowel markings and the head-diagrams next to them.
First was the circle, the glottal consonant – or maybe that’s the null consonant, he started to think. It wouldn’t surprise him – Hangeul, the writing system for Korean, worked the same way. But here, it was paired with not one but two head-diagrams. Huh? What’s up with that? He took the magnifying glass away to get a look at the page as a whole – then saw it: these were two columns of head-diagrams, not just one, and each was labeled with a different icon – on the left, a sun in splendor; on the right, a crescent, reminiscent of the moon. So that’s how they sort vowels out, is it? he thought with a chuckle. Associated with the sun and moon? But with that settled, using the magnifying glass, he looked down at the head-diagrams again.
The ‘sun’ one was almost identical to the ‘moon’ one, in every regard – even the lips were left unrounded in both instances. I guess it’s not purely a rounding harmony, he surmised. But then, nothing in life is ever really perfect. He looked elsewhere between them – and spotted the difference a moment later: in the ‘moon’ head-diagram, the tongue was perfectly flat against the bottom of the mouth, allowing an unobstructed flow of air and sound out of the larynx and out the mouth. This was clearly an open vowel – one he had marked on his trapezoid already. The ‘sun’ vowel, on the other hand, was slightly different – the tongue was flexed up just slightly to the palate. Definitely a mid front vowel. He couldn’t tell which if it was [e] or [ɛ], so on the trapezoid he just marked it as [e] between the two values. I’ll have to pay closer attention to their speech – see if they have any height allophones, or if it’s even just free variation.
But that does beg the question. . . do they have a vowel between [u]/[ɯ] and [ɑ]? He put that thought aside for the moment as he looked at the next mark – vertical line, on the right side of the glyph. The head-diagrams showed that it represented a close back vowel – but was subject to a few differences due to the harmonization process. The ‘moon’ version was rounded – [u] – while the ‘sun’ version was not – [ɯ]. Well, I have those marked already, he surmised, glancing back at the trapezoid to make sure. Moving on.
The next one was the same, but with another vertical line on the left side of the glyph as well. The head-diagrams here were also back vowels, and again with the same rounding harmony. Unlike the previous values, however, the tongue did not flex as far up to the velum as with the others. Adam had to double-check with the magnifying glass, but it seemed like it answered his earlier question of mid back vowels. Just like the close back vowels. Perfect! But he still didn’t know their precise values – so he just marked [o] and [ɤ] as approximations for the time being.
There was a vertical line on the left of the glyph, but the right side was blank. Moreover, it had a single head diagram, one straddling the ‘sun’ and ‘moon’ columns, which if he had to guess indicated it was a neutral vowel. Adam raised his eyebrow – then his magnifying glass. The tongue was reaching up to the palate – not as far as [j], but it was pretty close. [i], he concluded – and one he had already marked. Easy!
Then there was a downward curl, starting from the right side of the glyph, then turning to the left. It also had a single head diagram – meaning it was another neutral vowel – but its value surprised him: it appeared to be another approximant, but one articulated at the teeth rather than the palate or velum. This was a syllabic consonant, no doubt – with a value of either [ɹ̩] or [l̩]. But which one is it? Adam didn’t dare to mark anything in the book, but knew he would have to return to it eventually. It could be any number of things – perhaps both, with the difference either being free variation, allophonic, or dialectal.
The next vowel cleared that up quite nicely, even though it took a bit of work. It was another curl, this time starting from the right and curving to the left – the exact opposite of the preceding mark. It was also neutral, given it had a single head diagram – which indicated a nearly identical value to the other curling vowel. Wait a second. . . . Remembering the pages he had bookmarked, he flipped back to where he first saw the consonants and vowels indicated. He checked the bottom of the consonants page, where he remembered seeing those familiar shapes – and that’s where it clicked: the vowel markings he saw for the syllabic consonants were identical to the vowel markings. He double-checked against the vowel page; they matched as well there.
Safe to assume the vowel markings are identical to their non-vocal equivalents, he thought – but he couldn’t make that assumption, not without accidentally uttering an insult in practice. So, after refreshing his memory on which approximant was which, he flipped back to the inside back cover to double-check. Sure enough, they were the same. So they have syllabic [ɹ̩] and [l̩]. He marked them down on the pad of paper, in a separate place, below the vowel trapezoid. Not unlike Sanskrit. Do they have length differentiation as well?
There were a few more markings on the vowels. One such marking was a slight crescent-shaped loop placed on top of the glyph. It had no head-diagram to accompany it, but instead indicated a ‘moon’ symbol. Right – that shifts the vowel harmony, he realized – from ‘sun’ to ‘moon’ vowels. Meaning the sun-vowels are the default. Another marking was a reverse numeral 6. Adam realized this was a question mark – one apparently meant to be placed atop the letter instead of at its side. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve see that, he thought – as he recalled, the Armenian script did the same thing.
A third marking was a single dot placed below the glyph. It came with another head diagram, positioned precisely where the ‘sun’ vowel column would have run. I can’t see the difference. . . . But with the magnifying glass, he did – it was another [e] or [ɛ], but the velum was lowered, allowing air to escape through the nasal cavity. It’s a nasal vowel! he thought. So they have an oral-nasal vowel distinction. Adam hypothesized that the default value for the inherent ‘sun’ vowel was [e], with [ɛ̃] as a nasal shift. Same thing with [o] and [ɔ̃], and [ɤ] and [ʌ̃]. But these are all assumptions, he reminded himself. Educated assumptions, but still. I have to get confirmation from a native speaker – and until I see Antir again, I’m on my own.
A fourth marking was a line placed below the glyph as well. Its head diagram was another mid front vowel. Again? he wondered. Is it an archaic spelling rule? What am I miss – oh. He noticed right then that the throat was shaped differently. He brought the magnifying glass up, and compared it to the last one. Indeed, there wasn’t any tension in the throat for that line marking, but there were for the nasal vowel – as were literally every other vowel pronunciation. And as Adam recalled, he definitely heard some codas in Ukhǃerr – hell, the name of the language itself had two of them! So while Adam reserved the thought that the codas were historically voiceless vowels, for all intents and purposes they were codas now, and he would treat them as such.
The inside cover didn’t contain anything else for him to read in Ukhǃerr – meaning, between the script proper, the numeral system, and some limited mathematical notation, he had gotten down everything he would need to survive in everyday Rhyslinger life. Now he just had to develop a practical Romanization scheme, to help teach the language to the rest of Zodiac-Altair’s crew.
Thankfully, most of what he knew was easily marked with Latin letters – k and g were obvious, as were m, n, r, l, and y. b, p, f, v – and he completed the bilabial series. Well, almost – [ʘ], the bilabial click, gave him a bit of trouble; Adam decided to leave the click letter alone. Then there were the dental consonants. t, d, s, and z were quickly filled in – and leaving [ᵑǃ] as nǃ completed the series.
But it was the velar and especially palatal series that gave him trouble. c, j, and y could only get him so far – and he had already used y here. Adam decided to return to it later, while he filled out the velar series. Its nasal was unmarked, but as he recalled from reading The Lord of the Rings as a child, early versions of Quenya and Sindarin also had an explicitly-marked velar nasal. It could have been done half a dozen different ways, but J. R. R. Tolkein chose to use ñ – a choice that would plague Spanish readers for generations. But here, it was a suitable choice.
And then he had an idea – they use nasal vowels too, don’t they? And nasal vowels were made by lowering the velum. He could reuse the tilde to indicate nasal vowels as well. But first, he reminded himself, I’d have to figure out which vowels are nasalized. He made a note by the trapezoid about the idea. Even if they were allophonic, or at least dialectal, it was a swell idea.
Now, where was I? The velar click could remain as such, but the velar fricatives needed to be marked. [x] could easily be marked with h, but [ɣ] gave him some pause. He could resort to using ğ, per the Turkic tradition, but he didn’t like to use a diacritic on a single letter if he could avoid it. Then he started thinking – I’ve heard a lot of their speech, heard a lot of sounds, but what I didn’t hear? A [w]. Adam had been keeping w in his back pocket, just in case such a sound existed in their language, but not once did he hear that sound. It didn’t surprise him – not every language had that sound. Turkish certainly didn’t, for one.
But he could reässign it to [ɣ]. It was a radical decision – one he hadn’t seen before – but it had a similar manner of articulation, and almost the same place as well – the sound was labio-velar, after all. Of course, [w] may be just a rare sound in the language, but he would cross that bridge when he got there. For now at least, the velar series was transcribed neatly.
But that left the palatal series. Oh boy. . . . Adam had to scratch his head for a solution. Different languages Romanized their palatal sounds differently, but he had to find one that would stick. At first, he thought he’d use c for [c], which would make sense, but ultimately would be inconsistent – and harder to memorize. He racked his brain for a solution. As the saying goes, desperation breeds ingenuity.
And breed it did. He remembered how Hungarian marked its palatal sounds – it had a ky, gy, ny, and a now-obsolete ly. But y fit too well as the palatal approximant – but he had j to work with, didn’t he? Before he knew it, he had put down nj, tj, dj, sj, and zj. Amazingly, that left c over from the lot.
So why not mark the clicks as well? The language had four – all articulated (more or less) in the same places as the nasal consonants. In his head, he recalled how the Bantu languages marked their clicks with leftover Latin letters as well – c was [ǀ], q was [ǃ], and x was [ǁ] – with various digraphing, trigraphing, and so forth to produce further click variants. But they had no bilabial nor palatal clicks – so while Adam was easily able to assign q and x, and after some thought, c to [ᵑǂ], that left the bilabial click unassigned.
That letter was typically left as a click in those languages that had them – even the Bantu provision was a digraph, pc. But that would confuse the crew when he would teach them the language – for what if it was a sequence of p, then c? He could add a tiebar to the sequence, or add a diacritic to p – scratch that, m – but those solutions weren’t too elegant to him. He wanted something that would stick.
Then he remembered a bet he made with one of his students, Sigríður Magnúsdóttir, back at MIT six years ago. She saw how many uses the letters x and q had in Romanizing languages vastly different from the usual Indo-European lot, and claimed that she could use thorn – þ – as what he called a “wild-card” letter. Of course, thorn survived only in Icelandic, and while it was once used in English, it was supplanted entirely in the age of the printing press. She was adamant that a letter so tightly tied to the Germanic languages could be used elsewhere. He was skeptical, but took her up on her bet.
I guess you win this one, Sigríður, he finally, and silently, conceded. Thorn had never, ever been used for anything other than a dental fricative – up until this point. Now, he put it down as representing a bilabial click in the language of the Rhyslinger equines. Somehow, it felt right to him – graphically speaking, þ looked similar to p. Maybe she was onto something, he realized.
The vowels were much easier to do. The usual a, e, i, o, and u found their spots. For the back unrounded vowels, he took a few cues from the Vietnamese language, and used ơ and ư for those sounds. He snickered to himself – while it was for a different purpose, Vietnamese also used tildes in their language – on top of those letters, to boot. And as for the syllabic consonants, he simply used ḷ and ṛ – just as the IAST would do.
He breathed a sigh, as though he had exerted a great effort – and indeed he had; he was well on his way on becoming fluent in Ơhqer.
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I wonder, are books like that used to teach students? I mean, I never learned from such a book, the teacher would just say how a particular letter sounds. When learning English (not native speaker and English has much more complex pronunciation rules), again, the teacher would just say how a letter or a word sounds.
The book seems to be written for foreigners who are language experts and not for local children.
Still, with it, Adam will be able to speed up his learning and maybe start having conversations with more than one word.
That is a shed load of info from a whole load of languages.
Was trying to look up more bases for DNA so could Terbo Code the stuff in a deterministic manner
Well this was very very interesting and finally a breakthrough has been made both biologically and linguistically. Good Chapter.
Given the circunstances, why are they so elated/sceptical regarding a mere schoolbook for children? Heck, I'm surprised Adam didn't ask for It before given Twilight runs a library.
Why is he creating a custom script when the International Phonetic Alphabet exists?
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Depend on the material you got I guess
The head-diagram can be used in some books, and in some countries you get a single manual that would last for several years.
Of course for children it's mostly about the sentence under the fat cat in page 20.
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we can also ask why Celestia, meeting an alien sent on an obvious mission, wouldn't rush a linguist and an ambassador in Ponyville instead of asking him to get minimum wage temp jobs
Let's just say ponies have their own sense of urgency and he got swooped into the rhythm.
"Cylinder lock" can be ambiguous. When I read this, I first thought you meant opening a pin-tumbler lock with a skeleton key meant for a warded lock, because the common pin-tumbler locks do have "lock cylinders". I think you meant "open a tubular lock with a skeleton key".
My favourite example is carvone.
Great chapter! So, they eliminated threat of cross-contamination, air is breathable already, so we can finally get Adam out of his suit? So he can pet the ponies, scratch 'em behind ears and fullfill other required HiE tropes : )
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(i.e. Because it's hard to learn a language and a whole new writing system at the same time, and IPA is close enough to a whole new writing system for that to apply.)
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...and for a one-room schoolhouse, a textbook that covers a lot of ground does make sense, since you'll have a lot of variation in the learners' progress.
I suppose I can understand the crew's incredulity at the textbook in a vacuum... but this is after Adam's been taken to an isolated environment for a medical exam by the locals, where they demonstrated their understanding of medicine, radio, chemistry and so on, to say nothing of the library he went to on his first day in Ponyville. Is it really so surprising that they have the printing press and are using it for education? Again, Twilight's already showed him that much.
Inasmuch as they're edible to the locals. That amino acid issue never went away.
Okay, I know I expressed skepticism about the skepticism, but having diagrams for how to produce sounds as opposed to, say, words that start with the symbol feels a bit too convenient. And illustrations that need a magnifying glass to appreciate the fine details, even for a relative giant, feel wrong in an instructional book for children.
This entire story was setup for this bit of wordplay, wasn't it?
That is a lot of linguistics terminology thrown around at once. I get the general idea, but it's still a bad case of watching someone else geek out in enough of a specialized field that I struggle to follow along. Not exactly the most gripping read, is what I'm saying. Still, looking forward to seeing how the theory works in practice. And while Adam's tackled pronunciation, the matter of vocabulary is an entirely different one...
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Probably for the same reason why not just use the native script. It is easier to learn when you can read the word aloud even if you do not understand it (yet). Adam seems to be creating a script that is similar to how English words would be read, so that for English speakers it would be easier to start learning.
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As a child I never saw such head-diagram - probably would not have understood it. Later I also never saw it, despite trying to learn a few languages (with little success). For example, when we were learning Russian in school (6th grade IIRC), the teacher just said how the letters were pronounced (pretty much giving the equivalents in "normal" letters).
Interesting pony stuff. Interesting astronaut/cosmonaut stuff. Interesting interactions between Adam and Ponies and his various jobs. * For actual language stuff see footnote
to the in-depth linguistic study.
Reaction
*How he actually figured out all the interesting to linguist stuff
eyes glazed over 
I know some will enjoy this part.
Don't get me wrong. I'm still enjoying this, but some things just have to be skimmed over for me to enjoy it. Handwave it in the text footnote it for in-depth detail for more streamed line reading. JMHO YMMV
Would be funny Equestrians talked in basc language , an insolated laungage with unknown origins in Occidental Europe.
I will admit...once I got to the part of the guy alone with the book figuring stuff out...I sort of skipped reading from that point. Others can enjoy it, and I'm sure they did. But bluh...not really that excited to read about a guy getting all technical about language stuff. BUT that just me, still pretty good chapter.
I feel I should remind Elena that bacteria, archaea, and fungi (and their Rhyslinger analogues) don't really care how your genes work. You're still made of tasty food.
A few chapters ago I commented some concern for this colonization plan, and it just keeps getting more problematic.
It seems that when the humans first came to colonize the planet they thought it was uninhabited. When they arrived they found, not only that it was inhabited, but that it was inhabited by a sapient population who have already established a thriving civilization. And this discovery does not seem to have affected their plans at all. They're not talking about establishing diplomatic relations. They're not talking about whether the indigenous population would welcome or accept or even tolerate their presence. They're talking about how to establish their crops in land that doesn't belong to them.
The humans are aware enough of things like the dangers of cross-contamination, but beyond that they don't seem aware that historically colonization tends to result in very bad things for the people being colonized.
And then this chapter drops this:
The first explorers of those lands were the indigenous: the Native Americans, Polynesians, and Africans.
I can understand that Adam, the character, is thinking from a colonizer point of view, but it would be very nice to see this issue acknowledged and addressed.
Nice to read a detailed deconstruction of the process from the POV of a linguist!
Sun and Moon as classifiers... one of the things I really like about Arabic. My instinct would have been to use the Maltese ħ instead of þ, but... you say potato, I say potato.
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I also skimmed it but I read enough to absorb the sheer unmitigated joy of someone expounding upon their element.
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Found a new word looking this up; chirality
For viruses. Bacteria and other microbes can and will still run rampant between populations, and even common treatments formulated for one species may not be safe or effective for the other.
Well, before anybrony gets too gung ho about breaking biosegregation after that...
Viruses can’t invade or replicate, sure. But the fact that things from the two worlds can eat each other means things like bacteria and fungi are still a potential concern.
Do recall that The Black Death is a bacterial plague. And e. coli. And flesh-eating disease. We just won’t have to worry about pony-pox or feather flu.
Parasites like malaria and giardia are also still on the table.
And who knows what other kinds of alien microbeasties.
Okay, so. Sprinkling a bit of IPA around while interacting with the locals was cool and all, but this chapter is a wreck of technicalities.
I usually try to follow along with the chapter by writing my own notes to visualize the descriptions... but this was impossible due to the need for head diagrams. You really geeked out this time, and left us in the dust; describing the head diagrams was insufficient for the purpose.
I'm gonna be honest - I skimmed a lot of this chapter, but still got the gist of what was happening. I'm glad that actual conversations between the ponies and humans will soon be happening, finally.
11025104 *Sings* Where in the world is the Brony named Alondro? (IT WORKS!!)
"it’s like trying to open a tubular lock with a skeleton key"
Of course, a crowbar, here representing a bacteriological of fungal infection that doesn't care about the genetics and just sees useful molecules to eat, might well not have nearly as much trouble crossing over... and there's the question of how much trouble the other side's immune systems would have even recognizing it; I don't think I know enough biology to judge that.
"The galley had enough seating for the crew of fifty, though if the colony were to expand they would need much more housing"
Huh. Maybe this part of the ship is also one massive lander?
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Riiight.
Also, while the fact this comes up in it is potentially a spoiler, the subject and author name will probably be enough to spark memory in people who've read it: the Rifters trilogy by Peter Watts came to mind...
(Though, admittedly, it's been years since I read it, so I might be misremembering something.)
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"They're not talking about establishing diplomatic relations."
Well, they sort of are, as I read it!
"Let’s hope they are as good at negotiations as they are about developing advanced technology."
I read that as, basically, "Let's hope we can talk a deal out of them that's actually really biased in our favor", assuming Anton wasn't thinking much of Equestrian technology. You know, the old "'Buy' this land with a handful a glass beads, a treaty the natives couldn't read, and the threat of violence" trick!
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"Inasmuch as they're edible to the locals. That amino acid issue never went away."
Yeah. How well do humans do eating grass and drinking methanol, compared to even Earth horses?
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Interesting; thanks. It sounds like you know a lot more details about this than me!
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The immune system sees almost any foreign substance on that magnitude of size not being where it's supposed to be as an invader -- it even tends to err on the side of freaking out about harmless things, which is what allergies and most autoimmune conditions are. Actually, finding substances it doesn't react to is a pretty big deal for things like implants, and that's harder than it sounds.
So whether the immune system will simply react to an alien bacteria probably isn't a problem. How much havoc it might cause before it can figure things out and get rid of it is another matter entirely. Also how well a microbe can breed in the wild before it even encounters a warm body -- say, causing some kind of awful toxic death bloom in the water just eating local nutrients without actually being a predator to anything.
For instance, we have a particular microbe in most of our water that just isn't a problem for the overwhelming majority of living beings here because our sinuses evolved to be good at stopping it, and it has an otherwise totally benign place in the ecosystem. But every once in a while -- like, single digits yearly worldwide -- it manages to penetrate that plate and cause an almost always fatal infection. But aliens? Well, all bets are off on how dangerous our brain eating amoebas are to them
Just please tell me he's using letters as they sound to most European languages and not the unholy mess of effectively non existing pronunciation rules that's English. Specially since most of the crew in the Altair isn't a native speaker in the first place.
"As he looked closely, it was there, just so incredibly faded that it may have never made an impression on the page when it was first printed. If I had to guess, he thought, their printing plate was wearing out, and they didn’t notice until later down the line"
Or perhaps... Adam is being naively optimistic, and that the "faded" print was only what he was capable of seeing, smudges that veer of into colors that humans are able to see from something that we decidedly cannot?
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I kind of love the idea that the humans try to pull that trick on the ponies, but Celestia and Luna are just way too smart for them and end up making a deal that vastly favors the ponies before the humans even realize what's happened.
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That makes sense given that it's been established that the ponies can see colors humans can't
I think this is Adam's transcription:
a [ɑ]
ã [ɑ̃]
b [ʙ]
c [ᵑǂ]
d [d]
dj [ɟ]
e [e]
ẽ [ẽ]
f [ɸ]
g [g]
h [x]
i [i]
ĩ [ĩ]
k [k]
l [l]
m [m]
n [n]
ñ [ŋ]
n! [ᵑǃ]
nj [ɲ]
o [o]
õ [õ]
ơ [ɤ]
ỡ [ɤ̃] (I have found no instance of this.)
p [p]
q [ǃ]
r [ɹ]
s [s]
sj [ʃ] (I have found no instance of [ç].)
t [t]
tj [c]
þ [ʘ]
u [u]
ũ [ũ]
ư [ɯ]
ữ [ɯ̃]
v [β]
w [ɣ]
x [ǁ]
y [j]
z [z]
zj [ʒ] (I have found no instance of [ʝ].)
This system cannot represent the following:
[ɦ]
As an aside, it turns out that BBCode does not allow you to escape [ and ], so I bodged it with zero-width spaces (U+200B).
DNA is just the blueprint for building RNA, which is then used to build the real workhorse of biology, proteins. While having totally different base pairs is going to throw a proverbial spanner in the works, it's the protein interaction that is the real issue. Equestrian biology in this case could range from something as familiar as all 20 amino acids being identical to Terrestrial life, to any number of totally different amino acids. They don't know how many amino acids equestria has, how many base pairs code to an amino acid (Earth has 3 bases to an amino acid), or how many amino acids (if any) are the same as Earth. Any of these could still cause unforseen interactions with vital systems of either species. A benign earth bacteria could just happen to excrete a protein that is poison to Equestia; injesting Equestrian food could cause a prion disease in humans. They definitely have a long way to go before determining it's safe to go unprotected on the surface.
As for the linguistics section, I felt it was really unfriendly to readers who aren't familiar with linguistics. And I definitely don't think it was necessary to go through every single sound in the equestrian language one by one and learning the romanization of all of them.
"You haven't truly experienced Shakespeare until you've read it in original Ukh'err!" Pony commander of the War Griffon spaceship.
And then somepony with a magically-cloaked ship blows up Celestia and frames Adam for it. Thus, he ends up banished to the gulag in the Frozen North!
We can totally make a full Star Trek VI parody out of this story...
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Interestingly, there doesn't appear to be any inherent connection between RNA and the chosen amino acids. The code just works that way because of the enzymes and how they hook up the amino acid to the tRNA carriers involved. It's very possible that ANY amino acid could be substituted, and in fact that has been done already with engineered bacteria using atypical amino acids.
But, if we're talking about the rough chemical probabilities, any life in the universe utilizing proteins should at least have some of the simple amino acids because they are likely produced in abundance in stellar nebula and glycine has been confirmed in comet dust collected from Wild-2.
Others with simple hydrocarbon R groups are also likely ubiquitious. Alanine, with just a methyl R group is virtually a certainty. Then there's valine, leucine, isoleucine. Serine and threonine are both highly probably, as they're basically just an attached methanol and ethanol, respectively, which could be produced from formaldehyde and acetaldehyde binding to the R group spot via oxime reduction with sodium borohydrocyanate in the presence of iron oxide, zinc chloride and heat. Such conditions would be present in protoplanets with sufficient water as the planetesimal heats up and differentiates, forcing organic-laden and salt-rich water through metal and metal oxide-bearing material headed toward the core. Or, it can be produced in colder conditions from simple acetaldehyde and copper glycinate, a simple complex of glycine, water, and copper ion which is likely to be found in protoplanets as well as the cometary and more mineral asteroids coalesce.
Aspartate and glutamate are pretty likely as well; being merely 1- and 2-carbon acetyl groups with favorable amination parameters from a number of starting reagents and catalysts.
The starting material found in carbon-rich meteorites, hexamethylenetetramine can react in numerous ways, and is considered an important prebiotic starting material, providing a reactive source for carboxylation and branched hydrocarbon synthesis, inducing polymerization of many ring-bearing hydrocarbons. Indeed, a common use of it industrially is the production of phenolic resins.
So, tyrosine could be produced in relative abundance as well in prebiotic conditions, being merely a phenol attached to the R spot.
The longer chain, ring-bearing, and sulfur amino acids have a higher chance of being replaced with other similarly-structured amino acids.
And there could be amino acids with groups unlike anything on Earth, such as cyanate groups, sulfate, phosphate, and maybe transition organometal complexes which could favor life forming in hot springs where such amino acids could be part of proteins which facilitate energy production from ample sulfides and carbonates. They might take the place of terrestrial protein reaction centers in metalloenzymes as well.
We're ALWAYS going to have a low chance of being infected by alien viruses, even if the chemistry is EXACTLY the same.
Consider how many MILLIONS of viruses exist on this planet that we don't get infected with as it is. Those viruses need HIGHLY specific receptor molecules on the host. Without them, the virus cannot get into the cells. And for most of them, even if the did the cellular machinery and genetic sequences of our cells are incompatible with their replication machinery.
For instance: none of the myriad bacteriophages can replicate in eukaryotic cells.
So, for an ALIEN virus to infect us would be like winning the cosmic lottery. But even so, our immune systems would also just as likely recognize it quickly. It would not have evolved a mechanism to escape our specific immune counter-attack, and so it probably wouldn't be more than a day before our bodies began to mount an offense against it.
What we'd need to worry about would be, as Michael Critchon so brilliantly theorized, would be an opportunistic scavenging organism which can replicate all by itself and just needs delicious organic materials to eat. Andromeda was a fictional organic crystalline organism, but it need not even be so truly 'alien'. Something like an alien MRSA or Aspergillus could ravage our biome, feeding on almost any biotic material. We'd actually be depending on our native microbes to mount a defense against such an invader and keep it from taking over.
Forgot to comment this in the chapter about when the ponies took his blood. I remember one story were it was about that human blood is the key to eternal life. I don’t think it ever got finished… but it was interesting for ponies wanting to get the human
So Equestrian is based on Harmony between "Solar" speech and "Lunar" speech?
when he got to actually reading the language book....i had such a hard time following, and reading it. that was just far too much information, and very very very dry reading D: