No Phule like an old Phule by Robert Asprin & Peter J. Heck

Author:Robert Asprin & Peter J. Heck [Asprin, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub

"All right, fellas, you're strayin' from the point," said Rev, raising his palm to stop them. "What were you sayin', Sushi ?"

"Anyhow, they spoke all these languages, and speaking one didn't give you more than a guess at understanding the others. But they were all written the same way. The written symbols represented the meaning of the words, not their sound, so a Mandarin speaker could pretty much read a document written by a Cantonese speaker, even if he couldn't understand the spoken language. It's sort of the opposite of the old-time European languages, where a reader could get a rough idea how a message in another language would sound, even if he didn't know what it means."

"Weird," said Do-Wop. "Why'd they do a stupid thing like that, Soosh?"

"Actually, it's not that stupid if you have a big empire with several different spoken languages," said Sushi, shrugging. "That gives you two choices-either make everybody learn one common spoken language, the way the Romans did, or have one common written language, the Chinese way."

"You left one out," said Do-Wop. "Autotranslators. You don't even need to have the same kind of ears for them to work. . ."

"Sure, except the ancient Romans and Chinese didn't have autotranslators," said Sushi.

"You're jivin' me, Soosh," said Do-Wop. "The Romans had everything, man. They were like Italians, only with a better army and space force. . ." Sushi rolled his eyes.. "I hate to tell you this, but the Romans didn't have a space force, either. .."

"What?" Do-Wop's mouth fell open. "Fangul', Soosh, you can't tell me that shit with a straight face. . ."

Rev raised his hands. "Gen'lemen, gen'lemen," he said, in a calming tone of voice. "We're strayin' off the point again. Sushi, you were tellin' us about how the Zenobians write, weren't you? I'd surely like to hear more about that."

"All right, here's the deal," said Sushi. "From what Qual said, it seems as if the Zenobians learn to read before they learn to speak. They're descended from predators-well, in a sense, they still are predators. So the young ones depend on their vision more than most other sophonts.

Well, maybe the Gambolts would be similar. . . I don't know much about their language, either, except the translator works for them."

"All right," said Rev. "So the Zenobians learn to read first. I reckon that would mean the written language ought to be pretty easy to understand, then."

"You'd think so," said Sushi, nodding. He took another pull on his beer. "But that brings me back to Chinese. I've heard people say that Chinese is actually very easy to read-that all you have to do is look at the writing as pictures, and when you see what the pictures are, you know what the writing says."

"Why, that's perfect," said Rev. "So we ought to be able to read Zenobian even without a translator."

"Yeah, sounds great, doesn't it?" said Sushi. "Except it doesn't work quite that way. The pictures are too sketchy--four lines sort of in a box might be a house, or a dog.

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