milliways_bar | (no subject)

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Sometime shortly before this, Nita enters the bar.

And while the Suit she's wearing doesn't quite resemble the one in the icon -- it's still very black and very snazzy.

She's taking a well-deserved coffee break somewhere that doesn't have Neeble.

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Nita laughs. "Most likely, yeah. It might take less time than you think, though. It's . . . elemental. Everything already sort of knows it, it just doesn't know it knows."

Grinning, she takes a stick. "Don't mind if I do."

"Hmm."

Patterns and placements are already looking familiar. This from Mandarin, that from Japanese, these over here from Finnish...

"Goodness," she repeats, fascinated. "It really is the foundation language, isn't it."

...it's possible that speaking sixteen languages already will be a bit of a boost for her.

"My linguistics professor would faint if I showed him this. It's brilliant."

"You probably want to hold back from showing it to anyone outside Milliways, unless you really think they're prepared to accept the fantastic. It'll just look like squiggles to anyone else, if it looks like anything at all." She eyes the paper. "I got my manual to make those copies. I don't know how many of the properties of the manual itself they're retaining."

Matilda looks up and frowns.

"A language that you can only learn if you possess some foundational quality? Tricky. Potentially unpleasant. On the other hand, I can certainly see the logic."

She leans back in her seat, flipping the page and starting in on the description of principles.

"My goodness," she murmurs again. And then, in Sindarin: "Amazing. Absolutely amazing."

"Well, if you don't believe in the existence of Spanish, it'd be hard to learn it, right? If you can't accept the evidence of the existence of the Powers That Be, you'll have a tough time learning Their language."

"Yes," she argues absently, "but the language exists objectively regardless of personal belief, and the kind of mind who can disbelieve Spanish on practical terms when presented with a Spanish-English dictionary is going to have difficulty learning languages in any case."

The alphabet is familiar, too. She can see elements of the Elvish script, and this or that symbol reminds her of--

"I should learn Arabic while I'm at it. I've been meaning to get around to that, but I was sidetracked by Finnish."

"And yet you'd be amazed how many people can look at that page and see nothing."

She laughs. "How many languages do you speak right now?"

"Sixteen and a half. I'm working on Korean."

Nita whistles. "What're you gonna do when you get the whole globe?"

"Start learning languages from other universes, of course. I've already got Sindarin-- Elvish, you might call it-- from a dwarf I met once, and Shistavanen and Kazic from my friend Atton."

Nita bursts out laughing.

"I used to know a little Quenya when I was, I dunno, twelve? I wrote a couple horrible poems and then got caught up in Heinlein." She grins. "So I guess you're more than covered, even without the Speech."

"Heinlein's a fun read, but I prefer Niven on the whole."

She grins.

"The Speech is going to be such a help learning new languages, though. If I remember correctly, it lets you understand languages you don't speak yet, right? So I can just pick up a book in a foreign language and start reading. I won't have to have an English version on hand to check it against."

...yes, she has occasionally resorted to flipping back and forth between two translations of the same book in order to get a new language down.

She is a fiend for this sort of thing.

"Yep. Sometimes I get lazy and find it hard to stop reading or listening in the Speech, and pay attention to the actual language being used -- but I'm not looking to add a seventeenth language to my roster," she admits, smiling.

"How on Earth would you not pay attention?" Matilda wonders, blinking. "It's right there. Oh, well. I suppose we can't all be enamoured of language for its own sake."

She's finished her preliminary read-through of the folder by this time, and reaches for a celebratory stick of celery when she closes it.

"Like I said: lazy."

She nods at the folder. "Think that'll keep you for a while?"

"Certainly. If you don't mind, though, could you see about finding me a more extensive lexicon and grammar for later? I like to have all my materials on hand, even if it's probably going to take me some time to get through this."

"I'll see what I can do. Is there any particular field you've got a particular interest in? It'll be a lot easier to get you specialized vocabulary than an overview."

"Everything, of course."

She grins.

"I realize that's not terribly informative. Er, let's see-- I'm in my second year at Cambridge studying linguistics, philosophy, mathematics, chemistry, and physics, at the moment. Does that help?"

". . . Not really."

She sounds amused, and impressed.

"Let's start with physics, though." Wry: "Not that that particular lexicon is exactly small or stable, of course, but it's got a wide set of applications."

"All right." Brightly: "You'd be hard pressed to find a subject I'm not interested in, really."

"No particular affinities yet, huh?"

"Like I said, I'm interested in everything. Languages particularly... are there any people in your home universe who spend their time studying the Speech itself, on its own terms?"

If there are, can she meet and/or become one, preferably both?

"Grammarians? I think so. Somebody has to try and keep track of the way the language changes."

With satisfaction: "That would be a fun job."

She shakes her head. "To each her own. I think I'd get frustrated within a week. The Speech evolves at an incredible rate."