milliways_bar | (no subject)

(no subject)

Asar-Suti has fed the trilobites and is sitting in his usual chair near the fireplace, lightly leafing through a Greek Grammar, and occasionally giggling and taking notes.

No, he hasn't lost his mind.

Nor spiked his coffee, which he has as well, of course.

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Giggling in a bar is often bad news, so Ray heads that way. He blinks when he sees who's doing it. "Should I ask?"

"Morning, Ray! You can if you want to," Asar-Suti answers, grinning.

"All right, then," Ray says. "What's so funny?"

"The fact that the Greek word 'chloros' means both white and green at once - it's found describing things we would definitely call white, and others we would most certainly call green," Asar-Suti answers.

"It gets better, you know," Ray says. "One of the ancient words for 'morally pure' in the Greek language became the modern Greek word for 'hopelessly naive'. You're studying Greek? My dad made me learn that, years ago."

"I just learn that quickly to spit it out again for Amadeo - his lover Richard has suddenly turned into a wild Scot, with blue paint, and wearing nothing but a kilt, and speaking nothing but Greek, very oddly - David asked me to find a way by which Amadeo can magically learn Greek so he can talk to Richard. I researched a bit and thought the easiest way would be learning it myself and then offloading it either into Amadeo's mind, or into a crystal that can translate," Asar-Suti explains.

"... A Scot speaking nothing but Greek," Ray repeats. "I know the Romans called Scotland 'Caledonia' after Kalydon in the Greek stories, but that's... really strange. Do you need any help with the learning? I'm not that good at the spoken form but I'm a whiz with the reading/"

"It's so weird you could almost think the Hellfly was back," Asar-Suti sighs. "Poor Amadeo - and poor Richard, how emberassing that will all be when he gets back to normal. And no, I'm, erm, using magic and godding to push in the language within a few hours, so I'm afraid conventional help is not much use."

Ray starts to say something, then stops, mouth partway open. It takes him a moment to close it and get the speech queue back on track. "How long did you say this's been going on again? What seemed to set it off?"

"I haven't seen Richard myself, and David didn't say exactly how long - but it can't have been more than a day or two, from how he described it. And I hae no idea what set it off. Just that it spontaneously happened," Asar-Suti reports.

"Mmm. Want me to run a scan on him and make sure I've got demonic influences ruled out? That combination of ethnicities just sounds awfully weird."

"That would be a very good idea if he were here and not in New Orleans," Asar-Suti says. "And I think he's managed to lose himself, too - David said he 'might turn up here' so they're not holding on to him. Poor Amadeo!"

Ray rolls his eyes. "I'm starting to think the Bar needs to invest in a set of trank guns and some of those remote-tracker tags that the National Geographic people use to follow bears," he says. "Just for use on the people who're non compos mentis temporarily."

Asar-Suti laughs out loud. "Do suggest that to security!" he giggles. "Only, in this place, who dares define sanity?"

"Well, compared to their usual state, anyway," Ray says. "I mean, if River suddenly started speaking in perfectly ordinary complete English sentences and paragraphs, I'd worry that someone had jumped her brain, you know?"

"I don't think I've met her," Asar-Suti says. "She's that girl, though, isn't she? Talks to Meg quite often? From the same world as Wash?"

"That's her," Ray says. "Nice girl. A little strange, but a nice girl. I'm convinced she's either a descendant of my friend Egon, or a descendant of one of his relatives. I've never met anybody else who understood as much of what I was saying without me having to use words as she does."

"Everybody here tends to be a little strange," Asar-Suti agrees. "I must make sure to meet her after all. What language does she speak?"

"English mostly," Ray says, "but also Mandarin Chinese. Which is unfortunate because the only Chinese I speak is a fistful of sentences of another dialect."

"So if she speaks Chinese, then all hope fails of talking to her?" Asar-Suti asks, with a strangely fascinated expression in his eyes.

"Well, no, she still understands English even when she speaks Chinese," Ray says. "I just don't understand what she's saying if she reverts to that language, that's all. I mean, I could maybe read a little of it, but only a little. Never studied it academically."

Asar-Suti nods, seriously, distracted.

"How do you think people in this place communicate?" he asks, out of the blue. "Do all really speak the same language, or is there a translation spell? I talked about it with Eska, earlier."

"I'm guessing there's some kind of a universal translation field in the bar, though not as potent as there might be," Ray says. "I know for a fact that I was able to have lengthy conversations with Lysistrata of Athens, and my ancient Greek is not good enough to understand her spoken word for that length of time- plus, she had no way at all of learning twenty-first century English. I suspect that the reason I can't understand River when she speaks Chinese is because to some degree the form of the word is more important than the meaning, or at least equally important, and so the form is what reaches my ears instead. I know that when I spoke to Lysistrata I had to concentrate a couple of times and deliberately render some of my words in Greek to ensure that she had a good clear understanding of what I was trying to say."

Asar-Suti grins.

"Wonderful. Thanks for the long answer. Very useful. Yes, that's exactly my heory, while Eska thinks we are all speaking the same language, gone from world to world by memetic trandference or something. I decided to make a non-representative mini-survey and ask a few people what language they think they are speaking."

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