alicornutopia | barring emergencies

Entry tags:

barring emergencies

Bella's not sure where she has wandered. She thought she was about to walk into a shop, but this appears to be an unattended bar. With none of the windows associated with the shop she thought she was entering. It could be an elaborate psychic assault of some kind, but it doesn't feel very... assault-y... and she was in the middle of a town and doesn't think any humans want to sic their 'mon on her. It's strange. She approaches the bar, looking around warily, hand hovering near her belt.

with Max (Benedict)

with Earth and Lightning (kappa)

with Ann and Sabrina (kuuskytkolme)

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The elf frowns at him, but says, "There are humans in my world, yes."

"Humans, as in... I guess there are too many questions to find one to start with. I mean... I'm probably not going to your world, so the only thread I can chase is raw curiosity."

He drums his fingers on the bar.

"So... what's it like in Elf World?"

"My world's name is Thilanushinyel, and in it, elves find it highly impolite to ask questions outside of emergencies."

"It's impolite to ask questions? What in the... how does that work? What's impolite about questi-"

Oh. Wait. Crap. Hold on. That was just- he just asked three questions immediately after being told...

"I mean, um... I... I didn't..."

...he's got nothing.

"A straightforward replacement is to state the desire to know something. It is inelegant but not outright rude, as it does not so directly demand information."

"Directly demand... really? I mean- that- I register surprise, that wasn't a question, 'really', just- christ, that's weird. I wonder why... if there's this universal translator, and... I'd assume whatever language you're really speaking, under the hood... the grammar for question-asking would be special, a clearly different form that makes the demand explicit. Am I-"

He stops.

"...I'd like to know, but don't demand a response about, whether I'm right about questions having special syntax in your language. In the language that I'm really speaking, questions are... basically like what you're saying, stating the desire to know something, followed by a description of the thing, except the desire-to-know is indicated with like... it flips the subject and the verb, and there's a little inflection at the end, and that's it. Ingrained as a normal part of language. I mean... I should get Anna in here sometime, she's a linguist, she'd get like ten different research papers out of this."

"There are grammatical markers for questions. They are economical in time and in cutting down on extraneous social niceties, and are acceptable from small children or in times of war or other emergency, but not from polite adults, among elves."

"But I guess humans in your world, they speak-"

Oh, wait. Max has an idea.

"Actually, hang on, let me try something. I'm gonna say, right here: 'Hola! No habla Espanol!' and- if you like, tell me what it just sounded like I said there."

"Hello, I do not speak Spanish," she repeats slowly.

Max's eyes light up.

"A-HA! Oh, that's good. That's something. I just said, in that language I don't know how to speak... well, what you just said, but in a different language from my own. So, the translation here... it doesn't preserve those differences. But... it could have had something to do with how I did know the meaning of those words. I wonder if..."

He spins around.

"Bar, could I borrow a... one of those guidebooks that translate phrases into English for tourists, like... let's say Russian, I don't know a word of Russian, a Russian to English pocket dictionary?"

Of course. Here is just such a thing.

"Good, thanks, so I'll just read off something at rand-"

Oh. Wait. There is a flaw in this experimental setup. A flaw that reads "Where is the nearest restaurant? <-> Where is the nearest restaurant?"

"That's... this is not going to work."

The elf giggles.

"Okay, this can still work! I... well, maybe. Uh, Bar, does... if I take this book and sort of... lean out the door, so the book is outside, in my world, and read it from there, or... if I hold it open with my foot and stand out there and... question is, what's the limit of the translation effect?"

If you lean out the door, says Bar, with the book beyond the threshold, it will not be translated anymore.

"That's... unexpected, actually. It means... that it's the book being translated, not my brain seeing the words differently. Which... if two people can read the same book at once, it'd mean they'd see... well, never mind. Let's test this."

He walks up to the door and covers the English half of one page, then holds the book out the door and... oh. Right. Russian uses a different alphabet. He sits down and pores over the pronunciation guide for a minute, then selects a different random word.

He strolls back up to the bar and declares "картофель!"

If you want one, the bar says, you may have to produce a complete sentence and a quantity of money depending on how you want it cooked.

"Potato," says the elf. "Perhaps there is a purpose to this exercise that eludes me."

"Potato," he repeats. "So this place translates whether or not anyone in it actually knows the meaning of the word. But," he continues, "If I say-" he rattles off a string of gibberish- "- then it's not going to mean anything, even though somewhere in some universe it probably sounds like something in their language. So it knew "potato", it knew that was Russian, because..."

"I suppose this would be interesting if you hoped to exploit the environment to evade large amounts of difficult translation work," says the elf. "It seems unlikely to matter for the purposes of casual conversation; it is a highly effective utility and cannot be brought home, so..."

"No, you don't understand! This... it means something's watching, it can infer things from context! There was no Russian-knowing mind here, just like there's no gibberish-knowing mind to translate the gibberish- but it knew anyway! There's just the dictionary- it can see, oh, he was using a Russian dictionary, so he spoke something in Russian... Bar, I'm assuming you don't handle the translation yourself?"

I do not, but I am, technically, a Russian-knowing mind, chides the bar.

"...hm. Yes. I mean... well, you... you're also presumably a gibberish-knowing mind, right? Some species of alien or alternate human from one of those infinite universes probably has a word that sounds like- um, what was it, a znorfblarg or whatever I said. They're just not here. So... does it... does it pull all the languages from the world a customer comes from, or... did you learn Russian when you materialized that dictionary?"

I already knew Russian, I assure you, says the bar.

"Hhhhhuh. I assumed... if you don't... you remember every language you learn? I- right, I was thinking of you as human, limited memory... is it possible for you to materialize a dictionary in some language you don't know, and see if it has the same result? Or do you know every language in your library?"

Mumble grumble flawed experimental design grumble hrumble.

I know all of the languages I have ever heard of, and I am not now and have never previously been a human. My memory is not perfect, but it is not limited in language capacity.

The elf is peering at his napkins curiously.

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