JК
The Lovers :: Фармер Филип Хосе
Страница: 31 из 127It was true that they could be approximated, but would the Ozagenians understand these approximations?
Another obstacle was the grammatical construction of Siddo. Consider the tense system. Instead of inflecting a verb or using an unattached particle to indicate the past or future, Siddo used an entirely different word. Thus, the masculine animate infinitive dabhumaksani-galu'ahai, meaning to live, was, in the perfect tense, ksuupeli'afo, and, in the future, mai'teipa. The same use of an entirely different word applied for all the other tenses. Plus the fact that Siddo not only had the normal (to Earthmen) three genders of masculine, feminine, and neuter, but the two extra of inanimate and spiritual. Fortunately, gender was inflected, though the expression of it would be difficult for anybody not born in Siddo. The system of indicating gender varied according to tense.
Other parts of speech – nouns, pronouns, adjectives-adverbs, and conjunctions – operated under the same system as the verbs. To confuse the use of the tongue, different social classes quite often used different words to express the same meaning.
The writing of Siddo could only be compared to that of ancient Japanese. There was no alphabet; instead, ideograms, lines whose length, shape, and relative angle to each other were meaningful, were used. Signs accompanying each ideogram indicated the correct inflection of gender.
In the privacy of his study cubicle, Hal swore mildly by the lost right hand of Sigmen.
The captain of the first expedition had picked out the continent in the Ozagenian antipodes as his base for research. This happened to be occupied by natives who spoke the most difficult language (for Earthmen) to master. If he had chosen the other continent in the northern hemisphere, he could have had (rather, his linguist could have had) forty different tongues to choose from, some of them comparatively easy in their syntax and with short words. That is, they were if Hal could believe the random sample of them that the linguist had taken.
Siddo, the land mass in the southern hemisphere, was about the size, though not the shape, of Africa and was separated from the other by ten thousand miles of ocean. If the wog geologists were correct, it had once been part of a Gondwanaland, but then it had drifted away. Evolution had then taken a somewhat different path from that on the other continent. Whereas the other continent had been dominated by insects and their distant cousins, the endoskeletal pseudoarthropods, this land mass had been very hospitable to mammals. Though, Sigmen knew, there was an abundance of insect life on it.
Another obstacle was the grammatical construction of Siddo. Consider the tense system. Instead of inflecting a verb or using an unattached particle to indicate the past or future, Siddo used an entirely different word. Thus, the masculine animate infinitive dabhumaksani-galu'ahai, meaning to live, was, in the perfect tense, ksuupeli'afo, and, in the future, mai'teipa. The same use of an entirely different word applied for all the other tenses. Plus the fact that Siddo not only had the normal (to Earthmen) three genders of masculine, feminine, and neuter, but the two extra of inanimate and spiritual. Fortunately, gender was inflected, though the expression of it would be difficult for anybody not born in Siddo. The system of indicating gender varied according to tense.
Other parts of speech – nouns, pronouns, adjectives-adverbs, and conjunctions – operated under the same system as the verbs. To confuse the use of the tongue, different social classes quite often used different words to express the same meaning.
The writing of Siddo could only be compared to that of ancient Japanese. There was no alphabet; instead, ideograms, lines whose length, shape, and relative angle to each other were meaningful, were used. Signs accompanying each ideogram indicated the correct inflection of gender.
In the privacy of his study cubicle, Hal swore mildly by the lost right hand of Sigmen.
The captain of the first expedition had picked out the continent in the Ozagenian antipodes as his base for research. This happened to be occupied by natives who spoke the most difficult language (for Earthmen) to master. If he had chosen the other continent in the northern hemisphere, he could have had (rather, his linguist could have had) forty different tongues to choose from, some of them comparatively easy in their syntax and with short words. That is, they were if Hal could believe the random sample of them that the linguist had taken.
Siddo, the land mass in the southern hemisphere, was about the size, though not the shape, of Africa and was separated from the other by ten thousand miles of ocean. If the wog geologists were correct, it had once been part of a Gondwanaland, but then it had drifted away. Evolution had then taken a somewhat different path from that on the other continent. Whereas the other continent had been dominated by insects and their distant cousins, the endoskeletal pseudoarthropods, this land mass had been very hospitable to mammals. Though, Sigmen knew, there was an abundance of insect life on it.