Insulated by fur and blubber, the otter-like Ruadrath are comfortable in a cold environment where they toboggan down a snow-covered hill on their stomachs. Their respiratory system, protected by oils instead of by moisture, does not release breath like smoke. Instead, water leaves their bodies only by excretion. Their ears are closable. Their large, golden eyes have nictitating membranes. They have no nose but breathe through the opercula that protect their gills. As with Merseians, their forward-leaning stance is balanced by a substantial tail. Their webbed feet are both fins and snowshoes. A human throat cannot reproduce their melodious speech so the species communicate by vocalizer. The Ruadrath have no alphabet, just drawings and carvings. Flandry must say that he saw an account that was depicted, not that it was written.
These details mean that this novel is more than just a space opera with otter-headed aliens.
8 comments:
Though note that the pictures are a percusor -- early alphabets were stylized pictures, which then became either ideographs (Chinese script) or syllabic scripts.
Eg., in Linear B, the Bronze age script used to write Mycenaean Greek, a stylized cat-head is the symbol for a sound "miu", and a stylized ox-head represents "muu".
(Not kidding, they really do.)
So the Domrath system is a forerunner of writing.
Mind you, a lot of the Bronze Age scripts were abortions, hard to learn and ambiguous without knowing a panoply of unwritten rules.
Linear A, for example, was an adaptation of Linear A, a Cretan script which was almost certainly developed for a non-Indo-European language.
You can tell because the syllabary makes all words end with a vowel, which makes it impossible to represent the noun/verb/adverb inflectional system all early IE languages use.
For example, the Greek word for "human" is "anthropos" and was in Mycenaean Greek too.
(It's in the genative case, so means "of or pertaining to a human", btw.)
But the closest you can get to -writing- it in Linear A is something that sounds out as "a-to-ro-po-se".
So you have to 'intuit' the inflectional ending in any given writing.
It's no wonder the system was completely forgotten in the post-Mycenaean 'dark age'.
There's an episode in Homer where someone is sent with a message that reads "please execute bearer", and it probably dates from Mycenaean times, as a fair amount of his stuff did.
But the closest Homer can come to saying that is to say that the message contained "baleful signs"; even the memory of writing had perished.
And indeed these Talwinian drawings are described as "mnemonic." They have become stylized.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling1
Apologies, but I think you meant to say the RUADRATH had worked out a precursor to a true writing system.
I also thought of how the classical Pharaohnic hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt very plainly had their origins as pictographs. An amusing part of Chesterton's THE EVER-LASTING MAN was him speculating that an early Pharaoh and his courtiers coining many hieroglyphs as PUNS.
Ad astra! Sean
Mr Stirling
Much of what I think I know about such early writing systems comes from the chapter on writing systems in "Guns, Germs, and Steel".
Would you say Jared Diamond gets any major points wrong in that?
Jim: it's been a -long- time since I read Diamond.
Sean: quite right. Mental transposition!
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I wanted to be sure I understood you correctly.
Ad astra! Sean
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