Carl Donnan, now Captain of the USS Benjamin Franklin, converses with Hlott Luurs, the Draga of Tolbek on Vorlak and president of the Dragar Council.
"They both spoke in Uru, a modified form of the language used by the first interstellar visitors to this region. Some such lingua franca was necessary throughout a cluster; every spaceman mastered it as part of his training. Uru was flexible, grammatically streamlined, and included standardized units of measurement. Any oxygen breather could pronounce its phonemes, or at least write its alphabet, well enough to be understood. In fact, several other clusters, their own civilizations first seeded by explorers of that ancient race, had adopted the same auxiliary speech." (p. 43)
("Cluster" means "civilization-cluster," not "galactic cluster.")
This admirable summary deserved to be quoted in full. Imagine spacefarers learning a lingua franca as part of their training. This language has been modified and streamlined. In its inter-species use, it has probably departed far from its original form.
The scenario in After Doomsday is indeed unique.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Not quite, Anglic came close to being such a lingua franca in the sphere of space covered by Technic Civilization, in and out of the Empire. At least by beings of many races who were likely to have business with persons of other species. And that was true even of the hostile Merseians.
Ad astra! Sean
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