“Know, O traveler, that you pass through dedicated lands; these places are sacred to the Blue and the Purple, and to them alone.” “Drink deep, eat well our fruits, hunt for your meat; but light no fires, claim no holds, and harm nothing that grows. Those who pass freely may
Lhaegár Rhuanhz, Vice President of Operations for Bright Shadow in the Hanth Cluster, looked around her office, eyes passing lightly across a dozen network status displays, a reassuring blue overall with normal local traffic and the brighter datatrails of the Selvaciy and Synnecy backbones, before returning to rest on the
…is today’s not-my-fiction story recommendation! (I’ve also been having a little fun today with their Pulp-O-Mizer cover generator. Check it out: )
Emotions vs. Stoicism: Mastering talcoríëf (literally cold-mindedness; metaphorically, cool reason and mastery of passions) is very, very important to the eldrae. There’s a reason why their deep history were days of Glory and War and Wonder and Strife and Terror, and they don’t want to revisit those any
The half-grown hasérúr dashed through the threadbare forest, and Hanych followed, stumbling in the dim light of the storm-wracked sky. His breath was loud in his ears, the pain in his side nearly quieting the acid burn in his belly. Snow and old ash scattered at their passage, he and
Emergency Transformation: This is another thing that tends to happen a lot – not so much for the Imperials themselves, who are used to changing bodies, and for that matter substrates – “at home I’m a humanoid; at work I’m a squidbot” – like other people change suits, but as you
Eloquent In My Native Tongue: Eldraeic native speakers tend to come across this way, tending to be either stilted and concise (if they’re aware of it and overcompensating for that by grotesquely simplifying everything, Eldraeic being, ah, very enriched in language features indeed – an approach which is somewhat shameful,
Translator Microbes: More or less ubiquitous, in one form or another, and pretty much essential to sustaining galactic culture. Advanced cultures use neuroprosthetic translators, which are embedded directly into the language center of the brain (or are software run on more sophisticated brain implants) which provide real-time translation between ear
(Reason for out-of-sequencing: to express, in the light of this story, the sentiment that GW can kiss my authorial ass, too. Along with everyone else who has ever used the term, whose earliest usage that I am aware of dates to the 1920s. Come sue me, melonfarmers.) Space Marine: Yep.
Spock Speak: …partially. To some extent, it’s the nature of the language. Eldraeic doesn’t have contractions (although some words are coined as portmanteaus, more or less), and is designed to match the preferences of its creators (by both species and profession) for low-context, high-precision communications (spurred on, perhaps,
Should you, for some wacky reason, care about the software-type things I do for my day job when I’m not writing, you can browse through bits and pieces of my open-source stuff, tool recommendations, and general snippets of useful-type information over at my coding blog: public class Random : Coding
Sophisticated As Hell: The rather sophisticated system of registers and inflections for differing degrees of politeness and formality in Eldraeic would make this sort of thing really quite easy to pull off, for native speakers, and so it seems a crying shame not to use it on appropriate occasion. Translating