When the latest installment of this never-ending saga was pressed into my hands, I could not help but ask the question: “Why me?”
Davy looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “It’s obvious,” he said.
What is, perhaps, not so obvious is that 37th Century Galactic Standard has many commonalities with 21st Century English. But as one might expect, it is as different from the language we speak as Chaucer’s tongue is to us. It is English with phrases incorporated from German, French and Japanese, subject to all the cultural, linguistic and technological metamorphosis that one might expect in 1600 years of history. It is a language where memes have become idioms (i.e. “rickrollin” = to conquer thoroughly and utterly through deceit) and the influence of space travel is everywhere (reference the use of the term “holepunch” as a sexual metaphor.)
I say this to point out that when Ashtara names his emanations “Axel,” “Beat,” etc. the double-meaning is immediately understood. Also there are numerous words and phrases common to GS which are best left in the original tongue: grand jeté, for example, or honto-ni, a bastardization of the Japanese phrase for “It is true,” or “Is it true?” It is used with the same inflection as the 21st Century English phrase “O rly?”
Now that I have been made webmaster of historyofash.net, the media push venue for this series, I have little hope of ever getting free of it. However, I do intend to use the site for the shameless self-promotion of my soon-to-be-issued monograph “The Rise of the Robot Masters: how artificial intelligence changed the face of chess.”
-MC