>>>student, as her shirt indicated. She had an English name. Carolyn,
>>>maybe? No - Kaitlyn.
>>
>>"Kaitlyn" is a misspelling of an Irish Gaelic name (sort of; it ought
>>to be Caitlyn, unless you're going full-on Gaelic).
>
>Give Janvier a break, he's not a linguist - just a guy who runs a pub
>next door to Police Headquarters. :)

I'm nitpicking. Theses are the kinds of thoughts an amateur linguist has ^_^. "K" doesn't exist, really, in properly spelled Gaelic; it's only anglicization that turns "Ceiligh" into "Kelly" and things like that.

>Some cursory poking around on the Web came up with 16. It's a
>half-assed research method, but given that I was only looking for a
>baseline to extrapolate into the 25th century from anyway, I figured
>it was good enough. (Rather convenient, yes, but it saved me from
>feeling like I'd totally made it up. :)

Given that we're dealing 400 years in the future, anything's possible. Personally, given the kind of society you tend to portray in UF, I'm surprised that a drinking age exists. (Or, as a Dutchman I knew put it, "old enough to walk to the pub".)

>A friend of mine who played bass in an industrial band once told me
>that bassist is the best job in all of rock music, because the lead
>guitarist and lead singer are expected to put on a show, the rhythm
>guitarist gets sucked into that, and the drummer has to do all sorts
>of actual work, but all the bassist has to do is stand in the
>back and look cool. :)

I actually *do* work as a bassist. There's two kinds of bassists in rock music, basically: there's the ones who picked up bass because they couldn't get work as a rhythm guitarist (Duff McKagan, for instance); some of them are fairly good at that, but they're rarely anything special. Nothing wrong with that; it's about the same amount of skill as the typical rock lead guitarist ("Lead guitar? More like follow guitar..." -- a blues musician I played with a few times). Then there's bassists like the kind I try to be, for whom the bass is the principal instrument of expression, and who do the job of laying down a bassline but then go above and beyond that by adding considerably to the music; see Jeff Ament of Pearl Jam (probably the closest thing I have to a role model, musically) or Flea (whom I wish I could play like but I'm just not fast enough and probably never will be). That beautiful, melodic intro to "Jeremy" is played on a Hamer 12-string bass.

>>Paris n'a que vingt arrondissements au siecle vingt-cinqueme?
>
>What?

Paris only has twenty arrondissements in the twentieth century?

>>>perhaps from one of the 'colonies dans les etoiles'.
>>
>>Colonies inside the stars? Aren't they kind of hot?
>
>I was actually shooting for "in" in the sense of "among", but
>prepositional nuance is apparently one of the many, many things
>babelfish.altavista.com isn't good at. :)

*nods* I figured that. This is why I don't trust translation software, and occasionally amuse myself by writing complex, idiomatic compositions and running them through babelfish.altavista.com a couple of times (English -> Italian -> English, for instance) to see what comes out. Anyway, "dans" means "in" in the sense of "inside", not "among".

>By the Exile, G knows a lot of languages. He started learning
>them to pass the time during the dull bits when the WDF didn't have
>anything to do and Kei and Yuri were away on 3WA assignments. There
>were a lot of those in the Golden Age, and he picks up languages fast.

Well, a Detian mind has perfect recall, which helps one of my major stumbling blocks in learning a foreign language, vocabulary. Internalizing a word can sometimes be trying if I don't use it frequently.

>>Out of bizarre curiousity, did Mark Okrand invent a Klingon language
>>for the Trek franchise in the UF universe, and, if so, is it anything
>>like the language typically spoken by Klingons offworld?
>
>Dunno. Or care, really.

Wasn't really expecting an answer, but it's something that popped into my head while considering languages. It'd be a bit odd if he had and it did, but, then, it wouldn't be anything new for UF.

>>>turtleneck sweater, the other a gray-skinned, white-haired, slim and
>>>coltish Nebari girl,
>>
>>Why, I do believe that this is the first Farscape reference in UF.
>
>I believe it is, yes.

Well, here's to more. Farscape is the best genre (sf/f/horror) show on television right now (yes, I'll say it's better than Buffy or The X-Files -- hell, The X-Files peaked years ago, and I'll mostly be watching season nine out of inertia, and respect for a genre show that's lasted this long); while Enterprise looks promising, I'm not expecting it to be on the level of TNG or DS9. (All it really has to do is be better than Voyager, and I'll watch it; granted, that's not a huge challenge, but if Brannon Braga's involved, it could be tough.)

-- Sean --

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