>>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. :)

>> "Most excellent," said Janvier. "Shall I pour your wine
>>before I go and give your order to Mama?"
>> Juri said she would like that, thank you, but Kaitlyn went a
>>little pink and replied, "Um, n-n-no, th-thank y-y-you... I, I'm
>>n-n-not o-o-old en-n-nough. M-mayb-b-be Th-Th-Thursd-d-day... "
>
>I don't know where you got your information, but last I knew the
>drinking age in France is 13, and even then, nobody really cares.

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. :)

>Composers, maybe, but whenever I've been around a large number of
>fellow musicians we've mostly compared notes, techniques, preferences,
>and war stories. But bassists aren't really contentious anyway.

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. :)

>> In this vein, they sat across the table on the sidewalk by the
>>rue de Rivoli for almost two hours and argued. They didn't fight -
>>they -argued-, after the ancient Greek fashion, taking opposing
>>viewpoints and defending them with wit and courtesy.
>
>Am I the only one who finds this to be a difficult art to sustain? So
>few people seem to be able to debate aggressively without letting it
>get personal.

It's a Paris thing, I guess. :)

>>system, hitting shops in no fewer than nine of the city's 20
>>arrondissements).
>
>Paris n'a que vingt arrondissements au siecle vingt-cinqueme?

What?

>>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. :)

>>had missed out French. It was very possibly the only Earth language
>>he didn't know, but his ignorance of it was profound.
>
>Okay, even assuming that we're down to a selection of national
>languages, that's still several hundred. I'm impressed. (India alone
>has something like 140 different languages and over 700 different
>dialects.)

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. (That's a lingering aftereffect of my old friend Joe Martin's original Detians 413 game system - to learn a new language, all a Detian had to do was find a decent reference for it and spend the XP for the skill point. That aspect of Detianism has sort of gotten deprecated as the UF version of the condition has evolved away from Joe's original model, but I'd had the Gryphon-as-hobbyist-linguist thing established in my head before that happened.)

>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.

>>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.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor in Chief, Netadmin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/