Yet More Random Stuff

I...uh...had more random thoughts.

• I was thinking that my felinoids having 5 major languages for their whole species was unrealistic, but I do have one of the minority languages show up in my third (in-the-works) book.
  
  Also, though, English, Spanish, either Russian or Hindi, Chinese, and Arabic account for fully a third of all native speakers on Earth—and it's probably damn near impossible to go somewhere where someone doesn't speak one of them. Toss in French and you're in even better shape.
• One of my shoutouts that doesn't involve AI, though I haven't actually got around to writing it, is that one of the characters owns a vehicle souped up with top-notch parts from around the world. Among those parts are a Zek Adamah engine from Israel (I trust you know that means "Red Zach" in Hebrew?), and a Aznavuryan friction-reducing coating from Armenia.
  
  Is it perhaps needless to say that its top speed is triple the factory specs?
• Before I had the thought, above, about the Earth's common languages, I'd already decided that three of the felinoids' languages are in the same language group. Basically they're French, Italian, and Greek—one is the form of a classical language that developed in one of its former colonies, another is the form that developed in its original location, and the third is the modern form that developed from another classical language. The second one ("Italian") is the one the felinoids' "Empire" speaks (their equivalent of the Holy Roman Empire was Italian rather than German, mutatis mutandem), but the form that's actually used for official purposes is in many ways close to the late, vernacular form of the classical language. There was often a very thin line between Medieval Italian and the less scholarly forms of Medieval Latin.
  
  That second one, "French", coexists with an unrelated language that many of the populace still use, something like Basque (actually more like if half the French spoke Gaulish at home, except Gaulish is in the same language group as Latin and theirs isn't). The speakers of "French" call it "Old Gaulish" (or, y' know, the equivalent), while its speakers call it "Forest Words", in contrast with "City Words". That—I'm sure you picked up on, O discerning reader—is in parallel with the "countryside" and "town" distinction that explains half the developments in the former Roman Empire. Except the "town" people's leaders weren't German auxiliaries, they were military officers of the same nationality as those who became their subjects, and assumed control of the palaces when the Empire disintegrated. Then again, as Belloc perhaps too strongly insisted, half the "German" auxiliaries were so in name only, and were, for most practical considerations, about as German as the Palatine Hill.
• The other languages are, more or less, "Scandinavian languages" (basically what you might call "Modern Norse") and "the Semitic language group". In many ways my felinoids' languages are more typical of Native American ones—the former has ergative grammar and tone, like Navajo, while the latter makes plurals by initial phonetic reduplication, like most Uto-Aztecan languages. The "Indo-European" ones have post-positions and make their agentive by terpsimbrotos ("he runs", used as a noun, rather than "runner"), like a great number of Native American languages, but actually both are common just in general.
  
  And yeah, I mean "the Semitic language group". The big one, of course, is "Arabic", except it's actually "New Phoenician" or "Modern Aramaic"—the felinoids didn't exactly have anything quite comparable to Islam, at least in its social effect, so rather than the speech of the nomadic "Semites" becoming the norm, that of the settled, urban ones remained dominant. They also have an equivalent to Arabic, and a "Hebrew". The "Aramaic" language also has a classical form, used for religious purposes (and, as with the other languages, the official form of the modern language is very similar to that classical form).
• Obviously, of course, there are more differences than similarities between their history and ours; their equivalent of the Germanic tribes (the "Scandinavian" speakers, above) were of relatively minor importance, whereas ours were of major, though often overstated, significance. They did have a desert-nomad, evangelistic, lean-and-mean monotheistic religion, in some ways like Islam, but it wasn't nearly as successful (most of its adherents, for instance, are still "Arabs", while most Muslims are in South and Southeast Asia and they have a major presence in Africa, as well as Arabia). Its theology is similar to some of the Near Eastern monotheistic sects going around in the later part of the early Byzantine period, of which Islam is the major survivor on Earth, but it's less like Islam proper than it is like, oh, the Druzes or the various quasi-Zoroastrian groups in Iraq (the Yezidis, etc.).
• So those big, elaborate hoods from the Middle Ages, especially notable in the later (shitty) part, are called chaperons. Apparently it began to be fashionable, around 1300, to stick your head in the face-hole and wear it as a hat alone, rather than as a cape-and-hood. Am I the only one reminded of the inside-out clothes in the second Back to the Future?
  
  Apparently "chaperone" comes from, either, the fact the Order of the Garter used to wear them (they were court attendants, hence attendants in general), or else the little hood you put over a falcon's eyes to calm it down. I lean to the latter, myself.
• I don't recall if I mentioned this, but you know how, given that a spaceship doesn't really need to keep facing the direction it travels, the ships in Star Wars would actually easily be able to flip around and shoot TIE fighters coming up behind them?
  
  What they shoulda done, sez I, is mention something about how the Death Star's defense systems will get a lock on you, if you move at a constant velocity, so you have to accelerate the entire time (hey, given their engines were burning the whole time, they ought to have been accelerating anyway). If you're accelerating the whole time, turning around could make you slam into a wall or shoot off to God-knows-where—and if the defense system can't get a lock, it's that much more reasonable for TIE fighters to have to take a hand personally.
• You know how movement in space is actually just either orbiting, or changing orbits, around some body (usually either a planet or a star)?
  
  Well, orbiting, is falling. So most space travel is not flying.
  
  It's falling. With style.
• Which, huh, you know when people in various things say "I'll set your X (where X is all too often 'planet') spiraling into the sun?" Yeah, well, it already is, thanks for playing, that's what an orbit is. Earth is falling into the Sun, just with sufficient tangential velocity that its path is a very, very tightly wound spiral that makes billions of revolutions.
  
  And that brings up an interesting point. Many, many SF stories have beings or civilizations with godlike abilities. Why? So many hard SF fans think it's because they can't handle a world without the supernatural, but I think it's the reverse. I think that's their pathetic attempt to do it, humanistic triumphal posturing. Very few people can really cope with an atheistic cosmos; too many, if not virtually all, try to set up some other god in its place. As the greatest of all atheists put it:

  How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

  But most of our modern atheists are what he would call English flatheads—and not coincidentally, their most prominent spokesmen are all from places that put the Queen on the money.
• Ah, Fred, if only you knew, we killed him 18 and a half centuries before you were born. It didn't take. No existent thing, not even the ones that can be aware they exist, can do anything to Existence; as well ask a fire to abolish heat.
  
  Has anyone even heard of "Actus Subsistens Essendi"? It would appear not.
• On another note (imagine my voice cracking as I shift about two octaves), apparently some NASA employee (not actually NASA) said global warming might make aliens do a preemptive strike, against a species "growing out of control".
  
  Please, think for a second. Unless the aliens are paranoid-ass lunatics, they almost certainly wouldn't be paying enough attention to Earth to know about global warming, if it's real, or what's causing it, if it's us. And they very possibly wouldn't care: I figure your planet's climate is your species' business. Do you call the cops just 'cause your neighbor's keeping weird hours? I sure's hell hope not.
• Apparently Caspar Weinberger was responsible for the current sad plight of space travel. And by sad plight, I mean our insistence on fiddling with little pissant chemical rockets—it's an indignity I think most people aren't aware of. Just like how hunter-gatherer tribesmen don't mind not having indoor plumbing.
  
  See, Weinberger, back in the 70s, cut the funding for NERVA research. Twice. The first time he said the cut would make the research more manageable (which, uh, I'm pretty sure "reduced resources" seldom does, certainly never directly). The second time—when the program was cut all the rest of the way, i.e. effectively canceled—some congressman had the good sense to mock him about it: "Will this make it even more manageable?" Preach it, brother.
  
  We'd probably already have footprints on Mars, if not for that.