Post by Deleted on Jan 28, 2015 5:58:25 GMT -8
Lieutenant Harker’s enthusiasm was contagious as Caroline smiled. The words from the blonde Lieutenant mostly made sense and what she wanted next made sense, but the material surrounding it did not. The technician barely understood what a morpheme was much less an allomorph. She could just provide instructions to the computer to attempt to seek out allomorphs using the rule sets, but if one dd not understand what one was creating then what one created would in turn not be understood. Maybe the morality here in this impossible set of data was to be able to say ‘I don’t know’. For all they knew these glyphs and symbols came from some wall on some system in the Pewdin’s territory that they don’t even know.
"Lets start with this one"… "Lets apply these rules to this single language structure and see what we come up with. In the meantime, we need to try and decipher individual morphemes and allomorphs, if we can. We can start by looking for symbols that could be our plurals"
“Lieutenant Harker, I barely know what a morpheme is much less an allomorph. Could you please explain what we are looking for?“ Caroline asked softly. “Otherwise I don’t know where to begin with constructing that set of instructions to the computer.” The intelligent girl admitted. She could be brilliant, but even brilliance needed help to shine sometimes. For that matter, gemstones sparkled better in clusters.
"It's possible, Zaynah could you..."
Caroline had craned her head around till the chair swiveled in time to catch the Orion making an exit. Zaynah had to excuse herself to the bathroom. The pretty lady with green skin seemed to be a duck out of water. It really was a lovely shade of jade green. The quiet red head empathized with her and became contrite. The footwork needed to attain their goal was really the boring
part. The computer specialist excelled with dealing with the boring parts. Caroline gladly would give the front line work to those better suited to being in the front.
"You know what I think we need? Coffee, can I get you one?"
This surprised the red head. Being asked if she wanted coffee or anything was not something she was used to. She found herself saying, “Sure. Raktijino double strength extra sugar if you don’t mind. Thank you so much.” Once Caroline had the steaming cup of strong brew and took a drink, she got to thinking. ‘Wait a second. Why were they going for just internal sources? Surely… ‘ The thought ended right there as her eyes popped wide open. The miracle of the raktijino fired up the warp core of her brain and that little lady’s mind starting going at warp speed.
“I do have an idea we could try, but it will take all three of us. Assuming these symbols were not extracted from a stone wall somewhere in this section of this quadrant; we couldn’t have been the first to encounter the Pewdin. They knew about the war. If they knew about the war then they must have come across our language and managed to translate it. If that is the case, then their language and these other languages had to have cropped up somewhere in the general trade traffic and even pirate communication traffics. I propose to search those channels, both spoken and data stream, and see if we can locate Starfleet communication logs of this sector of ever
encountering these languages. Even items dumped into the other section, miscellaneous or some dreaded ‘x-file’ of communication data that they placed in because they didn’t know what to do with it. The universal translator has a learning program within it. If it is exposed to the language long enough it can learn the language. Maybe if we find enough examples of these languages we can find a translation of a few words and maybe get enough to expose the universal translator to the language to start it to learning it.”
The girl took a deep long breath from that and exhaled out in a long stream of breath. She hadn’t talked this much since the Academy and well since she met Luis. Luis often seemed to bring things out of the nervous girl and she would start talking her head off for some reason. The anxious lady often was not this open or forward, but a lot was riding on these tests. They were running out of options and quickly. The crafty nerd had one or two other possibilities in her head but failing those they may need to prepare to say ‘I don’t know’.
Tag: @harker, @zaynah