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nate for us that she did so, of course. Yet it is not clear to me why only the two of you
were sent on this important mission. When it began, she must have been a very young
woman. How was it that she was chosen to be your only companion?
Within half an hour, Hleo sent his response:
Dear Mr. Mndez:
There are two parts in answer to your query.
First, as you can imagine, the mission was very long, very complex, and
very difficult. (Indeed, it is not yet over.) An embodied human requires a
great deal of support in the way of water, food, and other supplies. A sec-
ond human would have doubled that amount; a third, tripled it. The addi-
tional burden on the mission would have been prohibitive. My own needs
are much more modest, to be sure. It was decided that a combination of
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one embodied human and one, shall I say, disembodied human (your lan-
guage has no word for me, alas) would be chosen.
Second, as to the choice of Ms. Darcy rather than someone else, several
considerations were operative.
The person chosen had to be young, in excellent health, courageous,
resourceful, and psychologically stable for the rigors to be faced.
Next, as you will know since you have read the basic information she has
provided on her blog, our society balances tradition with innovation,
which is to say politics is usually a factor in most major decisions. The per-
son chosen had to be acceptable to most factions, and of enough promi-
nence to be beyond controversy. Ms. Darcy has told me she has explained
to you that her father is the over-chief, that is, chief of our tribes. Given
that, his choice of his eldest child for the mission met with general agree-
ment.
I hope this information answers your question. If you please, I would not
like to add any further particulars at this time, leaving those to appointed
representatives who I am sure will be contacting you some number of
years in the future.
Wow, thought Matt. A lot to think about! Darcy was typing away at her own
computer, her eyes fixed on the screen in front of her. He jotted down a few
questions as they occurred to him. He would ask her later, after figuring out the
best approach.
Darcy was lost in her own favorite project, the attempt to place her language
on the Indo-European family tree. Dr. Sledd, more of a philologist than a lin-
guist, nevertheless shared her eagerness for the task. Much as John McLauphin
mediated inquiries about her life and society from people at large, Sledd acted as
her go-between for a large group of linguists scattered about the world.
She had done her best to explain it to Matt. What use is a long list of words
like that? he had wanted to know. She had been typing word after word for
nearly two hours. And what are all those funny symbols?
Those are from the International Phonetic Alphabet, she told him. They
allow nearly every feature of every spoken sound to be described.
OK, but what about that list?
She thought for a second. Well, suppose you had a list of the 100 most com-
mon words in English. Then suppose, in the next column, you put the Spanish
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words for the same thing. And in a third column, you put, say, the Japanese
words for those things and maybe Arabic in a fourth. OK?
OK.
Then you compare the words, and see how many from one column resemble
those in another. What do you think you ll find?
Well, I guess you d find that a lot of Spanish words resemble English words,
but not that many Japanese or Arabic words.
That s right. And the number of resemblances would give you a rough indi-
cation of how close the languages were. If we added columns for German words
and Portuguese words, you d find that most of the Spanish and Portuguese words
resembled each other, which would indicate that those two languages are closely
related. You d also find that many English and German words were related, prob-
ably more than the number of similar ones between English and Spanish. That
would suggest that English and German are closely related. So while Spanish and
Portuguese are also closely related, you could tell that all four are related to each
other, but not as closely. And Arabic and Japanese, which would have very few
resemblances, are likely not related at all. That s because they re from a different
language family, not Indo-European. Do you see?
Sort of. It sounds complicated. Even so, you ve been doing this for days.
How long is your word list?
It is complicated. It s more than just lists of words. It s also individual sounds
and even families of sounds. It s how the languages work, too how questions are
made, how negative statements are formed, and on and on.
Dang! I m sorry I asked! No, I m joking. Thank you for the tutorial. Seri-
ously!
You re welcome, Matt. I love this I think we re really getting somewhere.
Yeah? Like, what are you learning?
One thing I m learning is that linguists love to argue. They ll probably go
back and forth over this stuff for years. Right now, the historical linguists are try-
ing to decide if my language is a branch of Balto-Slavic, or maybe a whole branch
of its own. It has some similarities to the Germanic sub-family too. Another rea-
son it s complicated is that Luvit, my language, has changed as much or more in
several thousand years as the Indo-European languages have. That all has to be
traced back as well.
That makes my head spin, babe. How about some popcorn?
Gradually, they began to acquire social lives. Abuelita liked to invite several
elderly friends for lunch every week, and Matt and Darcy enjoyed sitting around
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the periphery of the group, listening to their conversation. The fact that they
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