Excerpt: Kherishdar's Exception (Patreon)

One of the things I'm doing right now is adding to this book. The plot is already outlined (just like it was with Black Blossom), but I want to leave lots of chunks open for serial commenters to inspire random tangents with their questions like you all did for the other books. 

So I'm writing the plot bits, and then putting in things like [INSERT STUFF HERE]. If you all, reading the serial, say something that gives me a topic to add, then that's where it goes! Otherwise, I can safely take it out without affecting the plot.

I fully expect your comments to add a lot to the book, even in the plot parts. (That's why I write ahead... so I can rewrite at a comfortable pace.) But it's good to have a buffer... which is what I'm working on now. Here's a bit from that buffer, to whet your appetites. And also to prove that yes, working out all those pronouns wasn't wasted work. :D

Enjoy!

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Your pronouns, aunera, are weak.

Or at least, the ones in this language I’m learning are. (It took me a while to truly internalize how many languages you have. And also to find it hypocritical that you disdain us for our single tongue but confess to using a common tongue on your planet. If functionally you must speak a single language to be understood by other aunera on your single world, then why are you so proud of having more than one? It’s as if you have a reflexive need to enshrine diversity for diversity’s sake. And before you make unwarranted assumptions about our ‘hive minds,’ don’t think that we fail to find pleasure in choice. But while I understand ornament in matters that don’t impede understanding between people, languages are not discretionary.)

But, back to your pronouns, and how few you have, and how meager in meaning. You have all of six pronouns for people, and this is supposed to suffice you for every situation. I have no idea how. When you’re talking with someone about someone else, you can’t communicate the most basic information about whether that person is here or in some other place. You can’t be part of a crowd except by implication, and Shemena knows context is not enough, most times, to make clear whether your ‘you’ is singular or plural. That’s not even touching that you can’t, with a single word, make known the relative rank of the people you’re discussing.

Ai-Naidari, by contrast, has 432 pronouns, and with them I can convey both exquisite nuances and frankly necessary data that you apparently must either miss, cobble together from context, or assume based on wild conjecture—probably incorrectly. When I went in search of your pronoun lists, in fact, I skipped Lenore’s page about it entirely, because it was just that: a page. I was expecting a section.

It was obvious to me that there was no way you could convey what we could with your feeble six words.

I discovered the following day that I was wrong.