Those words should be understood as mere equivalents of alien terms-that is, a conventional set of equivalents of the same sort that a writer of novels uses when he has foreign characters speaking with each other in their own language but nevertheless transcribes their words in the language of the reader. > Kalgash is an alien world and it is not our intention to have you think that it is identical to Earth, even though we depict its people as speaking a language that you can understand, and using terms that are familiar to you. I remember the introduction to Nightfall by Isaac Asimov, which explains (or perhaps defends) the familiar names of not just alien characters, but their measures and objects:
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |