"Blish, James - A Case Of Conscience" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

Chtexa: Like German "Stuka," but with the flat "e."

gchteht: Guttural "g" followed by the soft "sh" sound, a flat "e," and
the "h" serving as equivalent of the Old Russian mute sign; thus, a
four-syllable word, with a palatal tick at the end, but sounded as one
syllable.

Gleshchtehk: As indicated, with the guttural "G," the "fish-church"
middle consonants, and the mute "h" throwing the "k" back against the
soft palate.

THE RULE is that "ch" is always English "sh" in the initial position,
always English "ch" as in "chip" elsewhere in the word; and "h" in
isolation is an accented rest which always precedes, never follows, a
consonant. As Agronski somewhere remarks, anybody who can spit can speak
Lithian.


Book One

The stone door slammed. It was Cleaver's trade-mark: there had never been
a door too heavy, complex, or cleverly tracked to prevent him from
closing it with a sound like a clap of doom. And no planet in the
universe could possess an air sufficiently thick and curtained with damp
to muffle that sound--not even Lithia.

Father Ramon Ruiz%Sanchez, late of Peru, and always Clerk Regular of the
Society of Jesus, professed father of the four vows, continued to read.
It would take Paul Cleaver's impatient fingers quite a while to free him
from his jungle suit, and in the meantime the problem remained. It was a
century-old problem, first propounded in 1939, but the Church had never
cracked it And it was diabolically complex (that adverb was official,
precisely chosen, and intended to be taken literally.) Even the novel
which had proposed the case was on the Index Expurgatorius, and Father
Ruiz%Sanchez had spiritual access to it only by virtue of his Order.

He turned the page, scarcely hearing the stamping and muttering in the
hall. On and on the text ran, becoming more tangled, more evil, more
insoluble with every word:

"...Magravius threatens to have Anita molested by Sulla, an orthodox
savage (and leader of a band of twelve mercenaries, the Sullivani,) who
desires to procure Felicia for Gregorius, Leo Vitellius and Macdugalius,
four excavators, if she will not yield to him and also deceive Honuphrius
by rendering conjugal duty when demanded. Anita who claims to have
discovered incestuous temptations from Jeremias and Eugenius- There now,
he was lost again. Jeremias and Eugenius were-? Oh, yes, the
"philadelphians" or, brotherly lovers (another crime hidden there, no
doubt) at the beginning of the case, consanguineous to the lowest degree