"Suzette Haden Elgin - We Have Always Spoken Panglish" - читать интересную книгу автора (Elgin Suzette Haden)

language I was familiar with. Sometimes they were truly alien and I wasn't at all sure how to classify
them. Every detail seemed to me to be carefully chosen тАж nothing glaring, nothing shocking, nothing
tawdry; always, the choices were subtle and harmonious.

"I've seen some of those patterns before," I said slowly, "but I don't remember where."

Fadrien laughed. "You've seen them on Hisheffan dishes and curtains and shirts and swimsuits," she said.
"The Hisheffans are very fond of them."

I nodded, remembering. "Like the shirt I bought yesterday."

"Yes."

"Do they pay the Losheffan artists when they use the patterns?"

"Oh, no," she said. "You know how they are."

"Losheffans start working on this stuff when they're just toddlers," Bru told me. "They practice with
plain mud on flat rocks until some adult says they're good enough to move on to the real thing."

"Everybody does this?"

He shrugged, and looked at Fadrien, who shook her head to tell him she didn't know either. "So far as I
recall, it's everybody," he said. "If anybody is excluded тАж or maybe just doesn't want to be involved, and
doesn't take part тАж I don't know about it. I never thought about it before, Alyssa. I'm afraid I'm not very
interested in the Losheffans."

"Oh? Why not?"

"Well тАж It's interesting that they want to make the slum attractive to look at, I suppose, but it's still a
slum. A ghetto, really. I'm not interested, basically, in people who don't care enough to try to get ahead in
their world."

How do you know they don't try? I thought, but I kept still. When I was with Bru and Fadrien I was on
duty, and the more shallow I kept our conversations, the better. Sightseeing. The weather. Food. And the
words and grammar of Beydini, of course; in that one area, it was safe not to be shallow, as long as I was
careful not to say anything about how ordinary and typical the language was.

"I hope you don't think Bru is a snob," Fadrien said then, sounding a little uneasy, which meant that my
body language was giving me away in spite of my best intentions. I'd been finding it a little hard to
maintain my professional persona with the Yegerrian expatriates, because I kept losing my awareness
that they weren't Terrans. It's easy to stay "on duty" when the creatures you're interacting with have two


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 We Have Always Spoken Panglish

heads or look like giant caterpillars or some such thing. When they're like the Yegerrians and the
Sheffans, and they look and talk just like the people you know at home, it's not so simple. So Yegerrians
have two appendixes instead of one, and their pancreas is located in their upper chest, and their hair is