"John Norman - Gor 01- Tarnsman of Gor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norman John)

In the next few weeks I found myself immersed in intensive activity, interspersed with carefully
calculated rest and feeding periods. At first only Torm and my father were my teachers, but as I
began to master the language of my new home, numerous others, apparently of Earth stock, assumed
responsibility for my lessons in special areas. Torm's English, incidentally, was spoken with a
Gorean accent. He had learned our tongue from my father. Most Goreans would have regarded it as a

worthless tongue, since it is nowhere spoken on the planet, but Torm had mastered it, apparently
only for the delight of seeing how living thought could express itself in yet another garb.

The schedule that was forced upon me was meticulous and grueling, and except for rest and feeding,
alternated between times of study and times of training, largely in arms, but partly in the use of
various devices as common to the Goreans as adding machines and scales are to us.

One of the most interesting was the Translator, which could be set for various languages. Whereas
there was a main common tongue on Gor, with apparently several related dialects or sub languages,
some of the Gorean languages bore in sound little resemblance to anything I had heard before, at
least as languages; they resembled rather the cries of birds and the growls of animals; they were
sounds I knew could not have been produced by a human throat. Although the machines could be set
for various languages, one term of the translation symmetry, at least in the machines I saw, was
always Gorean. If I set the machine to, say, Language A and spoke Gorean into it, it would, after
a fraction of a second, emit a succession of noises, which was the translation of my Gorean
sentences into A. On the other hand, a new succession of noises in A would be received by the
machine and emitted as a message in Gorean.

My father, to my delight, had taped one of these translation devices with English, and accordingly
it was a most useful tool in working out equivalent phrases. Also, of course, he and Torm worked
intensively with me. The machine, however, particularly to Torm's relief, allowed me to practice
on my own. These translation machines are a marvel of miniaturization, each of them, about the
size of a portable typewriter, being programmed for four non-Gorean languages. The translations,
of course, are rather literal, and the vocabulary is limited to recognitions of only about 25,000
equivalencies for each language.
Accordingly, for subtle communication or the fullest expression of thought, the machine was
inferior to a skilled linguist. The machine, however, according to my father, retained the
advantage that its mistakes would not be intentional, and that its translations, even if
inadequate, would be honest.

"You must learn," Torm had said matter-of-factly, "the history and legends of Gor, its geography
and economics, its social structures and customs, such as the caste system and clan groups, the
right of placing the Home Stone, the Places of Sanctuary, when quarter is and is not permitted in
war, and so on."

And I learned these things, or as much as I could in the time I was given. Occasionally Torm would
cry out in horror as I made a mistake, incomprehension and disbelief written large on his
features, and he would then sadly take up a large scroll, containing the work of an author of whom
he disapproved, and strike me smartly on the head with it. One way or another, he was determined


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