"Shane Tourtellotte - String of Pearls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tourtellotte Shane)

more than a few sentences of Vetra with a native speaker."

Sentences were the problem, of course, not words. The vocabulary was large but not that difficult:
non-inflected, conjugation with tense-mark words, and just a few irregular plurals and possessives. But
the syntax...

"And remember," Jun Hua continued, "you're in the same boat we are."

"I'm a businessman first," Marcus snapped, "not a linguist."

"But we have a common goal."

Marcus didn't reply. For them, it was an end. For him, it was a means, to break through in his business
career, to break into the immense Kevhtre market. Or it had started so.

"Full immersion is often effective in learning languages," Jun said. "We would have done this earlier, if the
Kevhtre Union government had not resisted."

That government knew the advantage it held. It banned its people from providing humans any language
instruction, prescribing terrible punishments for the offense. Its computer networks were off-limits to
humans, lest one dig up that information. There might have been attempts, but there had been no
successes, and nobody had admitted a failure.

Marcus nodded. "It's easy to negotiate from strength. Do I want to know what we gave away this time?"

Jun stiffened. Another hit. "Luckily, there are some avenues that don't require negotiations."

He reached into his bag. Marcus perked up. Then his eyes widened. "What is that?"

Jun Hua laid the large box on the table. The top was dominated by a trio of triangles nested in a line,
points up-down-up, white ideograms on black, orange, and black.

"Tazpet nulh chomaken," Marcus read. "Gems on a pendant-pin?"

"The English vernacular would be 'String of Pearls.' It's a very popular game on Obrith."

"Game?" He undid the clasps and opened the box. Inside was a round turntable with a raised grid, an
equilateral triangle tiled with smaller triangles in several different colors. He counted sixteen triangles to a
side.

Under the turntable was a drawstring bag. He spilled some of the contents onto the grid. They were the
same triangular tiles as on the lid. They came in seven colors, like a human spectrum, but just that little bit
off, like fruits not quite ripe. The red tiles faded toward orange; the yellow ones had a sickly greenish
cast. The black was actually deep violet, if one looked closely.

He read a few of the ideograms, each with a tiny number below it. He flipped one tile, and found the
same marks, the number now down at the point rather than at the base.

Marcus rolled the tile around in his hand. "I used to play a game like this. I was good, too."