From: john.w.kennedy@gmail.com

On 2015-07-11 15:04:43 +0000, Dorothy J Heydt said:

> In article ,
> William Vetter   wrote:
>> Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
>>>
>>> I'm currently writing a character of Terran descent who grew up
>>> on Mars and is currently passing for half-Martian (there are no
>>> other Martians in the vicinity to out him), simply by speaking
>>> Terran with two Martian characteristics: no contractions, no
>>> sentence fragments.  It looks all right to *me*, but I haven't
>>> yet had a chance to get anybody else to look at it.
>>>
>> When you write SF in English, and have no contractions in the dialog,
>> people, like the people in SF writers' workshops, will say "Lt. Data,"
>> and if they're the dogmatic sort, they'll go on about "million-dollar
>> robot who can't handle contractions is SF cliche" and stuff like that.
>> I mention this because Yoda has been brought up, not because I
>> necessarily believe that or would react that way myself.
>
> Well, when (if) I ever get to the point of finding some readers,
> we'll see if anybody abreacts.

Marigold Heavenly Nostrils (of the comic strip "Phoebe and her
Unicorn", formerly "Heavenly Nostrils", and which I heartily recommend)
speaks without contractions. Turning to the real world, as an opera
singer, I know a /little/ French and Italian, but if I have to speak
them (such as the time I had to order a meal in a Tim Horton's in a
Montréal suburb), I certainly don't use the galaxy of standard
contractions for things like "of the", which native speakers use even
in formal writing.

Of course, SF has always gotten natural-language processing wrong.
Asimov, for example, assumed that robots would understand spoken
English decades before they could speak it, when, in fact,
computer-speech attachments were in IBM's regular catalog by the
mid-60s, and voice recognition is still either restricted in function
(Siri) or dependent on supercomputers (Watson).

--
John W Kennedy
"Though a Rothschild you may be
In your own capacity,
    As a Company you've come to utter sorrow--
But the Liquidators say,
'Never mind--you needn't pay,'
    So you start another company to-morrow!"
  -- Sir William S. Gilbert.  "Utopia Limited"

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