Second Wave (37 page)

Nisa
—one of Coco’s pirate band, a friend of Captain Bates.

Nrihiiye
—an Ancestor mare, mate of Hruffli.

nyiiri
—the Linyaari word for unmitigated gall, sheer effrontery, or other form of misplaced bravado.

Odus
—one of the Ancestral Friends who raised and experimented on “Narhii.” When Khorii’s twin was reunited with her parents, Narhii became better known as Ariin.

Our Star
—Linyaari name for the star that centers their solar system.

Paazo River
—a major geographical feature on the Linyaari homeworld, Vhiliinyar.

pahaantiyir
—a large catlike animal once found on Vhiliinyar.

Paloduro
—a planet in the Solojo star system, infested by the space plague.

Pandora
—Count Edacki Ganoosh’s personal spaceship, used to track and pursue Hafiz’s ship
Shahrazad
as it speeds after Acorna on her journey to narhii-Vhiliinyar. Later confiscated and used by Hafiz for his own purposes.

Pauli
—one of Coco’s pirate band.

Petit
—one of Coco’s pirate band.

Phador
—
see
Al y Cassidro, Dr. Phador.

piiro
—Linyaari word for a rowboatlike water vessel.

piiyi
—a Niriian biotechnology-based information storage and retrieval system. The biological component resembles a very rancid cheese.

Poopuus
—a term for water-dwelling students from LoiLoiKua used on Maganos Moonbase, an abbreviation from the words “pool pupils.”

Praxos
—a swampy planet near Makahomia used by the Federation to train Makahomian recruits.

PU#10
—human name for the vine planet, with its sentient plant inhabitants, where the Khleevi-killing sap was found.

Raealacaldae
—the corrupt Federation head of LoiLoiKua, who died after poisoning the waters of the planet. His palace on the dry land of the planet remains, and has been inhabited by the Ghosts.

Rafik Nadezda
—one of three miners who discovered Acorna and raised her.

Red Bracelets
—Kilumbembese mercenaries; arguably the toughest and nastiest fighting force in known space.

Rio Boca
—a planet in the Solojo star system.

Roadkill
—otherwise known as RK. A Makahomian Temple Cat, the only survivor of a space wreck, he was rescued and adopted by Jonas Becker, and is honorary first mate of the
Condor.

Roc
—Rafik’s shuttle ship.

Rushima
—a planet with an agriculturally based economy invaded by the Khleevi, and saved by Acorna. After the galactic plague and the Ghosts made things miserable there again, it was saved by Khorii and Mikaaye.

Scaradine MacDonald
—captain of the
Arkansas Traveler
spaceship, and galactic freight hauler.

Sesseli
—a curly-headed blond student on Maganos Moonbase with very strong telepathy, she is the first person to spot the Ghosts.

Shahrazad
—Hafiz’s personal spaceship, a luxury cruiser.

Shoshisha
—a student on the Maganos Moonbase.

sii-
Linyaari
—a legendary race of aquatic Linyaari-like beings developed by the Ancestral Friends.

Siiaaryi Maartri
—a Linyaari Survey ship.

Sinbad
—Rafik’s spaceship.

Sita Ram
—a protective goddess, identified with Acorna by the mining children on Kezdet.

Smythe-Wesson
—a former Red Bracelet officer, Win Smythe-Wesson briefly served as Hafiz’s head of security on MOO before his larcenous urges overcame him.

Solojo
—a star system in the human galaxy, one of the first infected with the space plague.

Spandard
—a varient dialect of Standard Galactic Basic, once known as Spanish.

Standard Galactic Basic
—the language used throughout the human settled galaxy, also known simply as “Basic.”

stiil
—Linyaari word for a pencil-like writing implement.

Taankaril
—
visedhaanye ferilii
of the Gamma sector of Linyaari space.

Tagoth
—
see
Bulaybub.

techno-artisan
—Linyaari specialist who designs, engineers, or manufactures goods.

Thariinye
—a handsome and conceited young spacefaring Linyaari from clan Renyilaaghe.

Theophilus Becker
—Jonas Becker’s father, a salvage man and astrophysicist with a fondness for exploring uncharted wormholes.

thiilir
(pl.
thilirii
)—small arboreal mammals of Linyaari homeworld.

thiilsis
—grass species native to Vhiliinyar.

Toruna
—a Niriian female, who sought help from Acorna and the Linyaari when her home planet was invaded by the Khleevi.

Twi Osiam
—planetary site of a major financial and trade center.

twilit
—small, pestiferous insect on Linyaari home planet.

Uhuru
—one of the various names of the ship owned jointly by Gill, Calum, and Rafik.

Vaanye
—Acorna’s father.

Vhiliinyar
—original home planet of the Linyaari, destroyed by Khleevi.

viizaar
—a high political office in the Linyaari system, roughly equivalent to president or prime minister.

Virii
—Neeva’s spouse.

visedhaanye ferilii
—Linyaari term corresponding roughly to “Envoy Extraordinary.”

Vriiniia Watiir
—sacred healing lake on Vhiliinyar, defiled by the Khleevi.

Wahanamoian Blossom of Sleep
—poppylike flowers whose pollens, when ground, are a very powerful sedative.

White Star
—see
Estrella Blanca.

wii
—a Linyaari prefix meaning small.

yaazi
—Linyaari term for beloved.

Yaniriin
—a Linyaari Survey Ship captain.

Yiitir
—history teacher at the Linyaari academy, and Chief Keeper of the Linyaari Stories. Lifemate to Maarni.

Yukata Batsu
—Uncle Hafiz’s chief competitor on Laboue.

Zaami
—a high mountain peak on the Linyaari homeworld.

Zanegar
—second generation Starfarer.

Brief Notes on the Linyaari Language

By Margaret Ball

A
s Anne McCaffrey’s collaborator in transcribing the first two tales of Acorna, I was delighted to find that the second of these books provided an opportunity to sharpen my long-unused skills in linguistic fieldwork. Many years ago, when the government gave out scholarships with gay abandon and the cost of living (and attending graduate school) was virtually nil, I got a Ph.D. in linguistics for no better reason than that (a) the government was willing to pay, (b) it gave me an excuse to spend a couple of years doing fieldwork in Africa, and (c) there weren’t any real jobs going for eighteen-year-old girls with a B.A. in math and a minor in Germanic languages. (This was back during the Upper Pleistocene era, when the Help Wanted ads were still divided into Male and Female.)

So there were all those years spent doing things like transcribing tonal Oriental languages on staff paper (the Field Methods instructor was Not Amused) and tape-recording Swahili women at weddings, and then I got the degree and wandered off to play with computers and never had any use for the stuff again…until Acorna’s people appeared on the scene. It required a sharp ear and some facility for linguistic analysis to make sense of the subtle sound-changes with which their language signaled syntactic changes; I quite enjoyed the challenge.

The notes appended here represent my first and necessarily tentative analysis of certain patterns in Linyaari phonemics and morphophonemics. If there is any inconsistency between this analysis and the Linyaari speech patterns recorded in the later adventures of Acorna, please remember that I was working from a very limited database and, what is perhaps worse, attempting to analyze a decidedly nonhuman language with the aid of the only paradigms I had, twentieth-century linguistic models developed exclusively from human language. The result is very likely as inaccurate as were the first attempts to describe English syntax by forcing it into the mold of Latin, if not worse. My colleague, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, has by now added her own notes to the small corpus of Linyaari names and utterances, and it may well be that in the next decade there will be enough data available to publish a truly definitive dictionary and grammar of Linyaari; an undertaking which will surely be of inestimable value, not only to those members of our race who are involved in diplomatic and trade relations with this people, but also to everyone interested in the study of language.

Notes on the Linyaari Language

1. A doubled vowel indicates stress:
aavi, abaanye, khleevi.

2. Stress is used as an indicator of syntactic function: in nouns stress is on the penultimate syllable, in adjectives on the last syllable, in verbs on the first.

3. Intervocalic
n
is always palatalized.

4. Noun plurals are formed by adding a final vowel, usually-
i
: one
Liinyar,
two
Linyaari.
Note that this causes a change in the stressed syllable (from
LI-nyar
to
Li-NYA-ri
) and hence a change in the pattern of doubled vowels.

For nouns whose singular form ends in a vowel, the plural is formed by dropping the original vowel and adding-
i
:
ghaanye, ghaanyi.
Here the number of syllables remains the same, therefore no stress/ spelling change is required.

5. Adjectives can be formed from nouns by adding a final-
ii
(again, dropping the original final vowel if one exists): maalive, malivii; Liinyar, Linyarii. Again, the change in stress means that the doubled vowels in the penultimate syllable of the noun disappear.

6. For nouns denoting a class or species, such as Liinyar, the noun itself can be used as an adjective when the meaning is simply to denote a member of the class, rather than the usual adjective meaning of “having the qualities of this class”—thus, of the characters in ACORNA, only Acorna herself could be described as “a
Liinyar
girl” but Judit, although human, would certainly be described as “a
linyarii
girl,” or “a just-as-civilized-as-a-real-member-of-the-People” girl.

7. Verbs can be formed from nouns by adding a prefix constructed by [first consonant of noun] +
ii
+
nye
:
faalar
—grief;
fiinyefalar
—to grieve.

8. The participle is formed from the verb by adding a suffix -
an
or
-en: thiinyethilel
—to destroy,
thiinyethilelen
—destroyed. No stress change is involved because the participle is perceived as a verb form and, therefore, stress remains on the first syllable:

enye-ghanyii
—time unit, small portion of a year (
ghaanye
)
fiinyefalaran
—mourning, mourned

ghaanye
—a Linyaari year, equivalent to about 1 1/3 earth years

gheraalye malivii
—Navigation Officer

gheraalye ve-khanyii
—Senior Communications Specialist

Khleevi
—originally, a small vicious carrion feeding animal with a poisonous bite; now used by the Linyaari to denote the invaders who destroyed their homeworld

khleevi
—barbarous, uncivilized, vicious without reason

Liinyar
—member of the People

linyaari
—civilized; like a Liinyar

mitanyaakhi
—large number (slang—like our “zillions”)

narhii
—new

thiilel
—destruction

thiilir, thiliiri
—small arboreal mammals of Linyaari homeworld

visedhaanye ferilii
—Envoy Extraordinary

Acknowledgments

W
e would like to thank Denise Little of Tekno Books for doing the initial editing on this book and most of the others in this series. We would also like to thank Diana Gill, our editor at HarperCollins, for her many excellent suggestions and input into this series. Both editors have been wonderful about discussing ideas with us. We would also like to thank Margaret Ball, who, with Anne, created many of the original characters, including the young Acorna in the first two books in this series,
Acorna
and
Acorna’s Quest.

About the Authors

A
NNE
M
C
C
AFFREY
, a multiple Hugo and Nebula Award winner, is one of the world’s most beloved and bestselling science fiction and fantasy writers. She is the author of the hugely successful Dragonriders of Pern series and makes her home in a castle in Ireland.