AN: The beginning of this chapter is basically a long nerd rant. I hope you don't mind.
I don't own this, even though I do feel like I've pretty much appropriated the Vulcan language in this chapter.
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"I've been wanting to ask," Nyota said during dinner some days later, "you told your mother my Vulcan pronunciation was ninety-nine point seven per cent correct. So, what are the mistakes? I mean, of course I knew it wasn't perfect, but I'm not completely sure what the problems are. It's 6a'n, isn't it?"
Spock inclined his head. "That is the most marked problem, yes."
"I knew it! Pharyngeal trill is just not a natural sound, you know."
"There are minor problems with other pharyngeal consonants too," he pointed out.
Nyota was horrified. "Even the fricatives?"
He tilted his head to the side. "Fricatives are 3in and 7a'at, correct?"
"Yes..."
"Then, no, there are no problems with those consonants."
She exhaled. "Phew. That would have been really embarassing. The other pharyngeals, well...I can hope that one day, I'm going to have it down perfectly, but frankly, I won't hold my breath."
Spock raised his eyebrow. "I'm surprised you're so pessimistic. As it is, you imperfections are hardly audible for the human ear already."
Nyota gave a short laugh. "Which helps not at all when it's my Vulcan we're talking about, and so the ones I need to worry about are Vulcans."
"Even the proudest of Vulcans would be able to appreciate that you speak much better than any other non-Vulcan they have ever met, unless they are in frequent contact with human university professors of Vulcan," Spock pointed out.
Nyota nodded, and sighed. "I just hate it so much, not being able to be perfect in something I do."
"If I remember correctly, pronunciation of most Vulcan pharyngeals used to be considered impossible for humans."
She nodded again. "Yes. Before first contact, we considered articulation of those sounds impossible, and so when we heard the Vulcans, we simply assumed that we stood no chance with our different pharynx. It took decades to discover that at least approximate mimicking of those sounds could be achieved by humans."
"Why did it take so long? I wouldn't have thought that experiment was so very difficult," Spock commented as Nyota got up to get some more water.
"Oh, that is simple enough," she said when she returned. "You have to start training at an early age. Small children have a flexibility of vocal chords they lose with age, and sounds they don't use regularly become more difficult to pronounce, some even impossible. So it was, in actual fact, impossible for untrained adult humans."
"So that is the reason why you started studying Vulcan so early?"
Nyota smiled. "Actually, no. But my mother did take care of that, too – she simply got herself a host of xenolanguage recordings and played them to me when I was a baby, never quite allowing me to loose that flexibility. Plus many of her colleagues are native speakers of Arabic, too, so she often invited them over and made them speak to me – Arabic has a number of consonants you wouldn't find in either English or Swahili. The same with her South African colleagues...I thank them for my introduction to click sounds in languages, among other things."
His eyebrows went up again. "Did your mother intentionally sculpt you to be a xenolinguist?"
"Not completely, but I did inherit my fascination with languages from her," Nyota admitted. "She just wanted to keep my options open in this respect."
Spock nodded and thought for a while, then said: "Are there any sounds that are still considered unpronounceable, even with training?"
"We're talking about humanoid species phonemes, I assume?" Nyota clarified.
"Naturally."
"Then yes. It's most glottal phonemes. For some reason, we can just do the fricatives and the glottal stop, and that's it. That's the reason why I haven't learned Ferrengi yet, in spite of it being very useful – they're obsessed with glottals for some reason. Much like you with pharyngeals. Don't know what you all see in articulating everything in the very back of your throat, but it's your language, I suppose. What I wanted to say is, there have been uncountable xenolinguists who have tried playing Ferrengi recordings to their small children, sometimes even prenatally, and to no avail. Except, sometimes, for having to play it every time the child was upset, because it became the only thing that could calm him down."
"Indeed?"
"Yes," Nyota laughed. "That actually happened to my phonetics teacher from the university. At the time she was teaching me, her child was nine and I think she was a bit worried about what he was going to grow into. He was as obsessed with the Ferrengi as I was with Vulcans at his age, but well, Ferrengi are not exactly the culture most human mothers would wish their child to imitate..."
"Fascinating."
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"I'm going out for a coffee with Leonard, care to join us?" Rachel asked after choral practice one Monday in late October.
Nyota hesitated. "I don't know..."
"Ny, I'm going to be there. It's not like you went out alone with him."
"I know, but still."
"You really should work on your paranoia. You can at least greet him, right?"
"Sure," Nyota agreed. She could do that.
The exited the aula and spotted Leonard waiting for them in front of it – with Kirk. Nyota groaned.
"I second that emotion," Rachel muttered.
They walked to the waiting cadets and greeted them. "I don't remember inviting Jim along," Rachel said to Leonard, shooting him a dark look.
"Oh come on, babe, don't tell me you're still angry!"
Rachel closed her eyes, looking like she was in pain. "No, Jim, I'm not still angry. It's been freakin' two years, and I have never been particularly angry. It's not like I didn't know you slept around. I just don't want you there when I want to talk to Leonard, you know, actually talk, not just make a lot of stupid jokes and get drunk. When I want that, you're welcome to come along. Got it?"
"Oh, all right. You two go off and be all deep, I'll talk to Uhura here in the meantime."
Rachel and Leonard quickly retreated, with Nyota shooting a I'm-so-gonna-kill-you look after them.
Kirk turned to her. "So...it's Nomble?"
"What?"
"Your name. Is it Nomble?"
"No," she rolled her eyes. "Have a good evening, Kirk," and she turned to walk away.
"I will figure it out one day, you know," he called after her.
It was likely. That didn't mean she wouldn't prolong the time until he did as much as she could.
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"Have you known anyone in Starfleet before you went to the Academy?" Spock asked on a November Thursday as Nyota was once again reminiscing on making the decision to join.
She shook her head. "Not really. There was one distant relative of my mother, but I have only met him a couple of times when I was little. He...died in service."
"I grieve with thee," Spock replied seriously.
"I do grieve, in a way," Nyota admitted, "even though I barely knew him. But service deaths always seem so very tragic."
"Any death is tragic, except perhaps that caused by old age," Spock pointed out.
"I know, but these particularly so."
The eyebrow went up. "And yet, this being the only Starfleet member you knew, it did not deter you from applying to the Academy?"
"Not in the slightest," she paused. "Perhaps tragic was not an appropriate word. There is sadness in those deaths, but there is also greatness rarely encountered anywhere else. It humbles me and fills me with awe. We talked about my motivations for joining Starfleet some time ago. Sometimes I think this greatness was the main thing that pulled me here. Some of the cases just...overwhelm me."
"For example?"
Nyota shrugged. "USS Kelvin would be the example that springs to mind first, since it is so widely known. The respect I feel for the captain cannot be properly expressed in words. It just...I apologise for my emotion, but it makes me want to sink to my knees and cry every time I think about it."
Spock paused. "It is very strange to me," he said slowly. "We tend to regard such sacrifices as a simple matter of logic, while respectable, of course. Needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."
"Or the one. I know, but don't you still think that it requires an immense amount of bravery?" She asked.
He gave it some consideration. "I believe that is the Vulcan kind of bravery – to let logic reign supreme even when our emotions are making themselves known more than is usual."
Nyota nodded. "I see what you mean. For us, it's the other way round – I think we wouldn't be able to do this without emotion. If we didn't feel compassion for the people we were saving – and perhaps, without wanting to diminish the heroism, if there wasn't some aspect of liking the idea of being heroes – we just couldn't overcome our instinct for self-preservation."
"The difference is perhaps not as big as it may seem. Our compassion is simply coached in terms of logic, but what are Surak's rules but compassion?"
"The Vulcan kind of compassion. You are right, of course," she said, a bit surprised, perhaps.
He continued his consideration, then, as they rose from their table to leave the cafeteria, he said, "There is one case where it serves better than the human one. Not, perhaps, so awe-filling, but equally important. When there is someone, someone innocent in the worst cases, who is nevertheless a danger – to the ship, to a planet, to any kind of life...Human emotions, I noticed, tend to get in the way. Your kind of compassion is always more concerned with the individual. Once there are more than, say, ten life forms concerned, it becomes statistics."
Nyota frowned. "If you were right, that would make the aforementioned sacrifices impossible."
"You are correct, I did phrase in imprecisely. When the case is sacrificing yourself, you will do it for millions as well as for one. But when it's someone else you should sacrifice, your compassion for him overshadows your compassion for the people he puts at risk. This kind of decision is certainly less pleasing from the outside, but is as important as the self-sacrifices, and saves as many lives."
She slowly nodded. "You are right that these decisions don't have the same kind of seeming attractiveness to them – and that sounds terrible when used in the context of self-sacrifice."
"Yet is it precise," Spock pointed out.
"They also," Nyota continued, "do not fill me with that kind of awe that makes me fall to my knees and cry. Instead, they make me want to hold the person who made the decision tightly and just whisper 'I'm so sorry' over and over again." She sighed. "Sorry, I am being very emotional today."
"We are discussing an emotional topic," he allowed.
"It's paradoxical," she observed, "that such great acts inspired me to join Starfleet, yet at the same time I of course hope I will never be faced with the necessity to commit them."
"You will," he said plainly. "If you are fortunate, the risk you take will not lead to your death, but once you make a bridge officer, you will be faced with such situations. I know I have been, several times during those five years."
Trying to lighten the mood, Nyota said: "That makes me feel rather conflicted. On one hand, I'd like to hear the stories, to know what kind of situations I should prepare myself for, on the other," she smiled faintly, "I really don't think I could handle it."
"You will need to be able to handle these situations in reality, surely hearing about it must be bearable?"
"That's not what I meant," she paused. "Commander, I already admire you greatly for your academic prowess. If I heard something about you bravely sacrificing – or thinking you were sacrificing, anyway – your life for the ship, I think I might be just a bit...overwhelmed."
He merely nodded, and looked at her intently. She cast around for something else to say.
"It is worrying," she noted at length, "to know I will be faced with such situations. Not because I am so afraid of death, but because I don't know if I won't fail, if in the critical situation, I won't just prove to be too selfish for a sacrifice of that kind."
"After the depth of your compassion that I have witnessed in this conversation, I feel justified in saying that your worries are unfounded," he said quietly, and she closed her eyes for a moment to savour the feeling.
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AN: I hope I haven't bored you all to death with that linguistic intro. Just in case you were confused, I used numbers in transcription of the Vulcan words to indicate consonants English doesn't have.
More detailed explanation for the nerds out there: I borrowed two of them from Arabic chat transcription – "7" indicates voiceless pharyngeal fricative (7a) and "3" voiced pharyngeal fricative (3ayn). I made up "6" to indicate the pharyngeal trill Nyota was so upset about. I imagine they would all normally be transcribed much as the Arabic "special" letters are – that is, as the closest consonant English has to them. As "7" is normally transcribed as "h", and "3" as " ' ", "6" would, I suppose, be transcribed as "r". I expect there would be phonemes like this in Spock's family name – my personal guess is that the "n" in S'chn is actually a pharyngeal nasal and the "g" in T'gai is a pharyngeal plosive.
Of course, this is based on the assumption that Vulcan really does have a lot of pharyngeal consonants. There is no concrete basis for it in canon, Vulcan simply seems to be that kind of language to me...the sounds would be back from the times Vulcans were violent, and pharyngeal sounds fit that perfectly. Plus, we can see that Vulcan mouth is shaped pretty much the same as human one, but we can't precisely see the pharynx, so there's room for assuming there would be differences. The same could be assumed about the larynx, of course, but the glottal sounds would be even more difficult to pronounce, and Lady Amanda does say she can sort of pronounce her family name after years of training, so I kept the glottals unpronounceable and left them to the Ferrengi. But since there must be some phonemes unknown to humans for Spock's statement that his name was unpronounceable to humans to make sense, my bet is on the pharyngeals. End of nerd rant.
Also, to explain further, it would have been embarrassing for Nyota not to pronounce properly the pharyngeal fricatives because those are consonants that actually exist in human languages, whereas other pharyngeals don't, and, as I indicated, are at the moment considered unpronounceable. Of course, that's gonna change after First Contact. :))