I
grew up speaking Esperanto as my primary language, English was second
and seldom used because the Ubers spoke it. We started speaking
Esperanto when the Dragans took over. What is Esperanto you ask? It's
'an artificial international language based on words common to the
chief European languages' according to Webster's Dictionary. The
Nietzscheans could figure out some of the words but by combining so
many different languages we confused the hell out of them. It was
nearly impossible to translate even if you tried to use the words you
knew in context
See if you can figure this one out: "Vi should
iri hejmo." Any idea what that means? Shout it at an Uber and he'd
probably figure it was a threat. I don't know what languages the
other words are and unless you knew them you'd never be able to
figure it out from the single English word in there. It actually
translates as "You should go home."
When Beka took me on as
her engineer I was still so used to speaking Esperanto that I had to
stop and think about how to say something in plain English. Do you
know how hard that was for me? I'd get excited or in a hurry and
forget that Beka didn't know Esperanto anymore than the Ubers did
and she'd get frustrated because I was apparently speaking
gibberish. It took almost a year for Beka to teach me how to speak
plain ol' English. You know what helped me most to learn it?
Listening to the music from Earth in Beka's collection. It drove
her nuts to hear me so I usually ended up practicing it in the engine
room where my 'caterwauling' was drowned out by the noise of the
engines. Every once in while my tongue will slip back to Esperanto,
just listen to some of the 'bloopers' and you'll hear
it.
That's why Beka said I could barely conjugate English.