Tuesday December 29, 2015
Book 16: Big, Dumb Objects — Part III

Note: If you're having trouble saying Yaeyoefui, you're not alone. That poor "f" is outnumbered eight-to-one by vowels, or sometime-vowels. If you smear those bully vowels together, the librarian's name becomes "Ya-yo-eff-wee." This smear is three syllables short of being completely correct, but it's as close as most meat-tongues are going to get.

Addendum to Note: With hyphenation added for help with the syllabification, here is how that most revered and ancient tome, the Oxford English Dictionary, would have encoded Yaeyoefui's name as follows: 

ˈjɑː-ɛ-iː-əʊ-ˌɛf-uː-iː

This string of characters isn't useful for readers accustomed to an alphabet with a couple dozen letters. Speakers of Galstandard Peroxide, whose language encodes tone and gesture along with an orchestral panoply of meat noises, scowl at the OED for pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Transcript

NARRATOR: Re-animation complete...

Prabstdi doctor: He's awake. Maia's cloned engrams should let him speak Galstandard West with us...

Prabstdi doctor: Greetings, Yaeyoefui! You have been r―

YAEYOEFUI: *interrupting* Re-animated. I know.

This is the fourth time I have awakened to find that my soul-foil has been wrapped in new flesh.

YAEYOEFUI: It is, however, the first time that crawling sophonts have taken this liberty.

YAEYOEFUI: I can't wait to learn the extent of the mess that was made in my absence.