find someone who loves you the way my girlfriend pushes me off a cliff. without hesitation.
the sillies :]
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As an eligible young noble of no small fame, Ambroys had a number of arranged courtships and suitresses in his youth, but any nascent marriages always fell through.
It's not that he didn't try; he certainly knew how to court a lady (perhaps too well, according to many fathers and husbands), and when he lacked knowledge on the affairs of womens' hearts, he sought counsel from a young woman who was a dear friend of his (perhaps too much counsel, according to his own father). Nonetheless, all he garnered for his efforts was separation after separation.
Ah, well. Maybe it was for the best.
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As much as I adore conlangs, I really like how the Imperial Radch books handle language. The book is entirely in English but you're constantly aware that you're reading a "translation," both of the Radchaai language Breq speaks as default, and also the various other languages she encounters. We don't hear the words but we hear her fretting about terms of address (the beloathed gendering on Nilt) and concepts that do or don't translate (Awn switching out of Radchaai when she needs a language where "citizen," "civilized," and "Radchaai person" aren't all the same word) and noting people's registers and accents. The snatches of lyrics we hear don't scan or rhyme--even, and this is what sells it to me, the real-world songs with English lyrics, which get the same "literal translation" style as everything else--because we aren't hearing the actual words, we're hearing Breq's understanding of what they mean. I think it's a cool way to acknowledge linguistic complexity and some of the difficulties of multilingual/multicultural communication, which of course becomes a larger theme when we get to the plot with the Presgar Translators.
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