300+ pieces of sushi coexisting in a queer 23 y/o body (medically recognized as non-disordered and mixed origins, if you don't like it fuck off /gen), they/sushi/🍣 pronouns
one singular piece of discodoll (ken from the barbie movie x wilford warfstache, for the uninitiated) fanart has put our brain in a chokehold and I think it will pull whatever shit it can to make this canon in our brain and I am scared
Okay but teacher Grace on Erid having very little say in which kids get filtered into his class, though he is aware that the selection process is super specific and that most of the kids he gets are high performers with star academics and some even with influential parents. He isn't quite comfortable enough with Eridian culture yet to object to the selection process and make it more inclusive, however. That is, until he learns about the special needs kids.
Obviously, there are Eridian kids with special needs, and a few of them even filter into his classes. But one specific type of special needs kid has never shown up in his classes, and the only reason he even learned of the condition is because Rocky and Adrien's first pebble has the condition.
It's initially quite a struggle for them to deal with, and Grace sympathizes of course, because the child will apparently have huge learning and academic struggles and will likely never be able to live on their own. That is, until he learns the details of the disability.
Basically, it's a condition where the part of the Eridian brain that gives them their eidetic memory isn't fully developed, and so these kids just... can't remember things the way most eridians do. And in a culture where an eidetic memory is the norm, all things cater to that, so not having that is actually a massive disability.
But Grace is like, so... this kid just learns the same way a human does, or something like. Which is nothing new to him, though he is somewhat boggled at how much Rocky and Adrian struggle with their infant and their "slow" learning curve, even as far as initial developmental stages. Grace, on the other hand, simply treats the kid the same way he would a human infant, and Rocky and Adrien are impressed with his patience.
But, through this, it occurs to Grace that there must be other kids out there with this disability who likely aren't getting the attention and chances in life that they deserve, because Eridian culture is particularly hostile toward this disability, and actively views those with it as unable to function in regular society.
So Grace demands that a special course be put together where he teaches kids with this disability specifically. Rocky is hesitant, as most kids with this disability are home schooled and kind of... kept shut away. But Grace insists and as one of Erid's saviors, he gets what he wants eventually.
His first class is super small, maybe only three kids because so few parents were willing to advertise that their children have this disability. And because of the stigma around it, even those who agreed to it are super unsure and want to be present during the lessons, perhaps paranoid about the impression it will leave on Savior Grace, who is so accustomed to only teaching the most gifted students.
But Grace knows exactly how to deal with these kids. Some of them have varying degrees of function when it comes to their memory banks, which isn't so unlike teaching kids on earth. And so Grace is able to introduce all these tools and teaching techniques that were previously unheard of on Erid (though very normal on Earth) like having textbooks for reference with you at all times and having strategies that are less focused on memorization for understanding, and providing these kids with tools like calculators and teaching them the art of taking notes to look back on, etc etc.
Suddenly, with all these tools that most Eridians don't need, these kids are learning at a much faster rate, and succeeding with the help of all their little tools. And because so many normal eridians are ignorant of Grace's actual biology, it's shocking to them that Savior Grace doesn't have an eidetic memory either (shocking to everyone but Rocky anyway)--that his brain functions quite similarly in capacity to these "disabled" children.
Once this news gets around, suddenly there's more kids in his special classes, and there's all kinds of discourse being inflamed because the real reason these kids can't live on their own or function is lack of support from Eridian society.
If Savior Grace, who is well respected as a genius in his own right amongst the Eridians, can function so successfully, they why can't these kids?
I dunno, I just think it's an interesting premise.
can you imagine tho if Eridians discovered radiation years and years after the Blip-A left
and they're just absolutely horrified because now they know why the Blip-A never returned, they sent them all to die, now to save their sun they have to redo the entire program all over again and Adrian is devastated -
and then three Eridian years later Rocky shows up with his pet alien and a ton of taumeoba all I LIVED BITCH
It has just occurred to me that most people don't have a super solid grasp of how languages work, especially when compared to one another, and that this means most people aren't aware of why Rocky's speech patterns are the way they are in PHM. To those who've only watched the film, it should be noted that the linguistics are more detailed in the book, but even still, it's highly likely that most readers of the book don't know enough about linguistics to fill in the gaps left by Weir. And that's why I'm here! Let your local linguistics enthusiast fill the gaps for you.
Break for the Dash™
I've seen people assume that the way Rocky speaks is a quirk of Eridian just being a simple language. While yes, that could be true to an extent, both the film and especially the book make it very clear that Rocky only speaks in stilted, broken sentences because of the language barrier. By the end, he speaks perfectly clearly in complete sentences with humour and sarcasm and natural sounding exclamations. Grace is at that point fluent and understands all the nuances.
This leads to the first hurdle of Rocky's in communicating with Grace in the beginning: Grace is stupid. He's not but to someone from a species that has the auditory equivalent of photographic memory (I don't think this is mentioned in the film but it is in the book), Grace's lack of such makes it difficult to share a language quickly. Grace needs spreadsheets, audio synthesis software, coding, text-to-speech in the film because he can only "hear" (read: see) in one direction at a time. He's functionally disabled to Rocky. Rocky therefore accomodates him which is very sweet. Here's a list of ways in which Rocky is most likely altering his language use for Grace's benefit:
He speaks clearly.
It's mentioned in the book that at one point Grace's translation software (which he programmed himself for all the only-film fans) fails to translate a sentence of Rocky's. Grace is confused and confirms that the software is fully functioning. He realises that the issue is the pitch. Rocky's voice dropped an octave. When he shifts it back into the range the software recognises, it's perfectly translated. This means Rocky must constantly be keeping his inflection and pitch extremely steady and repetitive so that Grace's computer can keep up.
There's an argument to be made that Eridian might just be like that, but knowing what we know about it (pitch change for emotion, it being a highly auditorily complex language made of musical chords, most likely created from at least five sets of whatever equivalent of vocal chords Eridians have, etc.), I find it highly unlikely that Eridian would be so even.
It's much more likely that super genius Rocky, despite never having seen a computer before, quickly realised that it couldn't keep up with those variations without serious programming that Grace isn't good enough at coding to do or manually entering every variation of a word. It's simpler to just speak evenly. And clearly, any mumbling would be a nightmare for the computer to pick apart.
He uses words he knows Grace knows.
Obviously he sometimes needs to use words Grace is unfamiliar with and then they're added to the translator, but have you ever tried to speak your native language to a novice speaker and limit your language to the words they know? It's way harder than it sounds. You naturally fall into expressions and phrases and words etc. that you use with other native speakers, and you often have to repeat yourself with altered versions of the original sentences because you accidentally used words the novice speaker didn't know.
And Grace has a serious ear for language, like, the speed at which he picks up "Eridian" (I'll get to that) in the book is startling. But he's also human and learning an alien language based on nothing but gestures and their simple shared vocabulary. Rocky must be spending a lot of energy keeping himself from simply speaking Eridian as he usually does so that the computer can keep up and Grace too.
His infallible memory definitely helps him remember what words Grace knows, but language is habit, it's a muscle and you don't think about the individual words when you speak. You just have a thought and it turns into words automatically. Eridians either don't have this automisation of repeated tasks in the way humans do, or Rocky is working overtime to keep his speech in check.
He speaks in English in Eridian.
This is the big one. Most users on the English speaking internet are native English speakers and, knowing English speaking countries, most likely don't speak more than one language fluently (not an insult, just a statistic, that's just how it is when the entire world speaks your native language). It's therefore completely understandable that this part of Rocky's accommodation of Grace's slower learning went over most fans on this part of the internet's heads. And as someone from a part of the world where speaking two to three languages is standard, I still imagine it went over most of the people in my area's heads too because most people don't think about linguistics all the time like me.
Anyway, to put it simply, translation is fucking hard. It seems simple, especially if you don't speak more than one, but it's not. Even highly related languages can end up nigh in comprehensible if you translate them directly into one another. The less related the languages are, the worse it gets. A lot of things cannot be translated directly because those types of words simply don't exist in the other language.
Take Japanese. In a super simple basic beginner level Japanese sentence like "watashi no namae wa jon desu", you'd still struggle to translate it. And this is, like, almost comically expansive for how Japanese people actually speak in their daily lives. A causal, fluent Japanese sentence would be nonsense in English. Even this simple basic sentense would translate directly as something like "I my name about John is".
The reason it's so weird is because Japanese uses particles to denote the roles of words in sentences, a lingustic concept that English doesn't have. Here "no" is possessive and indicates that the subject in front of it is the owner of what follows. English doesn't have anything even close to that type of structure and it can be really difficult for an English speaker to wrap their head around the sentence structure of Japanese when learning to speak it, not because they don't understand, but because constructing a sentence like that is so foreign. It takes a lot of mental effort to rewire your brain like that.
Now imagine speaking English with Japanese sentence structure. Imagine doing that and never slipping into real English sentence structure because then your poor Japanese novice English speaker friend won't understand a word. It's not "my name is John", it's "I name John is" and that's giving you the benefit of not having to find replacements for the particles. That would be impossible.
Now imagine you've met a literal alien species and have to start speaking English with alien language sentence structure. I cannot even begin to explain how wildly different Eridian and English likely are in every single way. Hell, they're so different that they're literally unpronouncable to the non-native speaker. And Rocky speaks Eridian with English sentence structure. It's explicitly pointed out in the book. And he does this flawlessly. Never slips up in any scene we get to see. I cannot begin to communicate the mental effort that would take for a human to do. Either all Eridians are crazy good at language or Rocky is just a turbo mega genius at it. Which is honestly not at all out of the realm of possibility.
All of this is to say that Rocky doesn't speak the way he does because that's just Eridian, that would be highly unlikely. He speaks the way he does because the language barrier is THICK and he's putting his entire rocky ass into making it thinner. It's less clear in the film, untouched as far as I remember, but in the book his speech becomes more nuanced as the story progresses. He uses more articles, more pronouns, more conjunctions, constructs more complex sentences, etc. As Grace learns more words and more about how Eridian as a language works, Rocky is fittingly upping the complexity of his speech.
It's never touched on but I have no doubt they spent many an evening (I know, I know, space, let me have this) talking about how Eridian expresses common English phrases and how to say this and that etc. etc. I'm probably the only person who'd find a long ass fic of just them discussing Eridian linguistic concepts and constructs interesting but hey, that's the nerd in me. I am the one writing this post, no one is suprised.
SO, anyway, to summarise, Rocky does a LOT of work to make his speech understandable to Grace. Grace starts to learn Eridian while they're still at Tau Ceti (not made clear in the film but is in the book) but he learns Rocky's frankensteined Eridienglish rather than real Eridian. I bet a lot of the trip to Erid was spent fixing Grace's understanding of Eridian so that he'd understand real Eridian.
By the time we pick back up with them in the biodome 16 years after arrival on Erid, Grace is fully fluent, meaning he must've already done all the hard work to learn proper Eridian which is unsurprising. He's a scientist, there's no way he'd accept just learning Eridienglish and never understanding any other Eridians than Rocky. Gotta be able to catch all the juicy gossip (what new science is being done and how to convince Rocky to convince the science Eridians to let him be part of it).
Anyway, that's my long ramble about why Rocky is a damn trooper and deserves so many accolades for how hard he worked to help bridge the language gap. Rocky is canonically super smart and I need people to see how that also applies to his language use. I love this rock <3
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