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    Omnilingual
    Omnilingual
    Omnilingual
    Ebook82 pages1 hour

    Omnilingual

    By H. Beam Piper and Kelly Freas

    3.5/5

    ()

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateFeb 1, 2007

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    Reviews for Omnilingual

    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      Great little story by Pipper. Should have been expanded into a full length novel. Most of his SF works are in the juvenile category. Piper is not one of my top ten Classic SF authors but he is always worth a read.This story has some great ideas and made me want to find out more about this lost culture. It's dated but it provides an opportunity to immerse yourself in the Classic SF era of the 1950s-1960s.
    • 4/5
      Silly, old-time fun.There's no point in pretending the science is anything other than dated, the sexism isn't appalling, and the "scientists" are at all credible. These yahoos would be tossed out of a real university when they leaped to their first unsupported conclusion with the focus and intensity of an impala pursued by lions.But the "girl" scientists get proper credit and support from the male bosses, which makes a nice change from the reality we live in.And that's a wrap on 2019's reviews.
    • 3/5
      This short story was written in the 1950s, and set on Mars in the 1990s. The Martians have all been dead for thousands of years. There's lots of Martian writing, but how can it be translated if there's no bilingual document like the Rosetta stone?The archaeology seems a bit unorthodox: smoking in newly discovered rooms, and using explosives to get into abandoned buildings. You can tell that nuclear power was the new thing in the 1950s as well.
    • 3/5
      This is a novella originally published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1957. I discovered it on a free audio book site and finished reading it on my Kindle (it's available free from both Amazon and Gutenberg). An advance group of scientists, military, and civilians begins uncovering a Martian city which died out 50,000 years ago. One archaeologist believes she has a (very long) shot at deciphering Martian writing but needs a big find: a Rosetta stone which gives humans even a few words they can be sure of for building a vocabulary. Her colleagues are generally discouraging, but she perseveres - and has good luck. Typical 50s SF, with women called "girls" and smoking allowed in the rooms being excavated. Still, neat to read, and certainly a quick one for a sci fi category.
    • 4/5
      This is a quick, fairly enjoyable read about a group of archaeologists, linguists, and other scientists excavating 50,000 year old ruins on Mars in the hopes of discovered what happened to the Martians and, ideally, deciphering their language. This book seemed fairly accurate in terms of the characters methodology (I can really only speak to the linguistic aspect, however). My one (petty) complaint is that it seems unlikely that Martian morphology would be so similar to English morphology. This story presented an interesting premise that could have been longer. As the book went on, I was trying to guess what did happen to the Martians; maybe they migrated to Earth!

    Book preview

    Omnilingual - H. Beam Piper

    The Project Gutenberg EBook of Omnilingual, by H. Beam Piper

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

    almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

    re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

    with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

    Title: Omnilingual

    Author: H. Beam Piper

    Illustrator: Freas

    Release Date: October 2, 2006 [EBook #19445]

    Language: English

    *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OMNILINGUAL ***

    Produced by Susan Skinner, Greg Weeks and the Online

    Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

    Transcriber's Note:

    This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction, February, 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

    OMNILINGUAL

    To translate writings, you need a key to the code—and if the last writer of Martian died forty thousand years before the first writer of Earth was born ... how could the Martian be translated...?

    BY H. BEAM PIPER

    Illustrated by Freas

    Martha Dane paused, looking up at the purple-tinged copper sky. The wind had shifted since noon, while she had been inside, and the dust storm that was sweeping the high deserts to the east was now blowing out over Syrtis. The sun, magnified by the haze, was a gorgeous magenta ball, as large as the sun of Terra, at which she could look directly. Tonight, some of that dust would come sifting down from the upper atmosphere to add another film to what had been burying the city for the last fifty thousand years.

    The red loess lay over everything, covering the streets and the open spaces of park and plaza, hiding the small houses that had been crushed and pressed flat under it and the rubble that had come down from the tall buildings when roofs had caved in and walls had toppled outward. Here, where she stood, the ancient streets were a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet below the surface; the breach they had made in the wall of the building behind her had opened into the sixth story. She could look down on the cluster of prefabricated huts and sheds, on the brush-grown flat that had been the waterfront when this place had been a seaport on the ocean that was now Syrtis Depression; already, the bright metal was thinly coated with red dust. She thought, again, of what clearing this city would mean, in terms of time and labor, of people and supplies and equipment brought across fifty million miles of space. They'd have to use machinery; there was no other way it could be done. Bulldozers and power shovels and draglines; they were fast, but they were rough and indiscriminate. She remembered the digs around Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, in the Indus Valley, and the careful, patient native laborers—the painstaking foremen, the pickmen and spademen, the long files of basketmen carrying away the earth. Slow and primitive as the civilization whose ruins they were uncovering, yes, but she could count on the fingers of one hand the times one of her pickmen had damaged a valuable object in the ground. If it hadn't been for the underpaid and uncomplaining native laborer, archaeology would still be back where Wincklemann had found it. But on Mars there was no native labor; the last Martian had died five hundred centuries ago.

    Something started banging like a machine gun, four or five hundred yards to her left. A solenoid jack-hammer; Tony Lattimer must have decided which building he wanted to break into next. She became conscious, then, of the awkward weight of her equipment, and began redistributing it, shifting the straps of her oxy-tank pack, slinging the camera from one shoulder and the board and drafting tools from the other, gathering the notebooks and sketchbooks under her left arm. She started walking down the road, over hillocks of buried rubble, around snags of wall jutting up out of the loess, past buildings still standing, some of them already breached and explored, and across the brush-grown flat to the huts.

    There were ten people in the main office room of Hut One when she entered. As soon as she had disposed of her oxygen equipment, she lit a cigarette, her first since noon, then looked from one to another of them. Old Selim von Ohlmhorst, the Turco-German, one of her two fellow archaeologists, sitting at the end of the long table against the farther wall, smoking his big curved pipe and going through a looseleaf notebook. The girl ordnance officer, Sachiko Koremitsu, between two droplights at the other end of the table, her head bent over her work. Colonel Hubert Penrose, the Space Force CO, and Captain Field, the intelligence officer, listening to the report of one of the airdyne pilots, returned from his afternoon survey flight. A couple of girl lieutenants from Signals, going over the script of the evening telecast, to be transmitted to the Cyrano, on orbit five thousand miles off planet and relayed from thence to Terra via Lunar. Sid Chamberlain, the Trans-Space News Service man, was with them. Like Selim and herself, he was a civilian; he was advertising the fact with a white shirt and a sleeveless blue sweater. And Major Lindemann, the engineer officer, and one of his assistants, arguing over some plans on a drafting board. She hoped, drawing a pint of hot water to wash her hands and sponge off her face, that they were doing something about the pipeline.

    She started to carry the notebooks and sketchbooks over to where Selim von Ohlmhorst was sitting, and then, as she always did, she

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