From: john.w.kennedy@gmail.com   
      
   On 2015-07-11 15:04:43 +0000, Dorothy J Heydt said:   
      
   > In article ,   
   > William Vetter   wrote:   
   >> Dorothy J Heydt wrote:   
   >>>   
   >>> I'm currently writing a character of Terran descent who grew up   
   >>> on Mars and is currently passing for half-Martian (there are no   
   >>> other Martians in the vicinity to out him), simply by speaking   
   >>> Terran with two Martian characteristics: no contractions, no   
   >>> sentence fragments.  It looks all right to *me*, but I haven't   
   >>> yet had a chance to get anybody else to look at it.   
   >>>   
   >> When you write SF in English, and have no contractions in the dialog,   
   >> people, like the people in SF writers' workshops, will say "Lt. Data,"   
   >> and if they're the dogmatic sort, they'll go on about "million-dollar   
   >> robot who can't handle contractions is SF cliche" and stuff like that.   
   >> I mention this because Yoda has been brought up, not because I   
   >> necessarily believe that or would react that way myself.   
   >   
   > Well, when (if) I ever get to the point of finding some readers,   
   > we'll see if anybody abreacts.   
      
   Marigold Heavenly Nostrils (of the comic strip "Phoebe and her   
   Unicorn", formerly "Heavenly Nostrils", and which I heartily recommend)   
   speaks without contractions. Turning to the real world, as an opera   
   singer, I know a /little/ French and Italian, but if I have to speak   
   them (such as the time I had to order a meal in a Tim Horton's in a   
   Montréal suburb), I certainly don't use the galaxy of standard   
   contractions for things like "of the", which native speakers use even   
   in formal writing.   
      
   Of course, SF has always gotten natural-language processing wrong.   
   Asimov, for example, assumed that robots would understand spoken   
   English decades before they could speak it, when, in fact,   
   computer-speech attachments were in IBM's regular catalog by the   
   mid-60s, and voice recognition is still either restricted in function   
   (Siri) or dependent on supercomputers (Watson).   
      
   --   
   John W Kennedy   
   "Though a Rothschild you may be   
   In your own capacity,   
       As a Company you've come to utter sorrow--   
   But the Liquidators say,   
   'Never mind--you needn't pay,'   
       So you start another company to-morrow!"   
     -- Sir William S. Gilbert.  "Utopia Limited"   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)