"Right," Kitsu said, manipulating his communicator and retiring to a corner again.
He pulled up samples of the language that the program had already collected, and looked at them long and hard. There were a couple of particles he thought were actually parts of words, judging by how they sounded in his head.
Kitsu found the most recent phrase that the alien had stated.
"Xjti J dpvme voefstuboe uifn, uijt jt gsvtusbujoh..."
It was as if someone had slapped their left hand on a keyboard, when put in textual format. Still. The language seemed to have plenty of buzz-like sounds "zhhh" instead of "shhh". A lot of soft-stops with the "jit"-like noises: "uijt jt". A slur? No. He had to assume it was perfectly spoken: that was safest.
So. Sentence structure: Nepleslian was a Subject-Verb-Object language: "I threw the red ball." Yamataian was a Subject-Object-Verb language. "I the red ball threw." What was this alien's structure for language?
Well. Another example the program had pulled from just before Kitsu's arrival.
Earlier said:
[Kata'Nova] picked out a picture of a workshop, with machinary in the background and people working around it, then picked out what she assumed to be a person 'asking' to use said machinary.
Then, she spoke her langugae so that the translation program could get a general idea of what she might be saying. "Jg J nbz, ep zpv cz dibodf ibwf boz ljoe pg b xpsl ps sfqbjstipq J dbo vtf?"
Machinery, and the person she had picked out, followed by a verbal... question? He thought it was. They assumed later that she was requesting some sort of repair.
Excluding the thought that the structure would start with anything but a subject ─ it simply wasn't logical or efficient, and while language wasn't always very efficient, it at least had to be passable for interstellar civilizations where dialects would cut apart and shuffle words, but the structure almost always remained the same. Subject first was, he felt, most logical.
Alright. It wasn't a sure thing, but... Kitsu manipulated the program's parameters to force it to look at grammar structure from a subject-first view. Then, he pulled up languages from all over the known sector, and had the program look for similar patterns ─ words repeated in what was guessed to be questions.
He would keep working on the program for the rest of the day, when he had a moment. By the time he would be done that night, the program was a little more likely to be off in its definitions of words, but after a few dozen more sentences and a few hundred more definitions, it would have grasped the structure of the language at least.
It would make finding more definitions faster. Maybe. If he did it right: translation programs weren't his specialization.
Still. He would send the program back up to Eternity for it to evaluate, and he would keep a copy of it stored on his communicator. For Kitsu, it was time to kill, and for the program, it would only be a matter of time before it became even better at the alien's language than even it was. Such was the nature of machines.
