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I look over. Once he knows he has my attention, he does jazz hands again and says, “??.” Same chord as before.
“Yes,” I say. “We covered this.”
He holds up a finger for a moment. Then he balls two of his fists and taps them together. “??.”
…What?
“Ohhh,” I say. I’m a teacher. What would I teach someone who just learned the word ‘yes’?
“That’s ‘no.’ ”
At least I hope so.
I ball my fists and tap them together. “No.”
“??,” he says. I check the laptop. He just said yes.
Wait. Does that mean it’s not no? Is that another yes? Now I’m confused.
“No?” I ask
“No,”he says in Eridian.
“So, ‘yes’?”
“No, yes.”
“Yes?”
“No. No.”
“Yes, yes?”
“No!”He balls a fist at me, clearly frustrated.
Enough of this interspecies Abbott and Costello routine. I hold up a finger.
He unballs his fist and returns the gesture.
I enter the frequencies for what I think is “no” into my spreadsheet. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong and we’ll work it out later.
I hold up the “+” symbol. “Four.”
He holds up three fingers on one hand, and one finger on another. “??.”
I make note of the frequencies.
—
For the next several hours, we expand our shared vocabulary to several thousand words. Language is kind of an exponential system. The more words you know, the easier it is to describe new ones.
Communication is hampered by my slow and clumsy system for listening to Rocky. I check the frequencies he emits with one laptop, then look them up in my spreadsheet on the other laptop. It’s not a great system. I’ve had enough.
I excuse myself for an hour to write some software. I’m not a computer expert, but I know some rudimentary programming. I write a program to take the audio-analysis software’s output and look up the words in my table. It’s barely even a program—more of a script. It’s not efficient at all, but computers are fast.
Fortunately, Rocky speaks with musical chords. While it’s very difficult to make a computer turn human speech into text, it’s very easy to make a computer identify musical notes and find them in a table.
From that point on, my laptop screen shows me the English translation of what Rocky is saying in real-time. When a new word comes up, I enter it into my database and the computer knows it from thenon.
