Originally published at: Written on the Exchange Walls | The Associated Worlds
Perhaps due to their unusually wide variability across a large number of trait-clines, the variety of ciseflish trade cants have no word cognate to race. When one is needed, they borrow the Eldraeic word kaelídárath, which is technically defined as “true-breeding phenotypically-distinct group taxonomically junior to subspecies”¹ and whose original roots mean “a group of people aesthetic in definition”. That neither of these definitions accurately reflects current usage of the word in Trade vernacular is perhaps a sad reflection upon the current state of galactic education.
Nor, consequently, do they have any word cognate to racism. Their closest equivalent is also an Eldraeic borrowing, which universally adds to the preextant -ehch “dishonorable” suffix the cant prefix for “fundamentally unprofitable”, placing it among the small and unusual category of double-condemnatories.
(This, of course, should not be taken to imply that the ciseflish are incapable of empathizing with racism in other species; merely of sympathizing with it. Ciseflish merchants can and will empathize with exotic racism for precisely the time and to precisely the degree necessary to wring the maximal profit from it, then go back aboard and laugh about the pathetic morons they just exploited. Not to do so, of course, would be inefficient, inopportunistic, and not at all in accord with the tenets of the Path of Ever-Growing Plenitude.)
– Words of the Profits: Implications of Ciseflish Trade Cants,
Mirú Altúráldé & Toru min Forill,
Imperial University of Almeä
- That this same word is also the cognate to breed (of animal) in relevant translation matrices is something that has offended a remarkable number of cultures, not relieved by the official statement of the Conclave of Linguistics and Ontology merely being an assertion of self-equivalency².
- “It is what it is. Necessarily.”