Saturnian n. 2

Ross Griffin had been busily taking down Gurra’s confession in Saturnian and when the man finished he handed it to him to sign.

‘Thur-glut-nu! Thur-glut-nu!’ came terribly, in the Saturnian tongue.

Everybody is familiar with the tendency of most language systems in the bulky planets, where the politeness of a word is in direct proportion to its length, so that a really diplomatic statement may have to appear in several volumes. In Middle Saturnian, the business dialect, it is customary to use words averaging about twenty phonemes, more or less, with no discourtesy implied as long as the number does not fall below eight.