Somehow this quiet story remains a personal favourite, after many re-reads years apart.

Sure, it's got that 50's feel with everybody smoking and cocktail hour before dinner, but despite that the characters are real and likeable, and the basic premise and it's conclusion stands. Any communication with aliens past or present requires a starting point, and there's only one thing we all really share.

Read this one - freely available these days from gutenburg if you like. ( )

Amid much smoking of cigarettes (who cares about contamination of artifacts), scientists, specialista, and their military escorts study an ancient city of mars.
A Linguist pieces together a "Rosetta stone," by studying what appears to be a periodic table in an auditorium.
Very short, but enjoyable, for the author's Viewpoint of what an ancient Mars University looks like. ( )

Great little story by Pipper. Should have been expanded into a full length novel. Most of his SF works are in the juvenile category. Piper is not one of my top ten Classic SF authors but he is always worth a read.

This story has some great ideas and made me want to find out more about this lost culture. It's dated but it provides an opportunity to immerse yourself in the Classic SF era of the 1950s-1960s. ( )

Silly, old-time fun.

There's no point in pretending the science is anything other than dated, the sexism isn't appalling, and the "scientists" are at all credible. These yahoos would be tossed out of a real university when they leaped to their first unsupported conclusion with the focus and intensity of an impala pursued by lions.

But the "girl" scientists get proper credit and support from the male bosses, which makes a nice change from the reality we live in.

And that's a wrap on 2019's reviews. ( )

This is a short sf story dealing with the discovery of extinct civilizations on a dead Mars and focusing on the efforts to translate the Martian language (the only one, apparently) without a Rosetta stone equivalent. The story was written in the 1950s, and while that clearly shows throughout, the resolution features a neat little idea that redeems much of its failings.

*** Here there be spoilers ***

The central conceit is typical of a "science can solve EVERYTHING" attitude: the key to decrypting the Martian language is the periodic table of elements. By figuring out how the Martians named their elements and how they represented the atomic weights, enough words and structural features can be deciphered to start attacking other texts. Furthermore, since the table is universal, its discovery serves as a Rosetta stone for any alien language we might encounter -- an omnilingual text, as it were. That's a clever idea to base an sf short around.

The story's greatest failing, in my view, is that the extinct Martians are so utterly un-alien. They are essentially carbon copies of 1950s Americans: they were humanoid, breathed an oxygen-infused atmosphere, built houses with windows, printed books, used electricity (but had no nuclear energy), used a decimal number system, divided the year in ten months, had universities with libraries, reading rooms, lecture halls and audiovisual teaching aids (here the protagonists discuss how students changed classes in narrow corridors), used an alphabet, their "vocal organs [are] identical with our own", and so on. Piper is very limited and uncreative in how he imagines this alien society. The Western blueprint is even clearer in how this Martian society progressed from a bow-and-spear stone age to a technological society: as evidenced by murals, this process went through the the steps of agriculture, priests and warriors with swords, cannon and guns, galleys, ships "without visible means of propulsion" and finally aircraft.

And despite all this, one of the characters comments that they want to heavily publicize the discovery that the Martians published monthly journals on Chemistry and Physics, in order to "make the Martians seem more real. More human."

The linguistics in this story is so-so. For this story Piper was inspired by the translation of ancient languages, frequently referencing Linear B and especially Hittite, and he deserves props for that. The actual methodology -- figure out a few items, use them to decipher others, and repeat until done -- is ok, too. But again Piper is very uncreative in how he portrays the (sole) Martian language: it's essentially an English-type language. It appears he has no real idea of morphology and how language works, structurally, or of the ways in which it can be represented in writing. For instance, the Martian language "must be something like German; when the Martians had needed a new word, they had just pasted a couple of existing words together."

It also irked me that characters were constantly said to be smoking casually, especially while pouring over brittle documents or while exploring freshly excavated rooms and buildings. And of course, all of the smoking takes place in habitations constructed by making Martian buildings airtight and then pressurizing them with an earth-like atmosphere.

In all, though, this was definitely worth a read. It shows its age and its era, but the optimistic resolution more than makes up for that.

"Omnilingual" is available through Project Gutenberg. ( )