Free Double Star by Robert A. Heinlein Page A

the gin "Gnu" has to do with the inhaled click with which a Bantu pronounces "Gnu." "Jjj," for instance, closely resembles a Bronx cheer.
                Fortunately Bonforte had no great talent for other languages- and I am a professional; my ears really hear, I can imitate any sound, from a buzz saw striking a nail in a chunk of firewood to a setting hen disturbed on her nest. It was necessary only to acquire Martian as poorly as Bonforte spoke it. He had worked hard to overcome his lack of talent, and every word and phrase of Martian that he knew had been sight-sound recorded so that he could study his mistakes.
                So I studied his mistakes, with the projector moved into his office and Penny at my elbow to sort out the spools for me and answer questions.
                Human languages fall into four groups: inflecting ones as in Anglo-American, positional as in Chinese, agglutinative as in Old Turkish, polysynthetic (sentence units) as in Eskimo-to which, of course, we now add alien structures as wildly odd and as nearly impossible for the human brain as non-repetitive or emergent Venetian. Luckily Martian is analogous to human speech forms. Basic Martian, the trade language, is positional and involves only simple concrete ideas-like the greeting: "I see you." High Martian is polysynthetic and very stylized, with an expression for every nuance of their complex system of rewards and punishments, obligations and debts. It had been almost too much for Bonforte; Penny told me that he could read those arrays of dots they use for writing quite easily but of the spoken form of High Martian he could say only a few hundred sentences.
                Brother, how I studied those few he had mastered!
     
                The strain on Penny was even greater than it was on me. Both she and Dak spoke some Martian but the chore of coaching me fell on her as Dak had to spend most of his time in the control room; Jock's death had left him shorthanded. We dropped from two gravities to one for the last few million miles of the approach, during which time he never came below at all. I spent it learning the ritual I would have to know for the adoption ceremony, with Penny's help.
                I had just completed running through the speech in which 1 was to accept membership in the Kkkah nest-a speech not unlike that, in spirit, with which an orthodox Jewish boy assumes the responsibilities of manhood, but as fixed, as invariable, as Hamlet's soliloquy. I had read it, complete with Bonforte's misprofluflciations and facial tic; I finished and asked, "How was that?"
                "That was quite good," she answered seriously.
                "Thanks, Curly Top." It was a phrase I had lifted from the language-practice spools in Bonforte's files; it was what Bonforte called her when he was feeling mellow-and it was perfectly in character.
    "Don't you dare call me that?'
                It looked at her in honest amazement and answered, still in character, "Why, Penny my child!"
                "Don't you call me that, either! You fake! You phony! You- actor!" She jumped up, ran as far as she could-which was only to the door-and stood there, faced away from me, her face buried in her hands and her shoulders shaking with sobs.
                I made a tremendous effort and lifted myself out of the character_pulled in my belly, let my own face come up, answered in my own voice. "Miss Russell!"
                She stopped crying, whirled around, looked at me, and her jaw dropped. I added, still in my normal self, "Come back here and sit down."
                I thought she was going to refuse, then she seemed to think better of it, came slowly back and sat down, her hands in her lap but with her face that of a little girl who is "saving up more spit."
                I let her sit for a moment, then said quietly, "Yes,