Yes, mom fixed the internet! Yay!

[melannen]

RE: the current SG-1 episode: why, by Ba'al's balls, aren't they using freaking *Morse code*?

bah bah bah.

On the other hand, m-theory is hot, even if Sam has it completely wrong. I'm sure Rodney would agree with me.

ETA: The SGA episode actually includes less logic than SG1. Bah. If he can design a virus that'll do that, he can design one that'll kill 'em outright and avoid all the sticky moral issues (since we obviously haven't got any qualms about biowarfare and genocide to worry about.)

And why, by the ring-devouring fires of Mount Doom, did they let a Wraith onto Atlantis in the first place? SGA seems to be alternating brilliant episodes with episodes that require every single person to be bloody stupid, and I no longer feel guilty about the fic I'm writing. So there.

ETA 2 ... and now I'm trying to figure out if it's reasonable that the Ancient alphabet is related to the SG Alphabet. (Answer: Heck yes. Clearly descended from the same ancestral forms.)

ETA 3: Ooooh! It's a Six/Baltar 'shipper episode! Now I wish I'd actually been paying enough attention to the show to follow the episode! Oh well. (Because all I care about in nu-BSG is Six/Baltar, and Kara when she gets to play fighter pilot.)

Comments

[melannen.livejournal.com]

You get someone to bring in a whiteboard.

On the whiteboard, you write a key, so that every Ancient letter responds to a letter or symbol in Morse code.

You then have Sam type out the message for you in about ... oh, let's be generous and give her plenty of time for looking at the key ... *five whole minutes*.

Being members of an Air Force team which frequently gets stuck in odd situations, you're probably both already fluent in Morse code *anyway* (or actually tap code (http://www.airsoftgent.be/dbase/tapcode.htm) is more likely) so it shouldn't be that hard.

[speakerender.livejournal.com]

How many letters are in the ancient language? And what if by chance they had new symbols? Or the stuff wasn't useful, i.e. that technical stuff that Daniel couldna really understand.

[melannen.livejournal.com]

The ancient alphabet has exactly 25 letters and 10 numerals (http://hometown.aol.de/SGEureka/Ancient_Letters_and_Numbers_Comparison.jpg), due to the fact that all Ancient writing in Stargate is really just English written in the Ancient font, like the Standard Galactic Alphabet (http://www.omniglot.com/writing/sga.htm) in Commander Keen. q-:

But even if we assume that in the 'real' Stargate Universe, actual translation is involved in moving from the Latin alphabet to the Ancient, the tap code can be easily expanded for any number of letters just by changing the dimensions of the grid.

Even if Daniel didn't know tap code already, he does this stuff professionally, he should have been able to figure out a similar system, even if it's just 'one tap for the first letter in this list, two taps for the second, etc ...' - spiritualists use simple systems like that to talk to ghosts during seánces all the time.

[speakerender.livejournal.com]

Are you sure its only 25 characters long? It looked like more than that on the book Daniel was using (where he asked them to tell him when to stop)

[melannen.livejournal.com]

Well, prop canon - that is, the letters they use in the scenery and props and effects (including, as far as I can tell, the display in the current episode) has 25 letters, 10 numbers (and the Stargate symbols, which are a syllabary, but not usually used for standard text.)

Stargate has been known to contradict prop canon before, but I think the Ancient alphabet is pretty well established after showing up consistently, in bits and pieces, for nine seasons.

But like I said, even if there's a hundred letters in the alphabet, improvised tap code would *still* have been quicker than going through it with yes/no questions!

[speakerender.livejournal.com]

You are forgetting various dialects of Ancients

Several Examples (http://wiki.stargate-sg1-solutions.com/index.php/Ancient_Language_and_Writings#Learning_the_Language)

[melannen.livejournal.com]

The only Ancient writing we've ever seen that *wasn't* in the standard 25-letter alphabet was the device from P9X-391, and nobody ever translated that anyway.That doesn't apply in this case, because we know that the writing was standard Ancient lettering (because that's what it looked like, and because Sam wouldn't have recognized it and Daniel couldn't have translated it otherwise.)

There is absolutely no reason a simple tap code wouldn't have worked.