Ernesto Strozzi

Ernesto Strozzi is the Xenolinguistics Branch's most-cited practitioner for a piece of work he got wrong, and has never once agreed to have the citation changed to something he got right.

He runs the delegation's translation portfolio and the junior linguists working under it, which is what a Principal Officer does anywhere in the Corps. What is unusual about the posting is the language. The branch exists for tongues that evolved somewhere else entirely; the Kingdom of the Five Islands speaks a human one, carried out of Earth by a sublight departure older than any surviving manifest and left to drift for the whole length of a gap the Archive cannot measure. Strozzi's standing position is that this makes the work harder rather than easier, and the record has borne him out.

Known History

• Certified through the Survey Corps' Xenolinguistics school and posted to the Five Islands delegation on its establishment, where he has worked the translation since.
• Rendered the Tideward Sisterhood's fixed annual obligation to the Crown as a tribute in the delegation's first substantial submission to the Survey Archive — a reading built on a cognate that looked secure and was not.
• Filed that reading at high confidence. It stood nine months, and went out to three other postings inside the Archive's first summary of the Kingdom's government, before Abbess Ilsabet Marrowtide, reading the translation back, corrected it.
• Did not withdraw the superseded version. It sits in the Archive beside the corrected one, dated and under his name, on the same rule the record applies to every conversion it publishes.
• Has since submitted every substantial translation to the Abbey's own correctors before it reaches the Archive, an arrangement he proposed and the Abbess accepted without comment.
• Prepared the receiving file for What Prayer Is For after a delegation linguist's question about the offices of the day produced a document nobody had asked for.

Character Notes

The error is worth stating precisely, because the version that circulates in the branch has been smoothed. Tribute is not a wild reading of the word. It is the reading a competent linguist arrives at from the shape of the term and the fact of the render, and it is wrong for a reason no amount of corpus alignment would have surfaced: the Abbey holds its ground from the Crown directly, owing one fixed thing regardless of season, and a word rendered as tribute made the Kingdom's single deliberate exception to royal administration read, in the Solar System's first written account of it, as ordinary subjection. One word put the Abbeylands under Aduine's steward in the only record anyone off-world could consult.

Strozzi's account of what went wrong is not that he was careless. It is that the language was human, the cognate was real, and he let the second fact do work the first had not earned — which is the failure the school's whole temperament exists to prevent, arrived at by a practitioner who could recite that temperament before he made it.

He does not describe the nine months as a lesson. He describes them as the interval during which three postings read a false sentence, and he can name the three.

What he teaches now, when the branch asks him to, is the mechanism rather than the remorse: a confidence band is a claim about the claimer, not the claim, and the only honest use of a high band is one you would still have filed knowing it would sit uncorrected for a year. He has said, in the branch's hearing, that he would have filed it. He does not offer the sentence that would soften that, and appears not to have one.

He is unfailingly courteous about corrections and completely unmoved by reassurance. Junior linguists who bring him a candidate reading hoping to be told it is good enough get instead the question he asks everyone, including himself, and asks in the same tone every time: what would have to be true for this to be wrong, and did you look.

See also: Anne de Courtney, Emma la Chapelle, Abbess Ilsabet Marrowtide, The Kingdom of the Five Islands, The Star Rangers Academy, What the Record Refuses.