Dr. Ransome's skills as a philologists are perfect for a protagonist of a science fiction series. Watching Star Trek, I always was a bit intrigued by the differences in culture between different groups, and the great depths to which the crew of the Enterprise had to go to understand alien cultures. Ransome uses his skills as a Cambridge man to learn the language of the hross, and it makes him part of the in-group. This makes him an instant friend, and gains him allies that he can use to escape his captors. He also uses his language skills to find that Malacandra has plenty of gold which is called "sun's blood."
This concept of gold/sun's blood brings up a point which was argued earlier in the course about language. The Hross people living on a different planet, with different surroundings called what earthlings call 'gold,' sun's blood. This minute point is crucial to the understanding of the formation of language, and Lewis subtly theorizes about how early cultural history progresses. Originally, there were settlers or people occupying a land, they start to see one another, interact, and have ideas. They observe their surroundings and call 'this thing' and 'that thing' by different names, and distinguish against things which are different. They see that trees and rivers are different, and that trees and rivers are a different thing from 'sun's blood' altogether. They name the thing that is shiny and golden in color, 'sun's blood,' because they see the sun, have named it such, and they understand blood, and how it comes out of humans and is red, and leaves in a certain fashion. They connect the two concepts, and think that it must be so that like blood leaving humans, sun's blood had left the sun at one point. This represents the difference in culture between the hross people and the humans. Humans understood all of the concepts involved, but did not recognize the similarity between bleeding and gold. Therein lies the formation of culture.
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