Aldoni Notes 2

Posted http://ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com/254984.html

There are things that the Aldoni have words for that appear in no other known race's languages. Concepts that naturally evolved species never develop words for, not because they don't experience them, but because they are such a basal part of their experience that they have no need for the words.
One example is uveason. Thorwald's translation of the Charlthose Universal Aldoni Dictionary equates uveason with altruism, one of half a dozen words in the Aldoni language that can be thusly translated. Uveason is not altruism. Uveason is to altruism what a metastatic tumor is to a wart. Roughly it is the tendency of a sentient species to expend lives and materials in an effort to protect or save an individual or small group of individuals completely out of proportion with the value of that individual to the group as a whole. The fact that humans will put a hundred people out in the mountains in the middle of winter searching for a single lost hiker, that losing six searchers to the hazards of the search doesn't stop the survivors from deploying the next time a lone hiker gets lost in hostile terrain, that us uveason. It is the complete negation of the survival value of altruism. Every naturally sentient race, even the Malar, does this. Among every culture bearing species in the Aldoni Archives, only the created races lack this tendency. The Aldoni have a word for it because they see it in others though they lack it themselves.