Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I try to tell myself that the problem isn't the language, it's the Terrans' way of transcribing it: they don't have to use that damned many apostrophes (think of the difference between the old Wade-Giles transliteration of Chinese and the more recent pinyin) and keep italicizing the names of trees. It's as if a visitor to North America constantly italicized maize and manzanita and coyote and American elm.