I almost had Avery say “the carpet can’t get wet”, until I realized tensei probably doesn’t have a word for ‘carpet’, or for the concept of ‘wet’.
I almost had Avery say “the carpet can’t get wet”, until I realized tensei probably doesn’t have a word for ‘carpet’, or for the concept of ‘wet’.
Technically water is considered a solvent due to it’s ability to break down more material than any other liquid.
True, but they must have the concept of ‘dry.’ And give it unpleasant connotations.
If they have ‘dry’ they have ‘not dry’, but maybe not a singular term for it.
I stand by my comment last page about natural swimming pools.
is the ‘other students” the angy child and shy child
It makes complete sense that she(?) doesn’t believe water would be damaging on its own since they lived almost their entire lives in water. It would be like telling most humans that they had to be careful not to let air touch the roof because it would damage it. It sounds ridiculous because air is everywhere!
Air absolutely can damage roofs. Many metals can corrode in air, organic materials are succeptible to being attacked by molds that depend on access to oxygen, and strong enough winds will destroy anything.
So like don’t get water on the water lily or don’t get the dirt dirty?
Yeah, was gonna say: We’re aware of Rust, of Oxidation (we even named it after the thing we breathe!), of the need to keep certain things out of certain gases so they don’t degrade (or go Boom), etc. etc.
If the Sarnothi are technologically advanced, they likely have an awareness of the components of water, the things that water does to break down other things, etc.
…albeit if they don’t even go outside the water (the way we’ve gone underwater), they likely don’t have a strong concept of what it’s like for a thing to exist in a water-free state, much as we had no clue what it’s like to live without gravity until we finally got some data on that one.
Still might be a weird concept for a water based people to be introduced to a living area that can’t get wet. While humans in general might know about rust and oxidation (though I would really wonder if the general public actually knows the reason why), most would probably assume that the person that built their living area would make it safe to exposed air for at least several years worth of time. We would find it pretty silly to have something as simple as a floor that we are going to walk on every day being unable to be exposed to air. It wouldn’t be very practical.
On a side note, we have no idea what the level of general public education is for Sarnothi or what these folks have for their education levels. I don’t know how much information was repressed or the general populace was kept uninformed since it sounds like it was something along the lines of a dictatorship there. Even our general public probably doesn’t know too much about how things like wifi or cell towers function, and just know whether they are working well or not. At some point people just know that it works because someone else figured it out and leave it at that.
I can’t imagine that anything that easily gets damaged by water would be too important in the average Sarnothi’s life. Someone at somepoint might have found out that something doesn’t work or last long when it is submerged, but I would expect that they would have made a solution by this point in time or it wouldn’t be used much in their everyday life.