Ask Fowl

Ask Fowl is a column devoted to answering your fan-fiction and Artemis Fowl related questions.

It's simple, you send your questions in, and then someone from our not-so-expert panel will do the best that they can to answer them. So, if you want to see your question answered, send it in to the editor.

How does the rate that fairies age at correspond with the rate at which humans age?

Submitted fuzzy_grapes.

Answered by Gus.

There really isn't a specific rate at which fairies age compared with humans, so it's quite difficult to answer this question. This is further complicated by the fact that some species age slower than others.

However, I made a graph [link], guestimating the fairies' ages and their corresponding human ages. It isn't very accurate, but it gives us a good idea of how fairies age.

My first set was that a two-year old fairy would be equivalent to a two-year old human. In The Arctic Incident, Opal Koboi is mentioned to have dismantled a hard drive when she was two. Because this is evidence of Opal's intelligence, we can assume that two is very young for a fairy. Unfortunately, this is data is for pixies, which may not fit with the other fairies.

Next, was more information from The Arctic Incident. In the narrative, we learn that Holly's father died when she was barely sixty. The phrase "barely sixty" implies that Holly was very young when it happened, only a child. My guess is that she would be ten yeard old, in human years.

The next piece of information is Holly's present age. She is around eighty, because her father died about twenty years ago. In human years, she seems to be in her early-to-mid twenties. She has to be quite young to have gotten into the LEP so recently (extrapolated from LEPrecon, the short story in The Artemis Fowl Files), but not too young because she is in a relatively senior position (almost a major, senior enough to be a desk job).

Our next character is Root. He grew up with Cudgeon, for about six hundred years. He also did his basic LEPrecon training five hundred years ago, but he was "no spring bud," according to Foaly. Because of this, I estimate that he is about 650 years old. In terms of life-span, Root isn't very young. He has gained weight, and in the short story LEPrecon, remarks how he isn't as fit as he used to be. On the other hand, according to The Opal Deception, Root is the youngest full commander on the LEP. The age range is quite wide, but I place him at around forty years.

At the very end of the fairy life span are dwarves. According to Foaly, there is an alleged dwarf miner who is over 2000 years old. Dwarves have better longetivity than the other fairies, and most of our data concerns elves, so this new information might skew our results. However, I believe that this dwarf would be 120 in human years. The oldest ever human lived to 122 years, even though the average human life expectancy is 66 years.

Looking at the graph, we can see that in early childhood, fairy and human years correspond very closely. However, as a fairy enters adolescence, they age very fast compared to humans. It took Holly about twenty years to grow from an adolescent to an adult.

Once a fairy has matured, their years start to "stretch." Their aging compared to humans slows down significantly, so a fairy can age hundreds of years, but only be a couple of years older in human terms.

As I said previously, there is no specific rate between fairy aging and human aging. We don't have many specifics in the book, so a lot of guesswork had to be done. The Black Knight and I discussed whether we could come up with a formula for converting fairy years to human years, but we decided that it would be simpler and just as accurate to read the values off the graph. Hopefully, this graph should be able to give you a rough idea of how fairies age.

Is it realistic that Artemis can speak fluent Taiwanese?

Submitted byStradivari.

Answered by Gus.

It's hard to answer this question, because we still don't know enough about Artemis.

On one hand, Artemis has shown himself to be a master of languages. He has decoded Gnommish. He speaks flawless Russian. And in The Lost Colony, he speaks French, Spanish, and even Gnommish fluently!

However, on the other hand, Chinese is a tonal language, and is difficult to learn. Artemis might be able to speak Chinese - or rather, the Mandarin dialect - but he would have a very noticeable accent.

Even if Artemis could speak Mandarin, it really doesn't make sense to speak Taiwanese. The Taiwanese dialect isn't as common as Mandarin, and is mostly spoken in Taiwan. Furthermore, the official language of Taiwan is Mandarin.

There are still two other factors we must take into account.

First is Artemis's attitude. He likes to show off, to prove his brilliance. One such way would be to walk into a Taiwanese restaurant like a tourist and promptly order tea in Taiwanese.

Presumably, the waitresses at a tourist attraction like Taipei 101 would be able to speak English. They too, would not hesitate to demonstrate their knowledge of other languages. Once the waitress made the switch to English, Artemis would follow and abandon all attempt at sticking to Taiwanese. In this scenario, Artemis only needs to know a few words in Taiwanese, and does not need to be fluent.

However, there is the risk that the waitress does not switch to English. In this case, Artemis would be stumped, humiliated by his overzealous attempt to show off.

This leads us to the other factor, the fact that Artemis can speak Gnommish. The fairy tongue is so ancient that all languages can be traced back to Gnommish. Even American Dog, as Mulch Diggums demonstrates in The Arctic Incident. In this case, it would be completely plausible for Artemis to speak Taiwanese, but he would have a terrible accent.

So can Artemis speak Taiwanese, fluently? Canon definitely states he can.

But is it plausible in canon for Artemis to do so? Personally, I don't think so. He can master languages, but I'd think that he'd learn Mandarin and not Taiwanese. However, being able to speak Gnommish does make it plausible for him to speak Taiwanese, albeit with an accent.

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