Q. If humans successfully bring back extinct species such as the Auroch, would the Being that was formerly the Auroch and is now cattle, go back to being an auroch?
A. Sadly, no. Selective breeding is great for trying to re-fill the archaeological niches we’ve emptied, but it’s creating a new breed, not bringing back the old one.
To get the Being formerly known as the Auroch to revert to its old form, you would need time travel. Or cloning a new auroch from preserved DNA, Jurassic Park style.
Q. If someone nowadays figured out how to make a new Being, could there be a new Mouse? Or would it being dead not matter when it comes to that and it still technically counts as existing?
A. There could be a new Mouse, yes! It would be a newly-created Being from scratch, no relation to the original Mouse.
Q. Do Beings automatically learn their new Master’s language? Like, what would happen if Ilsa’s next Master only spoke, say, Japanese. Or would she just find someone who already speaks German? What about people who speak a signed language?
A. Beings are automatically fluent in the language(s) of their current Master. Their knowledge of the previous Master’s language(s) will still be strong in the beginning, and then start fading. So in this example, Ilsa would instantly know Japanese, and would remember German and English for a while, but lose most of it pretty quickly.
We’ve seen Patrick use bits of Arabic and German, because he used to be fluent, and still remembers a few phrases. He was jumping randomly between languages (Hebrew, German, Malachim, and English) when Cohen first met him, because he was between Masters and didn’t have a “default” language to settle on.
Sign language works the same way as any other — if the Master is fluent, the Being is fluent.
Here is a question I just thought of: If a master learns a language sometime after making the contract, will the being start learning the language as well?
Yes!
(…That was easy.)
On that note, what if the master needs a translator? Like, if that Japanese master needed to speak with someone who only knew German, would that allow Ilsa to hold onto German longer? What if a master needed a language the being had previously known but had lost by the time this master contracted them? Or how about if a master wanted to learn a language? Could a newly contracted being hold onto a language they knew from their previous master long enough to teach their current one?
Memories that are already lost can’t be ordered back, including a Being’s memories of how to speak a language. But if you catch it early enough, you can order a Being not to forget its previous language, which will buffer it against the memory loss.
And yes, you could go on to learn the language from that Being. You’d just have to be a really good/fast learner, because they’re not natural teachers.
What if master knows some language but it’s not his first language, while it was first language of previous master: will the Being knowledge of the language fade to match how well his current master speaks it but not disappear completely?
Exactly right.
Hmmm… similar to that question about the Mouse, with the taxonomy of Beings, I assume that there are quite a few gaping holes which could be filled. The obvious question raised is undoubtedly already answered, but what if a non-sophont extraterrestrial lifeform were discovered? With the religious aspects of the whole thing, is it even possible that a Being could be created with those parameters?
(Insert nightmare scenario here about a Tribble Being.)
Yes, the tribble Being is a possibility.
The main factor here is humanity’s threshold for scientific understanding of animal species. By the time you get to spaceflight, that’s a lot higher than it used to be — vague notions of “big cats, you know, not lions, the other ones” or “lizards, just lizards” aren’t going to cut it. You’d have to get a really deep and complex understanding of what makes a tribble, the evolutionary history of the tribble family, how they differ from other species in the genus Tribbolata.
For start, tribble scientific name is Polygeminus grex. http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Tribble
Good to know.