Muahaha.

So far as I know, Sam never gets a middle name in canon. I just like "Grace" for a few reasons: it gives the kid in Grace a reason to be named that, it seems like it could be a trace of Sam's mother snarkily pushing back against her father "wanting a boy", and it makes her initials SGC.

...if we're honest, that last reason is probably the reason that got it cemented in my head.

With Quick Steps Over The Grass is the fic I have that aims to actually explain why the hell everyone in the galaxy speaks English. That was a bit from the middle of the prelude chapter; the rest of the chapter expands it through to when Teal'c is first brought to the SGC, and you have no idea how tempted I was to quote the entire thing.

I have to imagine there were some scientists in Moonlight who thought they were really, really clever until Jack put the fear of God into them. <_< I mean, honestly, guys, that's just really not on.

Fire and Calm is actually Bra'tac, which... should probably be made clearer, but I was having issues getting a first line that both scanned well and established that. And the old man becomes significantly more recognizable. ;)

Sam needs all the genhugs. Especially with the crap the magibrain pulls on her in her unenviable position as its current favorite character. (The Anat/Hard Road saga is kinda odd in subverting that and giving her the most traumatic pile of (gen) OT4 ever, followed later on by the most adorable torture scene ever, in which she and Jack basically manage to bluff their way out of interrogation by quoting an Abbott and Costello routine. And then stage a daring escape while still tied up back-to-back. After a while, I just stop asking.)

...

You know what? Have the rest of the establishing bit for With Quick Steps, through to the end:

At around the same time, English seemed to get a hold in the city of Nagada, and from there spread to the other cities. Words he knew he'd never taught anyone started sounded from the market stalls as he walked through.  Shouts of "Bargain!" and "Special price!" rang from almost everyone's mouths, alongside the similar heckling in their native tongues. And, now and again, there were bursts of profanity both familiar and inventive as people squabbled and fought.

Sha're would ask him about the business of his day, poke fun at his rubbernecking. Abydos produced no rubber. Kasuf launched into a tirade on the imbecilic excuses of one of the engineers tasked with overseeing the erection of the mastabas over the entrances to the old naqahdah mine. And Skaara, after two or three bowls of something potent and distilled from dates, was fond of singing The Lion Sleeps Tonight – despite living in a desert whose only exposures to lions were the chimerical elements in the ancient temple drawings of Sekhmet and Ammit. Even the sphinx hadn't come to Abydos.

Nearly half a cycle of the daughter moon before the Stargate opened and a box of kleenex came flying through, a man came leading a caravan of goods from Edfu on the banks of some distant river, hailed him as "Traveller from beyond the night! Slayer of the demon Ra!", and proceeded to conduct the entire trade Daniel and Skaara were responsible for in accented but fluent English.

Language transmitted itself, of course. Anywhere two languages encountered each other, there would be language transmission. But it didn't spread like this, almost virally, not in an area where there was no apparent economic, cultural or social impetus to spread it so quickly. And people didn't pick up words they'd never been exposed to.

When the daughter moon completed its cycle, he found himself with bigger things to worry about.

He didn't stop dreaming in the SGC, but they were different dreams. And he no longer dreamt in Abydonian. Or in those strange, guttural words he'd later learn to identify as Lower Goa'uld.

-

There was no reason for English to have escaped beyond Earth and Abydos. Even when the Jaffa had come and dragged off Skaara and Sha're, taking their Abydonian and English with them as they struggled and protested, languages weren't transmitted by touch or air, they were transmitted by concentrated study or immersion. The first time he'd arrived on Chulak, distracted, 'gate-lagged, mind torn in too many directions by the revelations of the last few days, he'd stumbled through the first meeting in the time- and distance-shattered dialect of Arabic, confronted Apophis and seen Amonet, and woken in a cell only to see Jack accosted by a man with a gold symbol on his forehead.

A man speaking English.

And that was the first time he heard that other dream-language spoken, the rough Shaka ha, kree hol mel Goa'uld; words Skaara translated, but Daniel already understood. It had been enough to convince him for a moment that he was still on Abydos, dreaming, though it was far too present and real to be a nightmare.

-

Weeks passed before he had the presence of mind to inquire about Teal'c's knowledge of English. When he did, he discovered that the military minds of the SGC had already questioned that at length, and Teal'c could only give Daniel the same answer which had failed to satisfy them: sometimes things came, at night, through kel'no'reem.