Further Conversations with the Ai-Naidari by M.C.A. Hogarth

Author:M.C.A. Hogarth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: M.C.A. Hogarth

August 5, 2019 – Without Legs

“You’re doing well,” Haraa says, paging through my notebooks. “I think you could talk with family now, and maybe it would be a little stilted but you would be understood.”

“Other than me sloshing your syllables around in my mouth like they’re about to fall out?”

She laughs. “Since I was no better with your tongue in the beginning, I have no problems ‘cutting you some slack.’”

“How do you say that?”

“Mmm. We say ni noneshu shanul chepeh. ‘We add water to the pot.’ A very old expression… you’ll notice we still use the older declension ending and the original article for ‘the’.”

I squint. “Signifying…?”

“As far as I can tell, it’s something to do with cooking. If someone over-seasons a soup in an excess of enthusiastic inexperience? You smile and water it down.” She closes my notebook. “Now, datyani. Since you can talk without offending family, you need to learn to talk without offending your betters.”

“I thought I understood…?”

“You thought you understood,” she says. “But your understanding was imperfect. Tell me again the ways you gradate speech.”

“With the word order?” I say. “And using the different vowels in pronouns.”

She nods. “And didn’t it make you uneasy, when you ran into sentences that didn’t have pronouns, or didn’t have enough words to make word order an issue? You can make entire sentences with a single verb in our language, after all.”

I sigh a little. “All right. Go on.”

“You will like this, I promise, da-datyani,” she says. “Do you recall significance frames?” At my squint, she makes cups of her hands. “When you used to draw our words, years ago, and put frames around them?”

“Y-yesss,” I say, drawing the word out. “I thought at the time I was supposed to do that around every word to make it clear they were different words. But I decided I was wrong when I didn’t see them often enough. Wasn’t I? Wrong?”

“No!” she says. “Did you think you were observing incorrectly? They exist! Significance frames—in writing at least—are an antique custom, found in older texts where they were used to denote important people or elevated concepts. No one does that anymore when writing, except to call back to those texts, or in poetry. It’s the written equivalent of writing ‘to thine own self be true.’”

I pause, feeling like I am at the edge of a precipice. “Annnd… you’re about to say you still do that in speech.”

She grins at me, merry. “And it conveys the same sense of antiquity and formality, yes.”

I stare at her a while longer, and she remains amused. I fumble through the words, but they come out anyway: “Temeqinejz daerith niki.” ‘You’re having too much fun.’

“Yes, yes I am,” she agrees, nonplussed. “But, to return to the matter at hand. We have three ways of significance-framing for mannered speech. A prefix for names, a prefix for verbs, and the literal frames for sentences. The sentence frame uses that consonant you’ve been thinking isn’t actually part of our language, dz.

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