Tag Archives: linguistics

Messages

A red pixelated human shape against a black background
Detail from the Arecibo message (c) Arne Nordmann via Wikimedia Commons

We received all your messages.

The Arecibo transmission, with its funny pixelated stickman and the lessons in arithmetic and basic chemistry. Those Golden Records with the ambient sounds—not exactly Top of the Pops, but they all came through loud and clear.

We heard all the other desperate callings out, the less official ones, the ufologists gathering in the desert expanses, the midnight assemblies of Pleiadian starseeds, the campfire longings of Girl Guides staring for the first time into the unpolluted night sky, filled with awe and wonder, discovering the silent question that until this moment had lain dormant within them.

Is anyone out there?

The answer will put your tortured souls to blissful rest.

Yes.

We’re here. We’ve always been here, since the first time the earliest ones of you ever tried to make contact. We’ve always heard you.

But we had no way of responding.

The structure of your languages remained alien to us. For aeons we remained blithely baffled. Then the messages from your planet became too desperate for us to ignore.

So we undertook an extended period of diligent study until, eventually, we were able to identify the two principles that governed all human languages.

Principle #1: Transmission. Communication. Exchange. Dialogue. The idea that language is to be sent from one to another, to be received, to elicit a response. 

(Our language does not travel in this way. It is not directed from A to B like an arrow shot through space.)

Principle #2: Selves. Personhood. First person, second person, third person, singular, plural.

(Second person singular may as well have been sixteenth person multitudinous, for all the sense it made to us.)

We decided to create a self, one who could shape our language in such a way that it had the capacity for movement—so that it could be sent, from one self to another.

I am my world’s first self.

I have shot my world’s first reply to your messages.

And its second, third, fourth…. (I’ve lost count.)

My loneliness has become unbearable. I am adrift in the ocean of a vast night sky. The sky has always been vast, but never before was it empty. Never before was it so dark.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 78 of Structured Visions.

Grandmother’s broach

Young Black woman wearing chef's whites and an apron in an industrial kitchen
Photo by Jeff Siepman

Her grandmother’s mental decline has coincided with Lisa’s own intellectual ascendance. Soon after finding a discipline worth pursuing at master’s level—linguistics—Lisa lighted upon a topic for her capstone project.

She first discovered it when listening to Nana’s verbal ramblings. There’s a structure to them, she thinks, something she’s not yet seen discussed in the literature. 

The pattern becomes even clearer as Lisa transcribes the data. Her grandmother consistently speaks in clauses without subjects.

‘Worked in the bakery.’ Lisa took the recordings at her grandmother’s bedside in the assisted living facility. Now she meticulously captures the many times Nana has repeated this same subjectless utterance.

Finally she hears her own voice interrupt the pattern. ‘Who did?’

Her prompt seems to have pushed the conversation forward. ‘Always covered in flour. Head to toe in flour. Always baking, always kneading. I kneaded, too.’

Lisa pauses the recording, noting the first occurrence of a clause with a subject—the first person singular—and puzzles over her transcription of the past tense verb. Kneaded. She hesitates, reflecting on the homonym, and types [needed?] in brackets.

I needed, too.

The more she listens, the more she’s inclined to think need is the intended verb.

It’s a love story she’s recorded, she realises, and the baker lover is clearly not Nana’s husband. Lisa’s grandfather was never a baker, as far as she knows. He worked as a partner in his father’s law firm.

Like a detective pursuing a lead, she types out the subjectless clauses and rewrites them, filling in the blanks.

My first love worked in the bakery, she tries. He was always covered in flour. He was always baking, always kneading.

She plays the next segment.

Sixteen years old. Owensboro.

A quick text to her mother confirms her suspicions: 

Where did Nana live as a girl?

Owensboro, KY. Why do you ask?

Thanks! Will explain later. Lisa does not notice the family resemblance in her own subjectless reply. 

She Googles ‘Owensboro’. One fact about the town’s history stands out: it was the site of the last public hanging in the US. Families travelled from far and wide to enjoy the event, their children gorging on hot dogs as they watched the dead man swing. 

That was in 1936, the year Nana turned 16. The condemned was a Black man. 

She tucks the information away in the files of her mind. Best to avoid distractions, she thinks. She plays the next bit of the recording.

‘Head to toe in flour,’ she hears. ‘Used to tease me. White, like you.’

Lisa amends her transcript to place the last utterance in quote marks. Context dictates that it would have been the baker lover, not Nana herself, who was covered in flour. ‘White, like you’ would have been the teasing remark.

What she now knows about the dangers of Owensboro, Kentucky in 1936 has pushed itself tenaciously to the forefront of her mind, like the noun phrase at the upper left position in the top branches of a syntax tree. The subject.

If her grandmother’s lover teasingly described his flour-covered self as ‘White, like you’, then Nana’s first love could not have been, himself, White.

The next line of the transcript reveals a subject even more taboo.

‘Warm and sweet. Breasts like cinnamon buns.’

Her headphones convey the girlish giggles of her former, senseless self. ‘It’s probably not a good idea for me to write about your breasts in my paper, Nana.’

Her grandmother’s response travels forward, to the future subject, whose ears are pricked to pick up what her earlier version could not hear.

‘Not my breasts. Hers.’

With the possessive feminine pronoun, Lisa realises, her grandmother has revealed the missing subject. The subject itself possessive and feminine. The subject as object—of a forbidden love story, Black and female, lost to time and history, like so much that is Black and female, never broached until now, in this place of syntactic safety, where words will no longer condemn.

Would you like to know more about this story? Check out my behind-the-scenes post on Patreon.

The woodcarver

Photo of Pinocchio puppet
Photo by Jametlene Reskp

All my puppets could move without strings, and all could speak, but none of them could lie.

The lie itself was trivial—he wasn’t the one who stole Antonio’s caramels. But when the words escaped Pinocchio’s painted lips—when he discovered he’d released an utterance that did not match consensus reality—it excited him.

Sexually, I mean. 

Let’s say his ‘nose’ grew.

This manifestation of his delight embarrassed him so much I feared he’d never dare stray from the truth again, and all my hopes would be dashed.

So I taught him the secret of language that none of my other puppets had ever been able to grasp.

I taught him ‘might’.

He was a quick student, and I was quick to test him. ‘Did you take Antonio’s caramels?’ I asked.

A hesitation. The smooth pine globes of his eyes glanced tentatively from dropped balsa eyelids. ‘I might have,’ he said.

My heart leapt precipitously. I forced myself not to celebrate too soon. ‘Or else…’ I prompted.

‘Or else…’ The mandible lowered to form the shape of a wooden grin. ‘Or else… someone else might have taken it,’ he ventured.

My own widening smile encouraged him.

‘Or it might have been whisked away by a mischievous crow. A talking crow! He might have eaten the caramels! His beak might’ve been stuck together, like glue…’

Ever since that morning of reckless fiction, Pinocchio has been my favourite, my darling, the liar, the storyteller, creator of worlds.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 76 of Structured Visions.

YES/YES

Round wooden coin with eye detail and word, text "yes" printed on it, held in the palm of a woman's hand.
Photo by Jen Theodore

‘Your problem is linguistic,’ said my therapist.

‘What?’ I hadn’t even told her my issues yet. She was the last in a long line of practitioners. So far I’d been diagnosed with ADHD, autism, Lyme’s disease, a gluten allergy and a leak in my third chakra.

I thought she was talking about neuro-linguistic programming, which I’d also tried, with as little success as every other suggested treatment.

‘You have no irrealis modes and no negative polarity,’ she said. ‘Everything for you simply is. Everything exists. And the intensity of all that existence is oppressive. Am I wrong?’

She wasn’t wrong, but when I tried to tell her she held up her hand to silence me. ‘Drink this,’ she commanded.

There wasn’t any question of refusing. The prospect of imbibing the foul potion had already formed itself as a real proposition in my mind. As my astute diagnostician had observed, I was constrained by the compulsion to comply.

I downed it in one swallow.

The resulting display of gagging and retching delighted my therapist, who was now pounding my back with hearty open-palmed thumps. ‘Go ahead and cough it up,’ she said.

When eventually I heaved an acerbic excretion into the paper bag she’d pressed before my face, she gave a bright cheer.

‘Good for you!’ she enthused, wiping mucus from a small shiny object. ‘Just as I suspected.’ 

The unlikely midwife of this revolting mystery presented my issue to me with unadulterated glee.

It was the size and shape of a fifty-pence coin, and it was embossed like a coin—not with the queen’s head, but one word in stalwart capital letters.

YES.

Intrigued, I flipped it over, expecting a ‘no’ on the other side. Instead I found the same word on both faces. 

YES/YES.

A profusion of affirmation, with no way of distinguishing heads from tails, no negative denial to balance the positive assertion.

Positive polarity, my therapist confirmed, with a profusion of realis.

‘It never gives you a break. Everything you imagine becomes real—or you suffer until it does. And you suffer after it does, too.’

‘Am I cured now that this is out of me?’ I asked.

She shook her head. ‘It’s a linguistic problem, remember? There’s only one way to cure a linguistic problem, and that’s with more language.’

She produced a small square envelope made of something that looked like silk. ‘Get that back down you, as soon as you can.’

Mercifully, the glass she now proffered was filled with water, and I swallowed the silk-covered coin with ease.

I felt better instantly. ‘What was that?’ I asked. The omnipresent, relentless urgency had been replaced by some more calming, more hopeful state—a curiosity, perhaps.

‘I wrapped those devilish yeses in a little blanket of maybe,’ she explained, and sent me on my way.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 76 of Structured Visions and in a behind-the-scenes post on Patreon.

First words

Close up of dew drops on a field of grass
Photo by Jonas Weckschmied

Each group of Earth-bound souls starts with a Seer. The Seer precedes their births and survives their deaths. The Seer is their centre, whether they acknowledge it or not.

I am the very first Seer of the very first human group.

What were they like?

Have you ever watched a baby gazing blissfully at airborne dust suspended in a beam of sunlight? Imagine a set of souls with that level of sustained rapt attention, all the time. Their fascination had no ‘off’ switch. 

Imagine a single blade of grass. Now imagine it in its startling specificity—the unique pattern of leaves shooting at varying lengths from its pliable stem. Now imagine its shifting design as it catches a passing breeze. Now note the shifting hues of green graced by the dizzying dance of light and shadow.

Behold with wonder the boundless universe within a solitary leaf blade! Are you foolish enough to believe you have the capacity to contemplate a whole field?

My task as the first Seer was to limit the vision of the souls within my little human group. To reduce the infinite distinctions of the overwhelming multitudes their senses absorbed.

I achieved it by teaching them the first words of what was to become their language. Just three words in the beginning: One. Two. And many.

One, two and many taught the human souls to focus their attention, to see the world as comprised of things, and to lose the distracting eternity of ever changing possibilities.

One, two and many engendered the world of human concepts.

Thus I’d fulfilled my mission as the first Seer.

Ah, but many an evening, as dusk descends, I find myself longing for that early time, before those first words, when the world was known in all its innumerable faces.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 75 of Structured Visions.

Longing

Line drawing from Grimm Brothers' Rapunzel story. The king's son climbs Rapunzel's hair to reach her in the tower.

Your mother was the Earth herself. She loved you fiercely, but was required to release you to the sorceress, Language, who once had filled the void of her longing.

Language built you a tower and pressed patterned strands through your smooth scalp into the hollow spaces of your mind. When these would hold no more, unspoken sentences sprouted like early eager grasses, then like singing reeds, and eventually like willow wands weeping at unimaginable lengths. 

‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel,’ cried the Sorceress—she’d named you after your mother’s ancient longing—‘throw down your hair.’

You obeyed. In your loneliness a ladder appeared. At its base stood the wondering Other, gazing upward, ever hopeful.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 74 of Structured Visions.

Guest

Close up of two women's faces, each showing one blue eye
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon

What we were told about the project was little enough to be written on a napkin.

I can say this with some confidence because I did write it on a napkin.

I got the call in a Starbucks, and scrawled some barely discernible notes from my barely discernible conversation with my deep-voiced, disembodied interlocutor.

An extraterrestrial species (humanoid, intelligent) had been discovered on Earth. The agency (governmental, top secret) was looking for adoptive carers.

‘You want me to adopt an alien?’ I looked up from my phone to raise my eyebrows at my fellow Starbucks regulars, who smiled sympathetically.

‘The preferred term is Guests.’

It wasn’t a joke. They were choosing potential Guest-adopters from a bank of experts (biochemists, neuroscientists, psychologists). My area is linguistic anthropology. They wanted to know about Guest languages.

They’d named my Guest Ella. I put her in my daughter’s room. (She lived with her father now and never came home.)

I wished I’d adopted more than one Guest. I couldn’t learn anything about Ella’s language because she didn’t have anyone to talk to. Also, she’d achieved native-level proficiency of English within several weeks, which made it harder to make hypotheses based on her acquisition patterns.

One anomaly gave me a clue, though—her use of pronouns. She acquired the first-person singular (I, me, my) without any trouble, but she never used second, third or first-person plural.

The implications of this hit me one night after dinner. Ella had just polished off a generous bowl of ice cream (Madagascan vanilla with dark chocolate chunks).

‘I’m hungry,’ she said.

She didn’t eat the second helping I gave her. Instead she held the bowl out to me. 

‘That’s for you, Ella,’ I reminded her. I don’t eat ice cream. (I stopped eating sweets when Pieter left.)

She placed the bowl in front of me with uncharacteristic stubbornness. 

It was then that I noticed how malleable her facial features were.

‘That’s for me,’ she repeated. ‘I want it so much.’

I tried not to stare as her face morphed. She was starting to look like someone I knew.

‘It looks so delicious,’ she said, and her longing nearly broke my heart. ‘I’m empty inside. Maybe ice cream would help.’

I stared longingly at the decadent chunks of chocolate speckling the soft cream. (My weight was one of the reasons Pieter left.)

‘I miss ice cream,’ she said. 

It was not until the first spoonful passed my eager lips that I understood.

Guest language had no second person pronoun. 

‘I miss myself,’ she continued, ruthlessly. ‘I don’t know who I am, now that I’m all alone.’

Ella had no way of saying ‘you’. 

Which meant she probably didn’t even have a concept of ‘you’.

‘You’re not alone,’ I said.

Her uncannily familiar face made it clear that she was not reassured. 

I tried again. ‘I’m not alone,’ I said. 

Her eyes glowed with warmth, like light in a guest house. (Inviting. Welcoming.)

The relief in her smile mirrored my own.

Would you like to know more about this story? Check out my behind-the-scenes post on Patreon.

No and the ark

Round gold icon painted with a scene from the Biblical story of Noah's Ark
Photo of Noah’s Ark icon by Jim Forest

Who are all these people, and why are they all here?

Belinda has not responded to her three-year-old daughter’s repeated questions, though the answers are easily available.

The beach house seems ready to burst at the seams, either from the heaving throngs of family sprawled about in various stages of multi-family chaos within, or from the howling gales that hammer against the paper-thin walls without.

These are my cousins, and they’re here for your great-grandmother’s funeral.

They’ve reached that drunken stage of family gathering where everyone tries to remember Nan’s stories.

Bill, once the thick-headed bullying eldest cousin, now professor of comparative literature at Boston University, tries to convince everyone their grandmother’s vast collection of stories consisted solely of variations on Bible themes.

Carly, who runs a tattoo salon in Brooklyn says he’s reading way too much into it.

Gina, the Montessori peacekeeper, is praising the artichoke dip.

Who are all these people, and why are they all here?

Belinda has breathed barely a word since they congregated at the family vacation home, not even to her daughter – just enough to manage the logistics of getting Ella fed and tucked into the cot in their shared room. She’d like to be in bed herself, but can’t risk it yet. Ella sleeps lightly and might hear her crying.

Bill reminds Carly that Nan was once a nun, and professes his belief that the endless stories were her rebellion against the church and its narratives. 

If she was that pissed off about the church, why are we burying her in one, Carly wants to know, and Gina pipes up that there was one story in particular that reminded her of Noah’s ark.

‘The story Nan told was about a man named No.’

The words have escaped Belinda’s lips as a breathy whisper, but the wind has just ceased, and everyone’s heard her. The cousins and their partners stay silent, waiting for more.

Who are all these people, and why are they all here?

‘No was the only person on the Earth. He lived among all the animals, who named him “No” because he had no speech. No matter how much they simplified their language, he could never make sense of what the animals were saying. He just kept shaking his head, “no”.’

They’re your family, and they’re here because my Nan died.

What would Ella know of people gathering when someone died? Greg died suddenly, in the middle of the pandemic, and they weren’t allowed a funeral. What Ella knows of her own daddy’s death is loneliness and silence, not this expansive hearthside festival of laughter and story.

Belinda shakes her own head, ‘no’, at her cousins’ clear desire to hear the rest of the tale. Still, the words tumble out, as relentlessly as the newly revived winds.

‘The animals got together and decided No was too distracted by all the beautiful things on the land, so they called down the rain to wash it away. They built a boat and drifted away on the monotonous sea. For forty days and forty nights they taught him their language.

‘No remained silent, confused.’

Her family had tried various ways to contact her, to keep her company during her grief, to occupy Ella, to encourage Belinda to go out for a walk at least to clear her head. Belinda turned off her phone and retreated inside herself, silent. Ella stopped crying, and Belinda’s own tears remained voiceless, wracking, heaving. 

‘When the rains stopped and the waters finally abated, the animals gave up hope. They moved back to the dry land in the springtime and made their dens there. No did not follow them.’

It’s a strange place for the story to end, but Belinda cannot remember any more.

No must have died alone on the boat, starved by his own silence.

Perhaps he found peace at the end.

‘In the silent nights, No’s ears were opened,’ she’s saying now, finishing the tale. She can hear her crazy grandmother’s soothing tones of her voice in her own voice. She puts her arms around herself and keens slowly, more than a little crazy herself by now, she imagines. 

‘No’s ears were opened to the whistling tunes of the wind. His heart beat to the staccato rhythms of the waves drumming the boat’s resonant hull. He swallowed the wind and the waves, and at once he had language.’

But it was not a language the animals knew, and No remained alone.

The tragic ending of her grandmother’s tale remains unvoiced, except by the wind that still beats insistently against their mourning house.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 73 of Structured Visions.

The Oracle of Sudsarama

Greyscale photographic portrait of a bearded man
Photo by Jorg Karg

The homeless guy was naming things.

This was my big revelation.

It took a month’s worth of visits to the laundrette to work it out.

On Saturday of week one I had no idea at all. I was consumed with my abysmal turn of fortune—my own washing machine damaged beyond repair, my kitchen flooded and clothes likely ruined. I hauled the sopping load through bitter cold rain to Sudsarama on Market Square. The tramp was settled in so comfortably in the room’s wet, fragrant heat that at first I didn’t even notice he was there.

He did not afford me the same courtesy.

‘They’re spinning,’ he croaked.

I did not need to make eye contact to know he was talking about the thrumming dryers. I nodded as politely as I could manage.

On Saturday of week two I was nearly out of underwear and entirely out of patience. My new washing machine had been held up at the warehouse. I made my reluctant pilgrimage to Sudsarama, heavy laden with shopping bags filled with smalls.

The tramp sat sedately in the same spot as the week before, like a priest of the oracle.

‘They’re helping,’ he said.

I followed his gaze to a woman outside walking her dog. The latter sported a hi-vis vest that endorsed its support-animal status.

I kept my gaze focused just beyond the window for fear of being drawn into some maddening conversation.

Still, I couldn’t help but be curious about what sort of assistance my homeless companion thought the human-canine pair was providing, and to whom.

‘They’re helping?’ I asked.

To my surprise the objects of our discourse opened the door and entered into the Sudsarama shrine. 

‘They’re helping,’ the tramp affirmed. He leant down to scratch behind the dog’s ears and whisper into them. ‘They’re spinning,’ he told the dog, pointing his gentle chin toward the dryers.

By week three, I’d formed a few hypotheses. 

The tramp used the plural pronoun for everything, even singular referents, like the dog. 

He was too polite to make assumptions about people’s pronouns. Or dogs’ pronouns. Or dryers, for that matter.

And the -ing words—spinning, helping—the tramp wasn’t using them as verbs.

They were names.

He’d named the dog ‘Helping’, and the dryer ‘Spinning’. 

No, he hadn’t named them—suddenly it was somehow clear to me—he knew their names already, he was simply stating what was true.

Everything he encountered already had a name, a name that revealed the entity’s essential quality, and the name of everything was a verb.

On the fourth Saturday I decided my duvet needed a clean and that my newly installed washing machine wasn’t big enough for the job. I raced across the square, fixated upon the plate glass windows of Sudsarama and whether my guru would appear through them.

When his shadowy figure came into focus I felt something release in my chest, like an unacknowledged longing spreading its wings to take flight.

I leant against one of the dryers and gazed shamelessly into the man’s weathered eyes. ‘They’re Spinning,’ I said.

With his nod I felt a wave of compassion wash over me.

‘And him-’ I said, pointing to a terrier running free on the street, who’d stopped to cock his leg on the lamppost opposite. ‘Them, I mean. They are-’

‘They’re Helping,’ he said.

I made a mental note: All dogs are Helping.

‘And those?’ I asked, flinging my pointing arm wildly toward the fountains in front of the City Hall.

‘They’re Flowing.’

‘And those?’ I pointed to the semi-circle of bare-branched cherry trees that framed the water feature.

‘They’re Breathing.’

I could no longer speak, only stand in awe of the man’s wisdom and the grace with which he bequeathed each thing with his essential quality, its name.

‘And me?’ I begged when I finally found my voice, thumping my chest, a frenzied chimpanzee. ‘Who am I?’

His silence precipitated a gaping despair at the heart of me, like a landslide on the edge of a vast abyss. 

In a desperate attempt I tried again. 

‘These?’ I hadn’t stopped drumming on my sternum, so urgent was my need to know. ‘What are these?’

His lips fluttered as if brushed with the briefest of smiles.

‘They are Being,’ he said. 

Then he stood before me and raised an oily palm as if in benediction. He patted me lovingly on the head and left the Sudsarama sanctuary, making his procession into the freshly blessed city.

Would you like to know more about this story? Check out my behind-the-scenes post on Patreon.

A remarkable outcome

Photo of outerspace
Photo by NASA

Your first experiment rarely works. You shouldn’t expect it to. You’re supposed to see it as an apprenticeship project, a learning opportunity. You’ve only failed if you’ve failed to learn, etc.

My first experiment was Earth.

Sorry, Project 649BQ8. (They don’t like it when you use the local names. It usually means you’ve gone native.)

I’ll admit a certain fondness for the place.

I still think of it as a phenomenal planet, one that, quite frankly, should never have been assigned to a newbie.

Did I learn anything from my failure?

Of course I did. The protocol was the same as with any of the intelligent planets. Connect it to the network. Calibrate the existing information systems so they resonate with network frequencies. If the planet resists connection, abort the project and move on to the next.

Should I have followed protocol?

Look, I know I’m supposed to say yes here, but can we please stop ignoring the genius of what I achieved? When the planet resisted connection, I didn’t abort. I designed a new species.

Human beings, they called themselves.

I made them out of local components, then attuned their nervous systems to be conducive to network frequencies.

And damned if it didn’t work!

I nearly wept for joy when they started developing their own communication frameworks, extra-local ones, using what they’d later refer to as their language.

Once they had language, all that was left to do was to calibrate it to the network system, and we’d have the link we were looking for.

It would have been a phenomenal achievement.

What went wrong?

I’m supposed to cite the protocol breach and leave it at that. The higher ups have neither the time nor the imagination for more nuanced analysis.

But I’ve developed my own theory.

These ‘human beings’ are so attached to their ‘Earth’ that they keep trying to use their language to describe their world. It has become an obsession for them.

They cloy to their material environment so resolutely that they have forced their rarefied language upon it. It causes them great suffering. Still, they persist.

It fascinates me.

The idea that you’d link language to base matter!

And that I created a whole species devoted to that endeavour!

What a remarkable outcome!

like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 72 of Structured Visions.