Languages
Siren has countless different cultures and manners of speaking and it would be impossible to provide a comprehensive guide to all languages. But modern-day language is not what concerns me, as a historian myself. I sought instead to back-translate my primary sources from the Era of Settlement into words comprehensible to the modern-day Sirenian (a cohort in which I am, regretfully, trapped). A linguist, however, I am not, so I will employ the services of my esteemed and highly respectable colleague Tektei-vas who will provide the next section of this article.
1. Introduction by Tektei-vas
It is indeed a great honour to be permitted to contribute, in some small way, to this body of knowledge. As my incomparable colleague Qedi-vas has mentioned, I am a linguist. My primary research thesis was on the Spiral-speak used by the Ii!wal people in the south-western sea, and in particular establishing a family link between this Spiral air language and the nearest coastal cultures, such that I might discover when these language families first diverged.Discovering that the divergence occurred much earlier in history than anyone had anticipated, I arrived on a tentative year count of roughly a century prior to the date system that is currently in use in the Western continent was established; thus, about -100 EY.
Once my first thesis was published and I had attained my -vas suffix and scholarly cape and collar, I worked in the Spire for several years doing smaller research projects on land-locked Eastern continent villages and the variable usage of sentence structure and diminutisation to covertly label in-groups and out-groups. I also taught language to under-graduates. I speak eighty Sirenian languages, have four published works to my name and I have won no fewer than ten sword-debates. I likely would have taken a -vay mastery suffix and resigned the rest of my life to teaching tonal shifts to half-asleep students, and been very successful if uncontroversial. But the materials presented to me by my inimitable colleague Qedi-vas changed the course of my studies for good, as you will now learn.
Although not a historian myself I find history rather fascinating. It provides a colourful backdrop to my true interest, that of linguistics, but it can provide a terrific amount of information which is required for a faithful translation of old primary source material. My translation of Settler language, which is called ‘English’, would have been impossible without the contributions of my historian and evolutionary anthropologist colleagues Qedi-vas and Ami-vas (often referred to by their -var researcher suffixes, unfairly in my opinion; but that is a matter for another day).
2. Construction of Modern-Day Sirenian Air and Water Languages
Before we dive into the fascinating world of English, we must establish some facts about how Sirenians speak today. Although you, my reader, may intuitively understand the languages which you undoubtedly speak, you may not consciously know the means of their construction.
The languages of Siren are divided into two major groups – Air and Water languages. The reason for this division is self-evident, I hope. One cannot speak an air language underwater, and a sizeable population of Sirenians will never even set foot on land. Aquatic peoples of all types, including harpies, have developed methods of communication which are independent of any air language.
Why is this independence factor important? Well, every air language on Siren – that is, every language spoken not in water – derives its roots from a single family. That family is ‘English’, though I know better than anyone that this will not guarantee mutual intelligibility. In fact the speakers of air languages would never be able to understand an English-speaker if one were to happen to arrive today. But ultimately it does mean that our air languages share a lot of overlap and back-translation is possible to bridge gaps in understanding. It is why one might find another air language at least somewhat intuitive to learn.
You see, this is not true for water languages. There was no single originating family under the waves, but hundreds. This makes learning water languages, even as a primary speaker of a water language, a far more time-consuming process. You will find languages which take the form of wailing, clicking, gestures and eye movements, stridulation of hand-tools, and even musical notes produced by instruments. As my area of expertise is in the Ii!wal culture, I am most capable of employing a form of water language called click-tongue, which is exactly what it sounds like.
2.1 Click-tongue
Click-tongue is a family of languages used by cultures for which rapid, long-distance communication is a necessity. A great amount of information must be communicated all at once, in a single short burst, so that conversation can occur between individuals who are many hundreds of metres apart. This is employed in the south-western sea, which is rife with leviathans. The Ii!wal people are hunters of leviathans first and foremost, so timely advance notice of a potential hunt is baked into their means of speaking. By using this long-range form of speech, they are capable of tracking and chasing down a leviathan quite effectively no matter how it attempts to flee.
It works by using the tongue to produce clicks which are then intercepted by the whiskers of another person. Those of us without a full disk of whiskers may struggle with the distance aspect, but I have found that shortwing harpies such as myself as more than capable of picking up clicks if they are communicated at short range, and I don’t have nearly as many whiskers as the average water-speaker. The biggest challenge, however, was in holding my breath long enough to respond. But I can attest that this is a rapid and efficient method of communication, particularly when employed poly-phonically by its most frequent speakers in pelagic Spiral villages. When clicks are used at the Spire, they are often drawn-out and mono-phonic, with less information being conveyed in short spaces of time.
This language is also a double-edged sword [old English idiom] for its users. Clicks can be fine-tuned such that they impact a receiver’s whiskers in a narrow band only, but it is not always precise. Conversations in one part of a pelagic village will be overheard by nearly everyone in the village. It is impossible to speak privately. This has its own effects upon these cultures; what is not said is almost as important as what is. They speak in metaphor and oblique reference – put plainly, as things are in the Spire, it is unacceptable to insult someone behind their backs as ‘behind their backs’ does not exist as a concept.
This has led to an interesting use of air language in otherwise fully-pelagic peoples; it is the language of intimacy, privacy, and secrecy. It is well-known in these regions that intimate partners often spend extended amounts of time at the surface of the water, speaking quietly to one another where nobody may overhear.
2.2 Air languages
These are spoken with the lips and tongue, using the breath and vocal cords to provide the sound. Air languages are spoken worldwide. Their exclusive use is reserved only for landlocked communities however, such as the landstrider and zeta nomads from the southern reaches of Dry Bowl. Leaving aside the possibility of injury or disability, all people are capable of using air language (and now we know the reason for that), though some may have been raised on water languages only and may struggle to engage the vocal cords effectively.
I have observed that pelagic phocids often have the ‘weakest’ voices, especially if they did not grow up using air language for much more than whispering secrets; they grow hoarse after only a few sentences. Others can, with some training, speak both air and water languages simultaneously, including vocalising words underwater. These bilinguals are most commonly found in coastal regions, for obvious reasons, and the most deft users of this type of mixed speech are often dockworkers such as those found around the Spire, who must communicate with every kind of person from across the globe to ensure there is no delay or accidents in shipping.
All air languages descend from English, though the structure this descent took varies by population and culture. Many cultures in the Eastern and Western continents have since died, forever terminating the growth of their own particular form of English. As the settlers arrived first to the Western continent, it is natural to assume that the forms of air language spoken there are the closest to ‘true’ English, and this is often the case. The harpies at the Hall of Faces are well known for being able to decipher Precursor text that appears in their visors. I will expand upon written language in a later section. The opposite of this assumption is also often true; the parts of our world which are furthest from the first settlement are likely to speak languages which diverged from languages with diverged from (and so on and so forth) English.
2.3 Gesture languages
These must be distinguished from the forms of gestures used underwater as part of a semi-voiced water language. Zetas have no tongues and communicate using hand signs and gestures. It is not unusual for kattakati to develop an internal gesture language which obfuscates their thoughts from curious onlookers, and can be spoken unobtrusively; such a language usually employs tail touching.
3. Written Language
Spoken language is only half of the story, of course, and we must also turn our eyes to the writing systems in use around the world if we must begin our task of reviving a dead English. As my colleague mentioned in his brief write-up of the eras of Siren, we cannot take the preservation of written text for granted. There are vast gaps in our archive of historical written texts, particularly where the Era of Decay was concerned. Perhaps had those early ancestors been of the same unaltered human stock that had arrived to Siren, they might have had a greater chance of recording their lives. They were well-educated and literate, unlike their modified creations, who were only ever intended to be test subjects.
Thus, few of our ancestors knew how to write and even fewer had the requisite knowledge of preserving information for future generations. Even the visor-wearing harpies were not truly “reading” the words their visors presented to them, rather recognising a word-mark’s meaning as one would a wordless signpost.
However, some elements of the English lettering system still persisted through the Era of Decay. Many of the letter-marks used in the Western continent are derived from settler English, including the ‘vowels’ a, ׀, x, and ə. It is unlikely that we read those with the same syllables as the settlers did, however.
In the Eastern continent, we use the system which you are now reading, which is called Eroa Lettermarks after master Eroa-vay, one of the founders of the University. It is ubiquitous in the Eastern continent now, even in communities which do not speak a language that is mutually intelligible with Spire speech (though, clearly, their words are not the same as ours).
We have several means of creating our letter-marks; using an ink pen on papyrus, of course, or carved blocks in a printing press. But living underwater provides a unique challenge for the written word; ink will run, papyrus will dissolve, and even carved stone is liable to erode. Instead, many pelagic cultures have adopted a form of writing which is woven, not written. The Ii!wal people, for example, write using long knotted cords, with the pattern and arrangement of knots translating into the equivalent of letters. To read them, one feeds the cord between finger and thumb, which is useful for short-limbed, long-necked people like phocids, as they can read without straining their necks. This method of writing has also been adopted on land by people who are visually impaired.
4. English
I was originally contacted by my honourable and esteemed colleague Qedi-vas after he unlocked the map within the memory cylinder. He had heard a computer-recorded voice from Signaswun, the visor he was using to unlock the cylinder, and wished to know what those words had meant. Originally I had my doubts, which I believe were somewhat overstated in his novelisation of the research project
[EDIT from Qedi-var: it wasn’t overstated you pompous ass]
[EDIT from Tektei-vas: it was overly accusatory, while I believe I was perfectly entitled to feel doubtful about the merits of the project.]
[EDIT from Qedi-var: I was fully qualified and had the expertise, as you well know. You were cowardly and refused to be published in my thesis under your true name until it was no longer controversial. I am locking this page from further edits]
to which I contributed. I remained sceptical and although I was fascinated to hear spoken English for the first time, I attempted to convince him that this piece of sound alone was worth an entire thesis. He insisted on travelling to the site of the first settlement, where he assured me he would find large amounts of similar primary sources. He left me with his memory cylinder, so that I might begin the painstaking work of truly back-translating what the voice had said while he travelled to the Western continent to collect more sources.
He left, and I was able to get to work on the cylinder in between my daily tasks at the University. He asked me, understandably, not to reveal my work to others until it was ready for publication, which is a common courtesy for projects such as these. First, I matched the letter-mark transliteration to the prior records I and other linguists had gathered. I found a similar word-mark in a text from Odr’s Sleep, which is a site of many archaeological finds, due to its cold and preservative weather.
Speaking to several colleagues from Odr’s Sleep, I was able to isolate more cognates from this region. It appears that people speaking a language not so strongly divergent from settler English had come to live there. These people had spread to several villages around Odr’s Sleep, and each village thus ended up speaking a different dialect of this particular language. These dialects were different enough that their similarities became clearer and more obvious, and led me to believe that the similarities held the key to unlock this mystery.
As Qedi-var and his survey team swam west, I took a flight with a longwing carrying passengers north. He wore the visor called Banditwhon, and I was able to inform him that all visor names are English names, and perhaps the oldest English names still in modern use. He asked me what his meant, and I was not able to respond then. But now, with all my accumulated expertise, I could tell him that his visor’s name is ‘The First Thief in the Night’ in our modern language. He was rather impressed with that.
At Odr’s Sleep, I was able to access their library of written works, once I agreed to sending some scrolls from the Spire in return. I was asked, then, the purpose of my trip, and I replied in truth that I was researching the divergence points of their language’s regional dialects.
It was enough work to fill the better half of a year, but I returned with a more complete list of spoken English words and their phonetic transliteration. I practised speaking these in my own time, and eventually brought my findings to my esteemed colleague Ami-var, who I falsely believed to have been working on the same research project. The response I received was not what I expected:
[EDIT from Qedi-var: removed several purposeless paragraphs here]
But I was happy to announce that, by the time Qedi-var returned to the Spire with his primary sources, I had been able to match speech to text and understand it in turn. I had discovered a fascinating link in the northern villages that, I believe, has allowed me to become the world’s only modern-day speaker of settler English, though I am now training others using the materials I produced when working upon this project.
In any case, Qedi-var returned without any new sources. He bid me to meet him elsewhere, outside the Spire, and this is where I found his now-infamous stash. I was stunned by the wealth of information locked away in these memory cylinders – there were hundreds! And not only that, but moving images, projected onto walls, showing more text in the form of light, or the forms of ancient people. I was utterly convinced of the merit, now, of travelling to the first settlement, and I now had not only the tools to back-translate English, but enough material to last me several lifetimes. My vocabulary expanded quickly. We worked night and day, hardly stopping to breathe, as I translated and Qedi-var compiled the data pertaining to his primary research subject, Ishmael.
We had not yet finished when Ami-var discovered us. We were in the process of setting out our conclusions, though the body of the text had not yet been decided upon. What occurred after this is the purview of Qedi-var to tell in his dramatisation, in his own words, but if you are a citizen of the Spire I’m sure you know what the University did to him then.
I am only here to discuss the language. I allowed Qedi-var to veer off into his anthropological focus, while I remained translating all else – and I can admit that, even now, several years later, I have not finished working through this body of information.
English is a curious tongue, too broad and flat to the ears at first listening. You would find some familiarities in it, even if you lacked any knowledge at all; certain sounds, the rhythm of speech, these are all familiar to an air language speaker. But the words are odd. Not only because they are a different language to what we speak, but also because the Precursors had at their fingertips so many concepts which are utterly alien to us. These concepts I cannot translate into modern language, so they remain in English – ‘computer’ and the linked concept of ‘memory’ or ‘datas storage’ for example, are ideas we struggle to articulate, but appear everywhere in these records.
4.1 Other precursor languages?
Now comes the obvious question: what other languages did the Precursors speak? Because, surely, there were many. Well, these are recorded in the settlement datas which Qedi-var recovered. A few of the settlers spoke languages which bear no resemblance whatsoever to English, but it appears that these were not used in the daily operation of the settlement, or by Atom corporation. It was also notable that these other languages and writing systems were found in the personal diaries of settler workers, and among these journals I found English-speakers who complained of having to work around people they could not understand, referring to them as ‘foreigners’. A case of xenophobia, I suppose.
These snippets of other languages are as frustrating as they are tantalising. Here is evidence of a broad, potentially vast linguistic history which I have no way of accessing. Unless I were to find translation notes among the datas from the settlement, I would have no way to translate these at all. When we mount our second expedition, I plan to be there in person, so that I may choose what I might find most illuminating, rather than be forced to wade through several thousand ‘vids’ of Ishmael in therapy again.
5. Conclusion by Qedi-var
I would like to thank my co-worker Tektei-vas for his contributions to this page. I have edited out several superfluous paragraphs and provided some clarification where necessary. I am sure you will be able to read more of his thoughts when he publishes his own treatise on English. I also note that despite his claims, I do not take the suffix -vas and nor do I wear the cape and collar, by choice. I hope you were able to find his thoughts insightful and illuminating.