Language (from Understanding the past, a textbook by Prof. Mufudazi Flowers) Language has been one of the triumphs of history. From what scholars can gather, our Ancestors started off with no language except the word 'la,' uttered repeatedly. We assume that they used different inflections for emphasis. Today's Umbagollians would find this method of communication confusing, but the Ancestors were comfortable enough to maintain it for anywhere from dozens to hundreds of years. Some Communications scholars have used this fact to support the argument that the Ancestors were many times more sensitive to nuances than we are today. "Tilting one's head to the right might have been enough to say, "This is a noun. This is you I'm talking about," while an eyebrow raised to a certain height may have conveyed anger, uncertainty, hunger or hundreds of other emotions that we do not have names for," suggests Professor Archduke James Martin Faraway. He goes on, "The death of our sensitivity was heralded by one thing: nouns." We can imagine that as the Ancestors became steadily more active in the practical world, they became interested in more rapid means of communication. "The veil of dreamlike communion was torn away by a new, rough world. They needed tools, and language changed from a lyrical song into a brutal tool, like a hammer." Verbs followed nouns. A sentence from the noun-and-verb era might have sounded like this: La la tree sit la grass leaf la la la blood la fall. Which might translate as, "I sat on the grass under the tree, but there was a sharp, prickly leaf in the grass and it cut me. I bled." There seem to have been words from this period which we cannot reliably decipher, such as 'wuh,' 'tchoo' and 'platch.' The cautious words 'seem' and 'might' often appear in essays about Ancestral language because the illiterate speakers left us no contemporary written examples of their tongue. All we have are writings from the period when noun-and-verb was crossing over into the more structured, linguistically complicated language we use today. Yet the legacy of nouns and verbs is still with us. Listen to a Goolooian and you will hear a pronounced 'la' inflection in their accent. "Hello" is rendered as "hell-la," while in Ex it is almost "helloi" and in Jail, a flat "Heller." "La," is also the Goolooian version of the more common, stammering "Um." The evidence we have suggests that those who used the new language were ashamed of the backwardness of noun-and-verbites. In contemporary play scripts the noun-and-verb characters are commonly portrayed as comic-relief idiots, yet the new language was, if anything, more dreamlike, less straightforward, than the old one. Thoughts are joined together by the loosest of threads. For example: Their mind hears silver fish rings, in the swollen grass comes their thought, the music of the fish and stars. This means, "They sat by the river at night." During the next few hundred years, language veered about all over the place. For example, from the Year of Maintaining Rage to the Year of Sighed Remarks, everything was written (and, presumably, spoken) in the past tense, in response to an influential gang of philosophers who reasoned that we cannot talk truthfully about the present or the future, because the future can only be guessed at and the present is past before we can grasp it, make comparisons between it and other occurrances, and thereby absorb its meaning. That was the theory anyway. As groups of people broke away from the primary tribe at Gum Gooloo Gum Jublet, different accents began to develop. Aristocratic families concocted individual styles of communication which were frequently pretentious. Building your own clique of people who spoke a private, incomprehensible language became a popular sport. The Baron Rivers spoke amongst themselves in what was described by one Goolooian as, "a dialect of hisses and clicks. The clicks suggest actions. The hisses describe nouns, and also the spirit of the sentence, ie, a brief hiss means that the speaker is being ironic; a long hiss, anger. I did not understand it at first. They thought that was very funny." These languages dissolved along with the aristocratic family estates in the Year of Strange Movement (1525) when the aristocrats and their citizens were brought out of their pockets of isolation and forced to communicate effectively with the outside world in order to survive. The posthumously published letters of Lord Small, with their flowing sentences and lack of punctuation, are an example of one of the more comprehensible aristocratic modes of speech. Meanwhile, the ferryists learnt to speak in a rapid patter, and Jailites, the amalgamation of escapees from a dozen aristocratic estates, developed a rich body of slang, in which 'bone-hoffer' is a complimentary term for the fast feet of someone who can tear an object from a person's hand and escape without being caught, and an 'odgett' is a person with a congenital limp who specialises in robbing the blind. In the Year of Present Ills, (1115) a group of Goolooians left Gum Gooloo Gum Jublet and isolated themselves in the northern forest where they built the city of Ex. When they emerged, centuries later, the Goolooians were surprised to discover that their prodigal cousins had preserved an archaic accent and spelling not seen in Gum Gooloo for four hundred years. Its arch, snipped rhythmns had been enjoying a brief vogue when the explorers left the city, but Goolooian language had soon moved on and the fad had been forgotten. The cocky young Exian invaders who looked upon the Goolooians as old-fashioned and stuck in their ways were, ironically, speaking the language of their enemies' great-great-great grandparents. The one constant of our linguistic development is that we have always struggled for perfect communication. One of the legacies of our illiterate, 'la'-ing ancestors has been "a terrible fear of saying something that means nothing," as Professor Faraway puts it. This has led to everything, from the broad, common language which is understood today across practically the entire country, to the dialect of Jail which invents its own words to express local realities, to the individual languages-of-one used by the Dangerous Mystics, to the dead aristocratic cliques in which one slip into clumsy common language meant that the speaker would be ostracised and deliberately misunderstood. It has led us to plays, songs and writing, in search of the perfect medium for whatever we are trying to say. Some, such as Professor Faraway, see it as, "A retreat from what we truly are, an undevelopment." I see it as a natural and beautiful growth. However you choose to view it, language is here to stay, and its future will always be interesting. Return to the the top of the page.