by Tom R. Pike
Tom Pike discusses the linguistic research into multilingualism by Dr. Rossina Soyan that inspired “Isolate,” his latest story, now available in our [May/June issue, on sale now!]
As with my previous story for Analog, “Isolate” was inspired by a specific scientific article.
“Isolate” owes its existence to the research of Dr. Rossina Soyan, an applied linguist whose work spans study of language acquisition and multilingualism in learners and speakers of the Russian and Tuvan languages.
It was a paper by Dr. Soyan[1] that made me finally understand why linguistic diversity is a laudable goal in its own right. Until I read this paper, I had assumed—as probably many Americans do—that our monolingual culture affords us many benefits that we would not have if we were multilingual. It is probably true that our shared language brings us closer together, but I had long bought into the false assumption that the universality of English must necessarily come at the expense of other languages.
Languages are not a zero-sum game. You do not have to destroy other languages to use your own.
Studies, like those by Dr. Soyan and others, show that biliteracy among children does not come at a cost. If this is true—and it is the overwhelming scholarly consensus—then every local language that has been deliberately wiped out or neglectfully forgotten represents a pointless loss.
I do not buy into the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis that languages set strict limits on human thought, so I do not believe there are concepts that “cannot be translated”. I am not arguing that we lose irrecoverable ideas when a language dies. The things we lose when we lose a language are things like rhyme schemes, prosody, and puns. It is said that you cannot translate a poem. The act of translating a poem creates a new poem.
Language loss is often imposed on a people by an uncaring imperial state, but there are also languages which were set aside by their own speakers without overt coercion. It is a common practice among, for example, immigrant parents, who often decline to teach their languages to their children, fearing their children will not learn English if they do. They need not worry, as a child can learn both, but the pattern has nonetheless played out time and again.
Dr. Soyan’s homeland of Tuva is in an unusual position by virtue of its unusual history. Unlike most territories of the Russian Federation, or the Soviet Union or Russian Empire before, it was not conquered at the point of a bayonet. Equally distant from the spheres of influence of both the Chinese and Russian empires, it was nominally controlled by the Chinese Qing Empire until 1911, when China underwent an uprising that became a revolution. The Chinese then had more pressing concerns than the remote frontier regions. Their troops and administrators essentially abandoned Tuva. Tsarist Russia, which had been quietly seeding Tuva with traders and colonists loyal to Russia for the previous half-century, was in a position to benefit.
Tuvan nobles were split into three factions following the withdrawal of the Qing: a group that wanted to join Mongolia, a group that wanted to join Russia, and a group that wanted independence. The pro-Russia faction acted first, requesting Russian protection. Russian troops entered Tuva, but they did not need to fight large, pitched battles. Although Tuva was nominally independent between the World Wars, it was aligned with the Soviets from then until its final, formal annexation.
The whole story of Russian colonization of Tuva is, of course, more complex than I have room for in this article. And the history was not entirely peaceful. But as compared to the fate of Indigenous people elsewhere on Earth, the Tuvans fared better than most. They got what so many did not: a choice.
Or at least, their nobles did. There was no referendum. Regardless, such a large territory is rarely claimed by an empire with so little bloodshed.
Today, the decisions of a faraway government affect the future of the Tuvan language in ways that could not possibly have been foreseen by the Tuvan nobles who made their choice in the early 20th century. Would they have chosen differently had they known? I’m not sure they would have.
You might think, given my story’s inspiration came from a Tuvan scientist, given that its main character’s name is Tuvan, and given that I have spent the last three years working to learn Tuvan, that the language of Gaskanni would be Tuvan.
But Gaskanni is not Tuvan.
Even an empire that is relatively benign is still an empire.
Gaskanni was deliberately written to have had an absence of a power structure prior to the arrival of Ares. Their society is guided by morals and songs handed down from elders. But, as the elders did not perceive that this would change if they allowed annexation, there was no armed struggle to preserve the existing social hierarchy in Gaskanni. It is not lost on the Gaskanni that the Aresians have railguns and missiles; all the Gaskanni got to choose is whether or not the intruders feel the need to use them. The result has been a slow, slippery slope shift into Ares, with the empire testing and gradually expanding the limits of their hold over the local populace, never pushing so far or so fast as to incite rebellion.
I chose this dynamic because there have been countless stories, many of them excellently crafted and insightful, about the way an empire that conquers by force is evil. (You might call this type of story a “star war”.) Instead, I wanted to ask if conquest remains evil even if the annexation is agreed to, or at least, not particularly loudly objected to.
By the standards of sci-fi states ruled by a god-emperor, there are worse places to live in than Ares. Aresians see themselves as bringing salvation to the cosmos. They believe that nobody is saved until everyone is saved, and so by saving others, they save themselves. It is a doctrinal theocracy, sure. But if it were an unwelcome growth in your body, it might initially be mistaken for benign.
Ares is built on two thousand years of linguistic drift, with much of that having been spent in a Dark Age that few written records survived. That leaves people like Arzhaana to deduce the past from the clues that remain, which they do with varying degrees of success. In her case, this is not merely academic. Though the Gaskanni themselves will be allowed to live in peace either way, the fate of their language depends on Arzhaana’s report.
The Gaskanni language will be allowed to persist if it is shown to be related to one of the “Golden Tongues”. These are the languages known to scholars to have been spoken on Ares during its Dark Age. They do not just include Dzhermanic languages, but languages derived from a variety of real-life language trees. Gaskanni doesn’t need to be Dzhermanic, but it does need to be a Golden Tongue, and proving a relationship to the most dominant language tree in Ares would be the most unassailable way to sanctify it.
“Gaskanni” itself is derived from the word “Basque”, and it would not even be the first time this sound change has occurred in Basque history (“Gascony”). Gaskanni, in its development from Basque, borrowed the informal register from Spanish, a development that is already underway in some parts of Basque country due to the lack of a unified agreement among the Basque dialects on how to construct the informal register. After Basque went into space on a fictional rocket, some Maori words and a tiny bit of grammar were borrowed during a period of close contact.
I picked Basque as the basis of Gaskanni not because Basque is the most famous language isolate in use today—though it is—but because of its ergativity, which allowed me to create a miscommunication between the Dzhermanic-speaking Aresians and the locals.
Dzhermanic is pronounced “Germanic”, and is the Aresian word for what we call the Indo-European language tree. The Aresians have not been able to assemble as complete a picture of the history of this tree as we can, today, because we have access to historical and archaeological records that simply are not available to Aresian scholars.
Bastion Dzhermanic, like English, is a nominative-accusative language where the subject of a sentence is almost always acting on the object, whereas Gaskanni, like Basque, is ergative-absolutive, with the subject being acted upon. A language’s “morphosyntactic alignment”, as this concept is known to linguists, makes little difference for a listener’s comprehension, but a language with a different alignment can be confusing to someone who has never learned such a language before. This disconnect led to an escalation of violence after an Aresian soldier mistakenly shot a Gaskanni elder.
“Bastion Dzhermanic” is partly derived from English, but it is not my view that the characters are speaking “English”. Rather, an act of translation has taken place behind the page. That way, you can read the story without me needing to first construct a conlang and then spend five years teaching it to you.
Ibero-Sperantsa Dzhermanic, which Arzhaana notes has cognates in common with Gaskanni, is the Aresian classification for the Italo-Western branch of the Romance language family, itself a branch of Indo-European (“Dzhermanic”). “Ibero-Sperantsa” includes descendents of both Spanish and Italian, with “Sperantsa” derived from the name of an early European Union settlement on Mars (“Ares”), in which daughter languages of Italian continued to be spoken well into Arzhaana’s time. It is not, and I cannot stress this enough, a reference to Esperanto, which is spoken by no one anywhere in the cosmos. So, as far as Esperanto, nothing has changed.
It is okay if you picked up on none of this backstory while reading “Isolate”. Some of it is buried deep, and some of it isn’t discussed at all, because Arzhaana has no way of knowing about it.
Having explained the evolution of Gaskanni now, though—you might be able to figure out on your own why the language was difficult to classify, what Arzhaana concluded, why it is a tempting conclusion, and why it is wrong.
Based on the many cognates between Basque (“Gaskanni”) and Spanish (“Ibero Dzhermanic”), as well as a grammatical structure shared by both languages (the informal register), Arzhaana writes a report which concludes that a descendent of Basque is a dialect of Spanish.
It absolutely is not. And despite her protestations otherwise, deep down, she knows it is not. The similarities are there only because Basque and Spanish coexisted side by side for thousands of years.
I believe Arzhaana is a decent person, and I was sad when I reached the end of the story and would no longer be spending time with her. She adheres to higher standards of ethical conduct than she is required to. She puts her life on the line to preserve a language spoken in a tiny corner of the cosmos. But she is still the agent of an empire.
Even with the best of intentions, even while risking her own life altruistically, Arzhaana remains a cog in an imperial machine. Thanks to her work, a religion will disappear. If “Isolate” had been about a theologian who understood what that loss meant, then that would have been the tragedy of the story. Empires make monsters of everyone who participates in them, whether we do so willingly or not.
One might say of “Isolate” that it romanticizes the role of such an intruder, and maybe it does. I tried to avoid the pitfalls of the genre. But I am not in a position to write from the perspective of the Gaskanni. The amount of research it would take for me to tell a plausible story from their perspective—it would be the only thing I did with the rest of my life, and I still might not pull it off. It is best left to other writers.
Moreover, I do believe there is merit in telling a story about a decent person, even if they are an outsider, who tries to do good, and who succeeds and fails in important ways. There are a lot of people in the real world in positions like hers: functionaries who work in service of empire, and must nonetheless do our best not to hurt others, despite the system constantly pushing us to do so and threatening us with consequences if we do not.
Of course, if any of you reading this feel that this description applies to you, you do have an option not available to Arzhaana. You can quit. If you work for a fossil fuel company, or a private prison, or a cigarette company, or any other real-life entity that is more rapacious and violent than my made-up sci-fi empire, quit your job. Someone else might take it. Fine, let them. That someone won’t be you, and you won’t have to go to sleep anymore knowing that the world becomes a worse place when you do your job well. Arzhaana, and other decent people who do harm, cry during their nightly prayers.
I almost wrote a version of this story where Gaskanni was descended from Tuvan, but I could not bring myself to do it. Having spent the last several years learning about this beautiful language and its songs, I could not write a future—even a marginal dystopia—where Tuvan remained vulnerable. It didn’t feel right, not when the story was inspired by a Tuvan scholar who has worked to promote the use of her language.
Tuvan is written into the story as Tuvadil, one of the Golden Tongues of Ares. There is a place for all languages in the future.
[1] This specific paper is not yet published, but for more of Dr. Soyan’s work, see:
Rossina Soyan (2020): Investigating the Needs of Foreign Language Learners of Tuvan, Journal of Language, Identity & Education, DOI: 10.1080/15348458.2020.1791714 https://doi.org/10.1080/15348458.2020.1791714
Kohen, H., Sadovina, I., Dzyadevych, T., Charter, D., Gomboeva, A., Grenoble, L. A., Kantarovich, J., & Soyan, R. (2021). Teaching and Learning Indigenous Languages of the Russian Federation. Russian Language Journal, 71(3). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.26067/C1S2-3Z21
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