Subjunctive

by Integral Archer

Chapter X: Diminutive

I tremble now as I recollect the moment when I perceived I carried this unprecedented power. But remembering it, like the entirety of this tale, comes to me with that sorrow peculiar to seeing a potential with trenchant clarity, recognizing it, knowing that it is wonderful; and then realizing that its opportunities for use had passed, that they weren’t used to their deserved extent, and may never be.

When learning a new word, one must see it repeatedly, say it, hear it, think it over until it saturates his brain and loses all meaning, all over the course of days, sometimes weeks—sometimes months!—in order for it to be stored by the subconsciousness, especially when said word has no equivalent in one’s native language. If one is learning a language from scratch (and by learning a language from scratch, I mean learning one that is from a different ancestral line than any language one already speaks), even when one has successfully internalized a word, it will, for a longer while yet, be inseparably tied to the equivalent word in one’s native language; and to recall the foreign word, one must first call upon the more easily obtained native word before the foreign one can be spoken and written. This is why new speakers speak so slowly: for the first few years, they are not speakers; they are translators for themselves.

Fluency is nearly impossible to define objectively, and every linguist will believe some variation of the following, agreeing with himself and no other: one definition says that fluency is achieved when the speaker can carry a conversation at a normal pace; another says that fluency is achieved when one can read with ease and can extract from a text the relevant concepts—and yet another one says that fluency is achieved when one, in a moment of profound stress, ecstasy, or any kind of overwhelming emotion, such that there is no time to think about the words, uses a vulgarity from his second language.

The first definition I reject on account of its vagueness: What is a normal pace? One hundred words a minute? Two hundred? What does it mean to carry a conversation? Certainly, some conversations are more difficult than others. How can that difficulty be measured?

The second definition I reject on similar grounds: What does relevant information mean? Does that mean the reader can follow the plot of a novel but not its metaphors, which are just as integral to the art form as anything else? Is he allowed to skip over words he doesn’t understand? What is with ease? Is that where he no longer needs to look up words in a dictionary while reading? But who among us, even to this day, still doesn’t do that occasionally?

Reading with ease, normal pace, carry a conversation, the ability to extract relevant concepts—what pitiful, flimsy, and nonobjective terms to use in such a precise science!

It may be hard to believe, but the third above listed definition is the closest to what I believe to be the most accurate and objective description of fluency: I define fluency in a second language as the state wherein one completely divorces the first language and the second language from each other, when the foreign words are forever tied to their respective concepts on their own; and, generally and most importantly, when the speaker finds no difficulty in expressing his thoughts in the new language, when the words needed to do so can be recalled and put together in the correct order with ease in the fraction of a second, when the speaker is no longer the disciple and subordinate of the language but its master.

Of course, as I’ve said, this takes years. That is, it normally takes years . . .

The sentry was telling me of his escapades when he used a word that I did not understand, nor had I any preconceptions to link the word to. But, nevertheless, when I heard it, I, without being consciously aware of it, had instantly realized what it meant, and then I knew my power: I can hear any assortment of sounds, recognize what concept they refer to, and instantly know the cases, the gender, then instantly and effortlessly have that all stored in my subconsciousness, ready to be pulled out whenever I need it.

I hear it, and I internalize it. I have this power. No more groping through the viscous recesses of my memories of lessons and past conversations to communicate my meaning while my foreign interlocutor yawns impatiently! I can learn anything, anywhere, from anyone!

How many languages are there on this planet? I want to learn them all! Would that I could leave this city, this land and its creatures whose language I already knew as well as my first, fly to the others, visit all the races, their cultures, spend a month among each; until I finally become the universal speaker, the first of my breed, able to unite all under the collective banner of sentience, and no longer would one view another living and thinking creature whom he does not understand as a mindless savage!

I discovered my ability thus:

*

It was one of those rare moments where the sentry did not come to me cynical, anxious, or depressed; and rather came to me elated, eager to tell me the story of an adventure he had had recently, all the while laughing, smiling, completely carefree, and trusting. I liked those moments, as I had only to listen and did not have to worry if my lessons and words were consistent, if he was learning and engaged, or if he suspected anything. I listened; I smiled; and I laughed along with him, even if I didn’t understand his humor.

He was telling me a story, and I was elated for I understood every word, though he was speaking so quickly. But I stopped him on the spot when he said a word I didn’t know but which I thought to be integral to the meaning of his sentence:

“What does that mean?” I interrupted. “What did you do?”

“What didn’t you understand?” he replied.

“The word you used to describe the action you took when you found yourself frustrated.” I groaned. “Your argot baffles and bemuses me.”

“What?” He sneered. “Are we getting all haughty now?”

“Not at all. I just prefer it when it’s possible to independently verify the meaning of words.”

“It’s in the dictionary, or at least will be.”

“Not in the dictionaries I read.”

He sneezed. “You are a prude.”

I sighed. “Many better scientists have studied argot to a much better extent than I ever could. But I don’t want to. Not because I would be unable but because it scares me: in the world of linguistics, argot is the drooling, rabid beast lurking somewhere in the dark forests, untamable and unknowable.”

“If anything,” said the sentry, “that’s the area worth studying. I hear a word, a strange word, which usually makes me laugh at a party one day, and then I use it in another context, and then I laugh. And then before I know it, I’m using it all the time. Sometimes I can’t imagine another word for the concept. Argot, you said it was called? That’s a relevant, living language.”

I nodded. “I hear your officers yelling things all the time. I can’t understand anything they’re saying, nor can I understand how you would even write such things—but at a bark, somehow, you and your fellow soldiers know to carry out ten movements with hundreds of sub-movements for each.

“The evolution of it is certainly noteworthy,” I went on. “A linguistic need arises in a niche subcommunity. And then, just like that”—I tapped my hoof on the table—“somebody somewhere makes some sort of click—maybe palatalized, vocalized, who knows—and then more clicks are made, maybe some trills, and then you have argot. How are those particular sounds chosen? One creature makes it, and then it circulates. How does he choose to make it? I have no idea. Maybe the simpler the concept, the simpler the sound, thus creating a direct relationship between ease of speaking and ease of the task? Pure speculation on my part. And I don’t understand it at all. Perhaps I’ll never understand it.”

“I don’t understand it either,” said the sentry. “I hear it, and I have to pretend I know what it means. And then when I finally do learn what it means, the word no longer has relevance—it goes out of style, as they say—and I have it stuck in my head, sitting there useless. Sometimes, slang is hard for me to keep up with, too.”

“Of course it should be!” I exclaimed. “Argot is unpredictable, undefinable. You can only speculate when it comes to argot. It has no definitive form, nothing that can be tracked. It can barely be documented. It changes to be what it needs to be in order to serve whatever purpose it needs. Blink, and it changes. Who can say who changes it? It’s alive, as you’ve said; it changes itself in all probability. And the most insidious part? It’s unnoticeable. It slips past you without your noticing, and you intermingle with it; you never even know that it has become a part of your life. But maybe you’ll wake up and see it there, and then maybe you’ll try to make sense of it . . . but by then—too late!—it’s gone, leaving as its remnants a few fleeting whispers, and you sit wondering how quickly your life has changed, and you wonder if it was for the best or the worst.”

I sat back. A second later, my words finally struck me, and I felt a supercilious smile coming to my face in response to the sentry’s bemused stare.

“You know what?” I said after a moment’s silence. “Maybe I’ll start researching argot when I have the time.”

“To me,” the sentry replied, with a hearty laugh, “profanity would be the only thing worth researching! Also,” he continued, his brow raised cheekily, “do you not understand the amount of horrible power you would have? Think about it! Walk up and down the hallways of your university screaming swear words at the top of your lungs. If anypony gets outraged or indignant—who could complain? After all, you’re carrying out very important research!”

“It would certainly stir up some much-needed attention, something any researcher would be fain to receive.”

“What are you researching now?”

“Various things,” I said. “Right now, the frequency of defective verbs in inflected languages—”

“Wait,” he interrupted, “what kind of verbs now?”

“Defective verbs.”

“Which are?”

“Verbs that lack certain tenses, numbers, persons, moods, or voices.”

The sentry blinked.

“Such verbs are defective,” I reiterated.

There was a long pause. “Why?” he said.

How stressed this language is, and how much diversity of emotion can be expressed completely due to intonation alone! One sentence can carry a completely different meaning as another sentence when certain syllables are stressed in a different way, though both sentences may use the exact same words in precisely the same order. In this case, the sentry spoke this why with a very interesting intonation, one I couldn’t place immediately. It didn’t seem as though he were asking me for the reason—but more as though he were asking for the reason why there would ever be a reason.

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. My first hypothesis was that they’re defective because—”

“Well, then,” interrupted the sentry, running a hoof through his mane, “if they’re defective, why don’t you fix them?”

At this, I performed a certain gesture. To describe it, had I not this power, I would have had to use a great deal of words, perhaps an entire paragraph, to describe the motion, the feeling, the internal anxiety and frustration, the facial expression, the particular unintelligible vocalization that accompanied it, etc.

But as soon as I assumed this gesture, the word popped into my mind. Not any word in my mother tongue—for no such word exists, to my knowledge, as we have no need to have a word for an action we do not perform under such circumstances—but the word I had just heard the sentry use earlier. It fit the context, the mood, the feeling, and I knew that this word described the gesture entirely. And it had just come to me. I hadn’t needed to dwell upon it, to link it with any other concepts, to think about how it applied, nor had I to perform the mental check to make sure that it fit this situation. When I made this movement, the word describing it instantly popped into my mind from its freshly lubricated recess in my subconsciousness.

And I can say that I, without a second’s doubt, performed the action the word that I had just heard for the first time barely five minutes before described, an action peculiar to this race, these ponies, of which I was now one, a new word from a dialect that I then knew I could become fluent in without effort, the word that completely described my gesture and the feelings that accompanied it after the sentry asked his naive question:

I facehoofed.

Comments

[Reese]

Brilliant. :D

[TheStratovarian]

A perfect end to this little chapter. And the clock was right that day, albeit on a far different time than expected.

[Forderz]

I adore this story.

[Puzzle Reader]

...yeah, it WOULD take a while to explain what exactly "facepalm" (or "-hoof") means, and what connotational values it carries!

[SomeRandomMinion]

That punchline...