Subjunctive

by Integral Archer

Chapter VIII: Jussive

If you were to ask me what the most memorable part of the whole endeavor leading up to the invasion was, if you were to ask what would bring me the most awe to talk about; if you were to ask what, in hindsight, was the most mysterious and perplexing part of that whole ordeal—the answer, threefold, would be the sentry who called himself Corporal Foil.

After that first day, he came to me asking for more instruction with that same inexhaustible thirst of a blank-minded student, the kind of student I’d always wanted to teach but had never the opportunity, such that his appearance was enough for me to halt every one of my thoughts of the moment, especially including those concerning the impending invasion, to teach him. To him, I taught; from me, he learned; but from that marvelous phenomenon in which a teacher learns more from a student, he taught me in his turn, checking my premises, proofing my lessons for clarity, resolving contradictions; and inadvertently, by his every mannerism, giving me more insight into his race. And by his teaching me, he learned to watch with a critical eye that which was taught to him, not to take words without thinking or questioning, no matter whom he might be receiving instruction from.

I depict a few such lectures in the proceeding pages; such was their uniqueness as to render them not merely pieces of instruction but also the unmistakable pivot stones in my relationship to him, to myself, to my species, to his, and to this land.

*

In my language, the jussive is the verbal mood used for issuing commands.

Strictly speaking, what we call the jussive “mood” is not a mood at all. Rather, it is what we should rightfully call the subjunctive in imperative contexts.

Of course, there would be some of my colleagues who would insist that it is a distinct mood due to the unique proclitics and enclitics that verbs of different conjugations take when used in this “jussive” sense; but the original subjunctive form is unmistakable, such that these aforementioned clitics are more often than not elided in text (especially in art), and almost never show up in spoken language.

One day, when the sentry asked yet again about the subjunctive, I could not help but lead the conversation to my native language, and then to this concept of the jussive. And as he sat there wide-eyed and enraptured, and as I explained the concept, it occurred to me, the superior, talking to him, the inferior, how even if I’d never seen his race nor had ever spoken to them, just by analyzing the differences in our languages I could infer as to the relationship of my race to theirs just by this difference: they, and their language married to the indicative, the workhorses, receiving and processing facts as though the speakers themselves were as mindless as any other natural force, the questioners presenting interrogatives to be answered with either a true or false in order to lead them to the next fact—contrasted with us and our language of the subjunctive, the commanders, who needed no authority to evaluate such questions, and instead issued their own power, what was or wasn’t being of the utmost irrelevance.

And what placed this title of superiors into our hooves? The fact that, to us, a thought and a command are literally indistinguishable.

This I explained to the sentry (albeit in not quite such specific terms as those above, lest I give myself away). “The consequence of this use of the subjunctive,” I went on, “is that our language does not have direct questions.”

When I was finished, he gasped, a deep, throaty sound, such that the ponies around gave us a few stares. It was familiar sound, but no less wonderful for it, since it was the sound of one reaching the end of a logical string and finding an elegant solution unifying all the dangling threads.

“No questions? So that’s why you don’t have a yes and no!” But his smile quickly faded. He put a hoof on his lips and tapped his teeth while looking at me quizzically. “Really?” he said at length. “You don’t have questions?”

I sighed. “I need to amend something I said. To say to you, as I did a moment ago, that my first language does not have direct questions would be misleading to you. I was speaking purely literally, and I’ve already said how literalism is how you reinforce the already solid walls of culture and language. I should have said: we use phrases and constructions that are functionally equivalent to asking questions, such that if I were translating them, I would indeed render them as questions, just as I would render literal subjunctive verbs into the indicative mood in a translation if such a rendering conveyed the same information, same intent, and same meaning as the original statement.”

The sentry frowned, placing his forehooves on the table between us. “That wasn’t helpful,” he growled. “Please just answer the question: does your first language have questions—yes or no?”

“Let me explain: literally speaking, if you mean a direct question as in the sense that you understand it, with an interrogative pronoun or with a subject-verb inversion, with a question mark at the end, and a rising intonation at the end in speech, the answer is no. But contextually speaking, the answer is yes, for we construct phrases to elicit the same information as you would in this language with a direct question.”

He shook his head. “Why do you now phrase your sentences so shrewdly, as though if you explained to me directly how your language worked, I wouldn’t understand it? I know you think I’m stupid, but there are some things that I’m able to infer on my own.”

He leaned closer to me. Though his bearing expressed exasperation, there was a hint of real anger deep within him, an anger that could have originated only in confusion. I didn’t know if he knew it himself, but I could feel it within me as palpable and present. It elicited in me a terror: the same terror as though he had seen through my physical facade.

“I’m going to ask you again,” he continued. “Does your first language have direct questions or does it not?”

“It does not.”

“So what do you use instead?”

“I don’t understand.”

He groaned. “Let me put this as clearly as I can: if you don’t have questions, how do you ask for something?”

“Why would I ever need to ask for something?”

“You did just now.”

“This is my second language. We’re talking about my first language.”

The sentry looked at me with wide eyes and with his mouth ajar. Rubbing his cheeks with his hooves, he began again: “Say, in your first language, somepony else has something you want, but that something is something that you do not have—in your native language, what would you say, literally speaking, to that somepony, with the objective of obtaining that which you want from that somepony but do not yourself have?”

“I would order that somepony to give it to me.”

That sentence severed his train of thought in two. We sat in silence for a long time, I watching him as he stared at the table, the ground, the sky, anywhere but my face, while he tapped his hoof on his chin and gritted his teeth. “How . . .” he once started to say, but he stopped himself after the first word and went back to his contemplative gestures. Once, he caught my glance, and I looked away just as quickly.

“What . . .” he stammered, with the same tone as the previous word, as though the word were the child of the previous thought, “what was your name?”

“Errenax.”

“No, I know that,” he said. “What does it mean? I’ve never heard anything like it before.”

“It’s the phonetic pronunciation of the transliteration of a noun phrase in my native language.”

“And what would that noun phrase mean?”

My face burned. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

The sentry brought his hoof down on the table as if it were a casual gesture of bemusement, but his strength, clearly unknown to him, made the motion and the ensuing sound of rattling cutlery appear menacing. “I don’t believe that.”

“It’s untranslatable.”

He leaned closer, and his eyes blazed with the fervor of a swinging torch held by one who has the intent to burn. “First you say it means nothing; then you say it’s untranslatable. The first one I don’t believe, for I don’t believe you’d be named after nothing, no matter what culture you’re from. As for the second one—I see the thinly veiled insult: you say that you can understand it while I can’t. Do you think I’m stupid?”

He was completely right. Worse yet, he was right more than he realized: I did think of him as a being of lesser intelligence. (A bias I’d had: as I’ve said before, the big, muscular, and virile became the hunters and the studs while the smaller became the artists and scientists. If he’d been a changeling, he’d have been the former.) But, not only that, I remembered how ardently in the past I’d pushed the notion that nothing was untranslatable, that there were just bad translators. And I’d just, in my haste, admitted, by my own premises, to be a bad translator.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m truly sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“You can apologize by telling me what your name is.”

“I can only tell you what it means literally.”

“So do it.”

“But you might not understand. It’d sound absurd to you.”

He sighed. “There you go, calling me stupid again. I probably am. But if I don’t understand after you tell me, why don’t you explain?”

I sighed. There was no way out of this. I could see his reaction coming, but I had no way to temper it. “It means . . .” I stammered, “it means . . . who might be august.”

The sentry nodded, but said nothing. For a few seconds, he stared at me with those vibrant eyes, inlaid in immovable granite features. Then, he started to shake, more and more intensely now; and as though there were an earthquake beneath his skin, his rock lips strained as they molded into a smile.

“Might . . . be?” he gasped.

Then, the stone broke, and he laughed with such fervor that every single pony who happened to be in earshot at the time came to look at this pony, this sentry, the symbol of power, authority, and security, steadfast in defense, inexorable in attack—they came to see him crumpling in laughter at the meek pegasus who looked at him helplessly.

I swallowed. “Or be he august,” I stammered. “Or could be august, or ought to be, or would be, or should. Pick any auxiliary.”

The sentry didn’t hear me, laughing too hard as he was. “I’m sorry!” he choked through his sputtering. “I’m sorry! I know, I know: ‘Their Majesties’ Royal Guard is a diverse, multicultural assortment of individuals, for it is representative of its country and its eclectic population’—but still! Might be?” And he continued to laugh.

He laughed as though his intention were to draw as much attention to us as possible. The attention we gained seemed to feed him, and he grew louder while I shrunk away, pulling my limbs close to my body and trying to deflect the stares. I felt bitterly envious of him: while I wanted nothing more than to pass unnoticed and steal love where I could, he openly invited and thrived on the love generously given by those who didn’t know him.

“But seriously!” he said, when the ponies around us tired of the noise and he was finally able to gain control of himself once again, albeit tentatively. “Might be? Why not is?”

I glared at him. “I was an infant when they named me.”

He snickered. “It seems to me that your parents didn’t have much faith in what you’d become. Don’t be too hard on yourself—we’ve got that much in common!”

“It has nothing to do with faith,” I said. “When I was an infant, they didn’t know what I was. They wanted me to be august; they hoped I would be—but they didn’t know. How could they? They could only wish. They named me thus.”

“Still,” said the sentry, “you’d think that parents wouldn’t want to sow doubt in the minds of their children at a young age.” He laughed again. “But that’s your culture. That’s fine. I’m just ignorant and uneducated.”

I could feel irony in that last sentence. There wasn’t much, and if I’d not been paying attention, I probably would’ve missed it; but it was there, slight but there, and none the less bitter for it. I looked at him, trying to see if it was deliberate. But his smile, from which a chuckle escaped every so often, betrayed nothing.

“Did your parents have a better philosophy of naming?” I asked.

“Foil,” he said. “It’s a type of sword, but not a heavy sword for brutish massacring in a livid rage; a foil is a slender precision weapon, quick but sharp, almost invisible but stinging nonetheless, which only the most adroit can wield to any effect.”

Or one who is used and disposed of to show the superiority of another, I didn’t say.

Comments

[TheStratovarian]

For all that is said. All that is done, there is one facet in here, that is perhaps the most enjoyable, that in a place where one is not viewing an aspect as truth or falsehood. One lacks a very crucial understanding. They have no concept of hubris. They may see it. They may see its effects, but the concept, none of them understand, when the nature of language is mutable.

[ferret]

Errenax truely is a mighty bee

[SpikeyWikey]

I think I get it. The name is a wish the parents make for the child. A dream for their child's future. It's not a declaration of the child's destiny, nor is it an expectation he must live up to.

I think the spirit of the meaning of Errenax's name could be translated as: "May this child grow up to be majestic."

[son_of_heaven176]

I know that someone mentioned this in the last chapter, but Foil's speech is at times too high-class for a high-school-dropout Guard (at least I remember him saying that he was a dropout.)

For example:

“Why do you now phrase your sentences so shrewdly, as though if you explained to me directly how your language worked, I wouldn’t understand it? I know you think I’m stupid, but there are some things that I’m able to infer on my own.”

Something more low-class would better fit:
"Why are you beating around the bush? Do you think that I won't be abel to understand if you just told me straight? I know you think that I'm stuped, but I can figure some things out!"

Other than that, I like this story so far, and especially Erranax's language lessons. You show quite a love for language and the correct type of mastery of your subject, i.e., the type that knows it well enough to explain it simply, in terms that even the uneducated can understand.