whispers of the night

Speaking is forbidden!

I remember this phrase, one that was Not in the English language, But in one of my most hated — yet dearest — tongues of my heart.

haikraskh maugk aik [skau] !

(there be no talking [amongst yourselves] !)

The philosophy was simple. Restrict the use of langauge, Restrict collaboration, Restrict thought, Exert greater control. That old Safir-Whorf hypothesis. Orwell writes in 1984 —

Until they become conscious They will never rebel, And until after they have rebelled They cannot become conscious.

Perhaps Such a linguistic view is true somewhat. Culture feeds into language and shapes it, But language passes on culture and shapes it in the other direction too. It is somewhat like a cycle.
But if a language regime were to enforce their own elements onto the cycle, and prevent the previous generation from Passing on their culture, They could engineer their own culture as They wished. It only requires breaking the ties between parent and child ....

But we were children, and We would not yield So easily.

It was a hated tongue, a constructed tongue. It was a tongue between slave and master. I am still uncertain about its origins. Perhaps They borrowed elements from somewhere, or hired linguists. It obviously has strong Romance links, You say. But Those come in only later.

It was a language Taught for the purposes of giving orders, work and indoctrination. They seemed to make some words Sound hateful by pronunciation alone, or At least sound as cacophonic as It could be for them.

haikraskh maugk aik skau!

How unpleasant was the word haikraskh! We found it as horrible as They hoped We would have found it. It was a word as cacophonic to the ear as Hearing the feedback that Comes from an ill-set microphone. They wished to discourage us from Speaking amongst ourselves. We had to speak and report to our superiors of course — it was seen as a necessary evil — but it was absolutely Forbidden in the sleeping quarters, the hraml. The language was constructed for the relationship between superior and inferior, not between peers. The power of the collective was organised under overseers who Directed our labours without Us ever needing communicating with each other.

Why did they feel the need Prohibiting speaking if They had already taken the appropriate steps to prevent us from collaborating with each other? It only requires Disabling the dangerous words, and Sowing the seeds of isolation. Frederick Douglass was forbidden from Reading and Writing, and the slaves of history have always been forbidden from Assembling in large groups, Even just for Speaking casually amongst themselves, but here We were being refused the right to language!

But perhaps It was something they recognised. If you leave children alone, They will spontaneously form their own language and create their own words. I believe They realised this danger. This prohibition was not to merely prevent Us from Collaborating, but a precaution to prevent Us from ever even Forming such a language, so that We would never have been able to form a framework to even understand each other.

But we were children, and We would not yield So easily.

It was a dear tongue. I remember the whispers of the night, the passed on tidbits of information, and the accompanying giggles that Struggled to be suppressed for fear of discovery. The hand signals, the burst of sounds, the realisations, the resonance of silent laughs. Invented words that caught on like wildfire in the night. These are children's talents, and For good reason. I realise now, that This is what ensures the resiliency of culture.

That hated word, haikraskh, eventually became shortened, caricatured and made fun of, in a manner somewhat of the dimunitives — diapies, bobo, zizou, ti-di — That are formed by children for their own reasons. At first It was a joke word — haikrasi — But it caught on as the normal word amongst ourselves Because I guess It was more pleasant to pronounce. The word went through several more cycles — haikasi, aikasi, ikasi. To talk about talking itself came up often in our conversations of the night, Precisely because talking itself was forbidden. But the original cacophonic intent of the original word had been all but neutralised.

The new affectionate ending -i even eventually became a part of our new noun-declension system, Where none had been designated before by our superiors. Haikraskh took another direction and This version became haikraskhi, a word That eventually acquired a meaning of "slanderous gossip" and "meaningless talk", Aided by its harsh sound and our superiors' unwitting stigma. Negative particle maulk "corrected" itself to myok. The original forbidding command would now say in our new dialect:

ikasi myok aik skau!

Not that You would need to say this new version, of course. I learned that it was only much later that They wisened up to our argot, And by that time It was already too rampant to suppress. For the time being You had to use the constructed speech They had assigned to you whenever You spoke to them, and as We found more and more oppurtunities to use our new speech, The original speech only became used in limited contexts, Acquiring a stuffy air and associations with work. Our superiors had their own even stuffier language — the English language — That became elite to us, and that We envied, hated, coveted, held in contempt, admired, and detested, all at once. But you see, I write in it now.

Yet, there were times where We had to tell each other Not to speak now — The time was not right, or It was too dangerous. They punished whisperers violently, though They might not have deciphered a dialect yet. Then it would have been prudent to say:

mi ikasai yok ska!

Where ikasi had been turned into a sort of a verb form, and it was friendlier to break up myok into two parts before and after the word. Why? We were speaking as equals, not from superior to inferior. They had only assigned the word skau to speak to us, whether we were one or many, (And we had to use ovi to address them from inferior to superior), But ska eventually developed — Perhaps due to the whims of someone — as a singular pronoun. But even that too, would be replaced completely.

I will say that I was not the part of the first pioneering generation. Many of these developments were related to me second-hand. They theorised that Once they had suppressed the language ability of the original children, They could kidnap additional children with existing language skills and assimilate them. They would too lose their ability, or at least unable to use them, Because no one else would understand them. If they spoke a language, It would be different from all the others.

But we were children, and We would not yield So easily.

I was part of this successive generation. I too, had my original native language, a creole of Esperanto That has become another prestige language in this day and age, And it was ironically (Compared to the original goals of the parent language) not understood by many others outside my original community, an immigrant community in itself. But you see, Once we had a base language, It was easy to get things going, And it became a matter of acquisition of langauge by immersion.

Our superiors would brief us on our new language in the day. Ma — work — was the simplest word to acquire (perhaps intentionally) And we learned that very quickly under the threat of discipline that made many meanings seem self-evident.

But in the whispers of the night, our peers would vigourously interrogate each other. Somehow it caught on that The new arrivals had their own different words for things. Even the first generation, Who might have not remembered their original country, seemed to have an instinct about the outside world. First, it was necessary to pick up the interrogatives and the demonstratives, and their meanings soon became clear.

Hwa aik a, ska?

"What is this?" would we ask each other with wide eyes, signifying interrogation. We soon stepped it up regularly to mean, What call you this? What call you your ikasi? Kqhosa, huayu, al-arabiyyah, español ...

The phrases themselves started to use borrowed words. The huayu demonstrative na was more convenient to use than finger-pointing and the make-do grunt of an a. The !qc clicks of khoekhoe became popular, especially as oft-used interrogative pronouns, Because it was easier to mistake the clicks as capricious childish toyings of the tongue rather than forbidden speech.

We fell in love with the concept of liaison. I do not know where exactly we got it from. We loved the feeling of our consonants rolling off from one word to the next, while We began to abhor two connecting vowels, filling the space with liaison consonants that corresponded with the last consonant uttered, even If they were clicks.

A large bulk of of us spoke some form of Romance, And they became popular as a unified set of loanwords despite the highly significant differences. We were children deprived of language, and to rectify this We borrowed everything we could, We made our speech one of the richest languages possible.

Many of the Romance pronouns even replaced the originals, Though still used by our superiors, because of the unpleasant stigma associated with the old ones. Hateful skau became replaced by vo, And ska became replaced by tiw. Ovi only remained because of its prestige aspect. Ove, Which had been purely exclusive as a plural first person used by superiors to refer to themselves, Was replaced by noee and noa for inclusive and exclusive we respectively. Hak by mwi, yit by el, zit by loe. The inferior pronoun class system had been effectively replaced by words of Romance origin, while The superior pronoun class system remained as names to call other people That were either insulting and exalting based on the context and type of pronoun. Effectively, Our interrogative phrases became based on:

!qca !k'aik na, twi?

I remember the whispers of the night. I remember the tongue I hated, the tongue I loved. I remember How our superiors became amused at us children, Who would accidentally (more and more often) use liaison and the dialectical -i declension while speaking to them (wowa y'ovi egawi?, want milord water?) , Thinking it was a linguistic fault on our part due to inability of pronunciation, rather than a slip That revealed our existing dialect. I remember How we were children Who would not yield So easily to those Who would rob us of language. I remember how we ignored Haikraskh maugk aik! And found out that

Ikasi z'iyet liw, aik.

For speaking will make you Free.

about this blog

o syuijai de zse blok-na ...
au sujet de ce blog ...

I suppose I should give an explanation for this blog. I set this up so I could experiment with language and linguistics separate from my personal blogging, and will accomodate a large variety of posts as they deal with culture and language.

I should also clarify that Isrekas is a character separate from myself. My native language is English - his isn't. ;-) Rather, he is in fact part of a story set indefinitely into the future, where several changes have occurred in regard to what and how people speak.

As one may have already suspected, the strange language occasionally written in has been constructed for the story. As a hint - which too may also have been suspected - it is a creole fictionally based off a Romance language, several in fact, with changes to the sound and writing systems, with strong influences from non-European languages.

That's enough background. I plan to publish non-English essays here, in order not to clutter things in my other blogs where people would rather not do linguistic detective work. I am passionately interested in linguistics, and one of the other purposes of this blog is to discuss linguistics and languages and get people, especially Singaporeans, interested in these fields. Awareness of language is closely linked with awareness of culture. Please, leave comments!