Changing Planes

THE “GARDEN UTOPIA” of the Nna Mmoy deservedly enjoys the reputation of being absolutely safe—“an ideal plane for children and elderly people.” The few visitors who come, including children and the aged, usually find it very dull and leave as soon as possible.

The scenery is all the same everywhere—hills, fields, park-lands, woods, villages: a fertile, pretty, seasonless monotony. Cultivated land and wilderness look exactly alike. The few species of plants are all useful, yielding food or wood or fabric. There is no animal life except bacteria, some creatures resembling jellyfish in the oceans, two species of useful insect, and the Nna Mmoy.

Their manners are pleasant, but nobody has yet succeeded in talking with them.

Though their monosyllabic language is melodious to the ear, the translatomat has so much trouble with it that it cannot be relied upon even for the simplest conversation.

A look at the written language may yield some light on the problem. Written Nna Mmoy is a syllabary: each of its several thousand characters represents a syllable. Each syllable is a word, but a word with no fixed, specific meaning, only a range of possible significances determined by the syllables that come before, after, or near it. A word in Nna Mmoy has no denotation, but is a nucleus of potential connotations which may be activated, or created, by its context. Thus it would be possible to make a dictionary of Nna Mmoy only if the number of possible sentences were finite.

Texts written in Nna Mmoy are not linear, either horizontally or vertically, but radial, budding out in all directions, like tree branches or growing crystals, from a first or central word which, once the text is complete, may well be neither the center nor the beginning of the statement. Literary texts carry this polydirectional complexity to such an extreme that they resemble mazes, roses, artichokes, sunflowers, fractal patterns.

Whatever language we speak, before we begin a sentence we have an almost infinite choice of words to use. A, The, They, Whereas, Having, Then, To, Bison, Ignorant, Since, Winnemucca, In, It, As … Any word of the immense vocabulary of English may begin an English sentence. As we speak or write the sentence, each word influences the choice of the next—its syntactical function as noun, verb, adjective, etc., its person and number if a pronoun, its tense and number as a verb, etc., etc. And as the sentence goes on, the choices narrow, until the last word may very likely be the only one we can use. (Though a phrase, not a sentence, this quotation nicely exemplifies the point: To be or not to—.)

It appears that in the language of the Nna Mmoy, not only the choice of word—noun or verb, tense, person, etc.—but the meaning of each word is continuously modified by all the words that precede or may follow it in the sentence (if in fact the Nna Mmoy speak in sentences). And so, after receiving only a few syllables, the translatomat begins to generate a flurry of possible alternate meanings which proliferate rapidly into such a thicket of syntactical and connotational possibilities that the machine overloads and shuts down.

Purported translations of the written texts are either meaningless or ridiculously various. For example, I have come upon four different translations of the same nine-character inscription: “All within this space are to be considered friends, as are all creatures under heaven.”

“If you don’t know what is inside, take care, for if you bring hatred in with you the roof will fall upon you.”

“On one side of every door is mystery. Caution is useless. Friendship and enmity sink to nothing under the gaze of eternity.”

“Enter boldly, stranger, and be welcome. Sit down now.” This inscription, the characters of which are written so as to form a shape like a comet with a radiant head, is often found on doors, box lids, and book covers.