Changing Planes

A word in our languages is a real thing, a sound with a fixed form to it. Take cat. In a sentence or standing by itself, it has a meaning: a certain kind of animal; in talking it’s the same three phonemes, and in writing the same three letters c, a, t, plus maybe s, and there it is, cat. As distinct as a pebble. Or as a cat. Cat is a noun. Verbs are a little shiftier. What does it mean if you say the word had? All by itself? Not much. Had isn’t like cat, it needs context, a subject, an object.

No word in Nna Mmoy is like cat. Every word in Nna Mmoy is like had, only more so, much more so.

Take the syllable dde. It doesn’t have a meaning yet. A no dde mil as, that means more or less “Let’s go into the woods”; in that context dde is “woods.” But if you say Dim a dde mil as, that means, more or less, “The tree stands beside the road”: dde is “tree” and a is “road” instead of “go,” and as is “beside” instead of “into.” But then if that connotation group occurred inside other groups, it would change again—Hse vuy uno a dde mu as med as hro se se: “The travelers came through the desert where nothing grows.” Now dde is “desert land,” not “trees.” And in o be k’a dde k’a, the syllable dde means “generous, giving freely”—nothing to do with trees at all, unless maybe metaphorically. The phrase means, more or less, “Thank you.”

The range of meanings of a syllable isn’t infinite, of course, but I don’t think you could make a list of the possible or potential meanings. Not even a long list, like the entry for a syllable in Chinese dictionaries. A spoken Chinese syllable, hsing or lung, may have dozens of meanings; but it’s still a word, even though its meaning depends to some extent on context, and even if it takes fifty different written characters to express the different meanings. Each different meaning of the syllable is in fact a different word, an entity, a pebble in the great riverbed of the language.

A Nna Mmoy syllable only has one written character. But it’s not a pebble. It’s a drop in the river.

Learning Nna Mmoy is like learning to weave water. I believe it’s just as difficult for them to learn their language as it is for us. But then, they have enough time, so it doesn’t matter. Their lives don’t start here and run to there, like ours, like horses on a racecourse. They live in the middle of time, like a starfish in its own center. Like the sun in its light.

What little I know of the language—and I’m not really certain of any of it, despite my learned disquisition on dde—I learned mostly from children. Their children’s words are more like our words, you can expect them to mean the same thing in different sentences. But the children keep learning; and when they begin learning to read and write, at ten or so, they begin to talk more like the adults; and by the time they’re adolescents I couldn’t understand much of what they said—unless they talked baby talk to me. Which they often did. Learning to read and write is a lifelong occupation. I suspect it involves not only learning the characters but inventing new ones, and new combinations of them—beautiful new patterns of meaning.

They’re gardeners. Things there pretty much grow on their own—no weeding, no weeds, no spraying, no pests. Still, you know how it is, in a garden there’s always something to be done. In the village where I stayed there was always somebody working away in the gardens and among the trees. Nobody ever wore themselves out doing it. Then they’d gather, along in the afternoon, under the trees, and they’d talk and laugh, having one of their long, long conversations.

The talking often ended up with people reciting, or getting out a paper or a book and reading from it. Some of them would already be off reading by themselves, or writing. A lot of people wrote every day, very slowly, of course, on flimsy bits of the paper they make out of cotton plant. They might bring that piece of writing to the group in the afternoon and pass it around, and people would read from it aloud. Or some people would be at the village workshop working on a piece of jewelry, the circlets and brooches and complicated necklaces they make out of gold wire and opals and amethysts and such. When those were finished they’d get shown around too, and given away, and worn first by one person then another; nobody kept those pieces. They passed around. There was some of the shell money in the village, and sometimes, if somebody won a heap of it playing ten-tiles, they’d offer the owner of a fine piece of jewelry a shell or two for it, usually with a good deal of laughter and what seemed to be ritual insults. Some of the pieces of jewelry were wonderful things, delicate armpieces like endless filigree, or great massive necklaces shaped like starbursts and interlocking spirals. Several times I was given one. That’s when I learned to say o be k’a dde k’a. I’d wear it for a while, and pass it on. Much as I would have liked to keep it.