‘In Life’s Name, And For Life’s Sake,I Say That I Will Use The Art For Nothing But The Service

PART TWO AT LAST

okay y’all, you can click through the image on a blog, or click here to find my powerpoint on google drive. feel free to look through it, talk to me about it, talk to each other about it, whatever.

i have not edited this in the slightest, so take it all with a grain of salt. do have a look at the “notes” field for most of the slides; that’s where i wrote out (in varying degrees of detail/clarity) my thoughts on the subject at hand, but YMMV with that.

all that said please do credit me if you use this stuff for anything. and if you find any of my sources in the presentation lacking in citations, let me know!

feel free to join in the conversations over on slack (link is for signup, then find the #linguistics channel), or on tumblr! do also keep this post and other posts that involve speculation with respect to the Speech tagged with #not you DD, so that everybody’s butts are covered on that front.

thanks, cousins!

Is there an alphabet or lexicon of the human version of The Speech? And if so, where can I find it?

No, there's not.

(And as I've been asked about this before, I'm just going to paste the answer in here—since though the original post is buried in the depths of Tumblr somewhere, I do have my saved draft.)

Per these, which came in very close to each other:

@melbetweenstars

This is something I’ve always wondered but never realized I could actually ask about until I read through that long meta response. (go me.) How much of the Speech do you have fleshed out? Do you create it as you go on more of a need-to-know basis, or do you have vocabulary and grammar structures ready to go? Basically I’d be really interested to hear any Speech-related meta if you have the chance because fictional languages are hella cool!

and:

@sansa–clegane

I just read your post on dark wizards and field terminologies, and am totally loving the Speech translations you provided! Now I’m wondering, though, how much of the language you actually have mapped out or established? I’m very curious as to what, for example, the standard “I - you - he/she/it/etc. - we - you plural - they” conjugation endings would be– or if there even are any in a language as complex as the Speech. I’M JUST REALLY INTERESTED IN FANTASY LINGUISTICS AAAHH

Linguistics is a big deal for me too, as people who read my stuff will have guessed. And needless to say, the Speech is on my mind a lot (along with other “magical languages” and their history/histories).

So let’s take a moment to first to make it clear what the Speech is not. It’s not what’s sometimes referred to as an Adamic language  (whether you take the meaning that God used it to talk to Adam, or that Adam invented it to name things.) It’s also nothing whatsoever to do with Enochian. It’s not an occultic language, or anything invented by human beings.

The basic concept is that the Speech is the language, or the very large body of descriptors, used to create the universe (and very likely others, but let’s leave that to one side for the moment). Such words are also assumed, having been used in the building of the universe, to be able to control the bits they’ve built. Every word, therefore, when used ought ideally to sound as if it contains some tremendous power. 

Writing something like that every time the Speech is used, even for a much better writer than I am, would be very, very hard.

(We need a cut here. Under the cut: Ursula Le Guin, C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, J. K. Rowling, and others. ...Also a fair number of beetles. And a bear.)

It’s worth mentioning as a matter of information that I met the concept of secret / divine magical languages in Le Guin’s Earthsea long before I ran into it in C. S. Lewis. (I came pretty late to Lewis’s non-Narnian work.) Yet here Lewis, as more than occasionally before, is my master, having been over this ground right back in the mid-1940s.

There’s a point in the final novel of the so-called “Planetary Trilogy”, that big fat (now endlessly problematic but still fun-in-the-right-moods) book That Hideous Strength, where Elwin Ransom—philologist, unwilling visitor to Mars and Venus, unnerved conscript into the wars in Heaven, and Lewis’s take on both the Pendragon and the wounded Fisher King—is instructing his friend and co-linguistics scholar Dimble on how to behave in a meeting with the newly awakened, and potentially quite dangerous, Merlin Ambrosius. (The POV in this passage is that of a lady named Jane who's just recently fallen into company with the group supporting Ransom.)

“You understand, Dimble? Your revolver in your hand, a prayer on your lips, your mind fixed on Maleldil [just think “Christ” for the moment: surprise surprise, that’s the parellel Lewis is using here]. Then, if he stands, conjure him.” “What shall I say in the Great Tongue?” “Say that you come in the name of God and all angels and in the power of the planets from one who sits today in the seat of the Pendragon, and command him to come with you. Say it now.” And Dimble, who had been sitting with his face drawn, and rather white, between the white faces of the two women, and his eyes on the table, raised his head, and great syllables of words that sounded like castles came out of his mouth. Jane felt her heart leap and quiver at them. Everything else in the room, seemed to have become intensely quiet: even the bird, and the bear***, and the cat, were still, staring at the speaker. The voice did not sound like Dimble’s own: it was as if the words spoke themselves through him from some strong place at a distance—or as if they were not words at all but present operations of God, the planets, and the Pendragon. For this was the language spoken before the Fall and beyond the Moon, and the meanings were not given to the syllables by chance, or skill, or long tradition, but truly inherent in them as the shape of the great Sun is inherent in the little waterdrop. This was Language herself, as she first sprang at Maleldil’s bidding out of the molten quicksilver of the star called Mercury on Earth, but Viritrilbia in Deep Heaven.

Now if that’s not like being hit over the head with a hammer, I don’t know what is.* That moment has been before the eyes-of-my-mind for a long time as I’ve worked with the Speech.

Note, however, that Lewis does a very wise thing here. He doesn’t actually spell out any of the words out for you. Because in the reader’s mind, there’s always the six-year-old saying, “Go on, say the word: see how it sounds, see what happens…!” And when you recite the magic spell, it doesn’t work. The words come out sounding, well, like any others. And maybe not your interior six-year-old, but your interior twelve- or fifteen-year-old—the ego-state that’s about keeping you from getting hurt or looking stupid in front of other people who aren’t privy to or supportive of your dreams—says, “See, it was just another word, just a bunch of nonsense. You got fooled. Dummy!” No wise writer, I think, willingly sets their readership up for such easy and constant disappointment. It's tough enough to weave, and hold in place, the spell that is prose. Handing the audience a potential spellbreaker, over and over again, is folly. 

And by rights the Speech ought to be like Lewis’s example above. If in reality you were to hear the words used to restructure matter or undo gravity, they ought to shake the air in your chest like a Saturn V launch, they should raise the hair on the back of your neck to hear them used; they should freak you out. But a long string of invented syllables isn’t going to do that. I’m stuck with using English to produce even the echo of such a result.

Which means I have to go Lewis’s route… mostly. Here and there I’ll add in a Speech-sourced word or phrase when it supports the narrative or makes it easier for characters to talk about what’s going on—as, when working with wizardry, you do sometimes have to call in precisionist-level language for words that have no casual English cognates: just as you would if you were working in particle physics or organic chemistry at the molecular level. But that’s all I’m going to do… because if you do too much linguistic work in this regard, you constantly run the risk of your readers being distracted from the real business at hand, which is the interactions between/among the characters.

The tech inherent to a work of fantastic fiction is always an issue in this regard. Ideally L. Sprague de Camp’s very useful definition of science fiction, tweaked here for fantasy, ought to be a guideline: “A fantasy story is a human story with a human problem and a human solution that could never have happened without its fantastic content.” Yet inside the definition, there’s still a lot of ways to go wrong. Too much merely human stuff, and a work of fantasy turns into a soap with some casual magical gimmickry—all too often these days labeled as “magic realism”, when it’s not publisher code for “We’d call this fantasy if we had the nerve and we didn’t think it was going to tag us as ‘genre’ and keep us off the best-seller lists”. Too little human-problem-and-human-solution, and it turns into a modern version of what James Blish (God rest him), when writing as the gently merciless science fiction critic William Atheling Jr., used to call “The 'Greater New York and New Jersey Municipal Zeppelin Gas Works’ school of speculative fiction”, where you tour your readership through the Wonderfulness Of Your Tech (magical or otherwise) until they expire of boredom while waiting for someone to fucking do something.

You have to find a centerline between the extremes—indeed pretty much a tightrope—and walk it with some care. I’d guess that J. K. Rowling ran into the need for this balancing act; while never having read the Potter books, I nonetheless get a sense that you get the occasional Wingardium leviosa without also being burdened with long strings of magical Latin. (Though I confess that the answer to the question “Where does the magic come from? And what’s it for?” as it applies to her universe could be of some interest. I have no idea whether this ever gets explicitly handled.**) 

Anyway, it’d be way too easy for the YW books to become long discourses on the Speech and its use. This aspect of the “tech”, I think, gets more than enough time onstage. Having once established that words are a tool, indeed the tool for a wizard, the ur-Tool, making every spell they build a resonance between what they do and the initial/ongoing work of Creation—my business is to stay focused on the challenge of driving plot forward by interactions between human beings (and all kinds of others) who have conflicting agendas.

…So much for the tl;dr. I do have some very basic grammatical structures tucked away, but they’re not in any fit state for other people to look at. The Speech, I think, is really best treated as an ongoing mystery that unfolds a little at a time, as required, and leaves everybody wanting more.

HTH!

*It also leads into one of numerous affectionate nods in this book toward Tolkien, as philologist, fellow novelist, and Lewis’s good friend. It's no accident that when Ransom meets up with Merlin himself, a little later in the narrative, the question of this language—the proper name of the Great Tongue is “Old Solar"—comes up again. When discussing what language they’ll speak with each other during their upcoming negotiations [they apparently start out in a rather beat-up and denatured medieval Latin], Ransom says to Merlin about the language he’d prefer to be working in, "It has been long since it was heard. Not even in Numinor was it heard in the streets.”

The Stranger gave no start … but he spoke with a new interest. “Your masters let you play with dangerous toys,” he said. “Tell me, slave, what is Numinor?” “The true West,” said Ransom. “Well,” said the other.

Yeah, “well.” Better scholars than I have dealt with the relationship between these two, as scholars and writers and friends, so enough of that for the moment. But it’s very sweet to see Lewis do something in his books that I’ve done with mine.

**It’s always possible, of course, that in the HP universe this issue is a surd: like asking “where physics comes from”. (Well, not a surd precisely, if your spiritual life tends a certain way. Mine tends toward “Whoever or whatever made the universe, that’s who made physics. And they must really like it, because they made a metric shit ton of it!” (This answer also works for beetles, though that's a slightly different issue.) :)

But if there’s a most-fundamental difference between my wizardly universe and Rowling’s, it might be best revealed in the third question that came up for me directly after “What if there was a user’s manual for human beings/the world/the universe?” and “If there was, where would it have come from?”: specifically, “And why?”

***There's a bear in the Pendragon's kitchen. Thoth only knows what initially brought that on for Lewis, but it's a character insertion that pays off later, so (shrug) wtf.

The city breathing, burning, living the life they had preserved. Ten million lives and more. If something should happen to all that life- how terrible! Nita gulped for control as she remembered Fred’s word of just this morning, an eternity ago. And this was what being a wizard was about. Keeping terrible things from happening, even when it hurts. Not just power, or control of what ordinary people couldn’t control, or delight in being able to make strange things happen. Those were the side effects- not the reason, the purpose.

you have to pretend to be a wizard sometimes, for your health. the obvious method is d&d, but you can also open the dishwasher on cold mornings and raise your arms dramatically as you’re enveloped in the steam, or you can find a really good stick to walk around in the woods with, or you can run a bizarrely dedicated rp blog on tumblr. but it’s an important component of human well being to occasionally pretend to be a wizard.

My boyfriend would like to know what a Godiva chocolate bar would run on the galactic market? I wasn't sure, given what you had said about Hershey bars, since I don't have a frame of reference.

Well, obviously there’s a lot of room for subjectivity about this. Some collectors (Galactic or otherwise) will feel differently. But generally speaking, I suspect the collectors’ opinions will roughly match mine.

Ranking gets complicated because old chocolate companies and brands keep getting bought by bigger companies / conglomerates, and the brands and the quality of their chocolate tend to suffer as a result. By and large, though, the best chocolate tends to be made by companies that do so-called “bean-to-bar” production. The longer the history of this, the better. In general, artisanal chocolate, especially single estate/single bean chocolate, and organic and free-trade chocolates, will also be preferred by the discerning intergalactic collector.

Ranking chocolate from worst to best: (and yes, for those who’re wondering, I’ve eaten all of these, normally on their home turf):

North American chocolate: Almost routinely no better than poor-to-middlin’ quality: the bigger the producer, routinely, the worse, as they keep trying to do it cheaply and good chocolate can’t be done cheaply. It’s too energy-intensive, especially as regards the time and energy required in the conching process that’s absolutely key in giving merely okay chocolate a chance to become great. Hershey’s is the worst of the lot because they’re purposely catering to that spoiled-milk taste that’s become traditional for them. …The exceptions to the poor-to-meh quality rule are invariably smaller producers like Ghirardelli. Meanwhile it should probably be no surprise that when the Lexington Avenue Local worldgate was resited following the refurbishment of Grand Central Terminal, it wound up behind Li-Lac Chocolate’s satellite branch in the food hall. One might suspect Carmela’s straightforward hand in this.

European-based chocolate generally: Significantly better. …Subdividing into:

British Isles chocolate: Pretty good most of the time. Many small classic brands (Fry’s, Rowntree) were subsumed into bigger British chocolate companies over time, with only slow degradation of general quality. Cadburys is probably at the top of the heap, despite what’s happened to the Creme Egg over the years. (mutter)  …And naturally I would be remiss in not mentioning, on the Irish side, Lir, Lily O’Brien’s, and Butlers. (When we go to visit friends in Switzerland, we bring them Lir.) Additionally, there are people who are vocal about their claims that Irish Cadburys is better than British Cadburys, due to local/regional differences in the mix. Myself, I refuse to get mixed up in local chocosectarian stuff. Life’s too short.

Italian and French chocolate: Perugina, Valrhona (as in “I’d rather be in Valrhona than Valhalla”), Callebaut, Agostoni, Amedei, and Bernachon stand out. There are many more smaller makers in the region worth looking out for: check this list for some.

Belgian chocolate: Almost always really good, even at the mass-produced end (Guylian); sometimes terrific (Leonidas) or more than terrific (Neuhaus, Galler, Dumon). This is where Godiva fits in. (I first had it when its initial New York store opened in 1972: it was far better then than it is now. Then again, having been owned by Campbell’s Soup can’t have been good for them.)

Swiss chocolate: Probably the best: certainly routinely seen as such (and collectors will be aware of the implications of this). Again, the smaller the producer the better. The great/old houses like Lindt and Sprüngli are being given a run for their money by newer competitors like Teuscher and Läderach (attn @petermorwood: Stengli!!).

…I’ll complete this later as I just splashed some tea on my keyboard and I seem to have a membrane problem. (sigh)

(Resuming after prying off all the keycaps and cleaning out what could have been the start of a small tool-using civilization if it was let go much longer:)

So anyway, we were attempting to tease out how Godiva would do on the Galactic chocolate collectors’ market.

It’s all so relative. But there are a number of different factors in play, so better to take them one by one.

(a) Provenance / authenticity. Real Chocolate From Earth (SM*) still has to be specified, these days, in some parts of the Galaxy: as with any unique collectible, there are always counterfeits out there. But none of them work perfectly, not even those produced by atom-by-atom matter duplication. There’s just something about genuine Earth-grown cocoa beans that cannot be duplicated. (If we pulled Dr. McCoy into this discussion he’d simply snort and say, “It’s soul. Why d’y’think I hate that damn transporter so much?”) And the bad fakes…  (shudder) Well. You know the correlation between flavors (and everything else) of chocolate versus carob? The comparison between real chocolate and bad fake chocolate is like that. But generally worse.

(b) Reputation and/or scarcity on planet of origin. Godiva is not hard to find, but its lower-end-of-high-midrange reputation would affect the going price. Many artisanals or single-estates would bring in much, much more on the collectors’ market. But Godiva still would not be cheap.

© Freshness and state of packaging. Fresh and perfectly packaged Godiva obtained before the first of the large corporate acquisitions via timeslide would bring a way higher price than the stuff available on the high street right now.

(d) The present state of cocoa futures. Believe me when I tell you that none of Earth’s financial markets are so closely scrutinized off-planet as the cocoa futures market. A serious ripple in the world’s cocoa production figures can send shockwaves through the collectibles and personal-chemical-enhancements markets galaxy wide (in the latter case, for those species who use chocolate as an aphrodisiac, mood-altering drug or hallucinogen). If anything was going to bring on the classic aliens-arrive-from-space-to-save-Earth-from-itself scenario, it would be news that we had fucked up our climate so totally that the cocoa bean was going to die out. The intervention wouldn’t happen because of any particular altruism, oh dear me no… but because with the death of Earth’s cocoa, many extremely currency-sensitive aspects of the Galactic economy would take a hit that would make the Earth’s recent nearly-worldwide-bank meltdown look like an insolvency involving a kid’s lemonade stand. 

Anyway, the state of the market pushes the day to day price of collectible chocolate up and down in unpredictable but interesting ways, and the smart investor keeps its ears (or legs or abdomen or whatever it listens with) to the ground to stay informed about what’s going on in Earth’s so-called “soft commodities” markets.

(e) Preparation. How much actual chocolate is in the confectionery and how has it been prepared? Plain solid chocolate is always preferable for collectors’ purposes. (The two-pound solid chocolate ingots that Kron Chocolatier in Manhattan used to sell back in the day would have been seen as very choice.) Dark chocolate is always preferable to milk: the milk is seen as an adulteration, as 18K gold is seen as inferior to 24K by precious-metal collectors. Some additives, if psychoactive or otherwise seen as valuable on their own, are viewed as positive (see the chocolate business with Nita and Kit at the Crossings here.)

(f) Demand. Is the product hot right now? Has some buzz about it in the collectors’ networks kicked the price up for some reason? 

…And there are other factors, but you get the general idea. So if you were offering a Godiva bar on the open market, say one of these, depending on where you planned to do your shopping afterwards you could probably exchange it for enough currency in one of the smaller spacefaring cultures that’s chocolate-using in one of the valuable ways (meaning as a recreational chemical) to get yourself a small private island on some planet where the climate suited you. Or a nice little space yacht. (Nothing really huge. After all, you need to pay for crew services too, and berthing, and… Never mind.)

Hope this helps. :)

*Service mark is the property of Gaia Protectorate CRLLC: for more information see here.

the trees you grew up with have not forgotten you. their branches still whisper your name in the breeze and their roots remember the paths your feet once traced through their shade.

Twice a year, you may experience some degree of television interference due to sun outages.

RCN I have news for you, if the sun goes out I am not going to be worried about missing Wheel of Fortune.

(Sun Outages are actually when the sun moves directly behind a TV satellite and interferes with its signal, which makes it sound like the sun is photobombing my TV, but “sun outages” just made me lol.)

BTW, I finally did this

A number of people have suggested it over the last while... and finally I thought "WTF, why not?"

Ko-fi

Support Diane Duane on Ko-fi! ❤️. ko-fi.com/dianeduane

Support Diane Duane On Ko-fi. Ko-fi lets you support the people and causes you love with small donations

So if folks want to contribute to what's going on around here without buying ebooks, here's a way! ...And if you're in the UK and have been feeling annoyed by not being able to assist in that way, well, here's an option for you, as Ko-Fi doesn't care about Brexit in the slightest.

(And thanking all of you in advance, for those of you who choose to support.)

...This setup isn't particularly customized as yet. I really need to get a page banner sorted out, and do some other stuff. Give me a week or so and it'll probably have wizards and dragons all over it. :)

...Anyway, thanks again to those who suggested this.

So I recently got ebooks of the new revised versions of the Young Wizards series by Diane Duane because I loved the originals so much growing up and I wanted to reread them and see the changes (especially A Wizard Alone) and I was terribly unhappy to discover that the revised editions aren’t available in print in the US probably won’t be for years. But I’ve always wanted to learn book binding, so I’m just going to print out the ebook and attempt to make my own print copy. To that end I spent all day today rapturously fantasizing about end papers and book jackets. This started as an attempt at designing my own endpapers, but it may be a bit much for that actually…

Started this blog because everyone needs a place to dump their space porn and YW fandom stuff....right?