Around midnight, the party had to ford a wide, shallow stream that flowed through a desert wadi. Always prepared, Ulgor slipped on sealed booties, crossing with dry feet. The other urrish rebels slogged alongside the humans and animals, then dried each other’s legs with rags. After that, the Urunthai seemed eager to run for a while, till the moisture wicked out of their fibrous ankle fur.
When the pace slackened again, Sara slid off her mount to walk. Soon a low voice spoke from her right.
“I meant to tell you — I’ve read your paper on linguistic devolution from Indo-European.”
It was the scholar-turned-hunter, Dedinger, striding beyond her donkey’s other flank. She watched him for a long moment before answering.
“I’m surprised. At fifty pages, I could afford to get only five photocopies cranked, and I kept one.”
Dedinger smiled. “I still have friends in Biblos who send me engaging items, now and then. As for your thesis., while I enjoyed your ideas about grammatical reinforcement in pre-literate trading clans, I’m afraid I can’t bring myself to accept your general theory.”
Sara didn’t find it surprising. Her conclusions ran counter to everything the man believed in.
“That’s the way of science — a cycle of give-and-take. No dogmatic truth. No rigid, received word.”
“As opposed to my own slavish devotion to a few ancient scrolls that no human had a hand in writing?” The flinty man laughed. “I guess what it comes down to is which direction you think people are heading. Even among conservative Galactics, science is about slowly improving your models of the world. It’s future-oriented. Your children will know more than you do, so the truth you already have can never be called ‘perfect.’
“That’s fine when your destiny lies upward, Sara. But tradition and a firm creed are preferable if you’re embarked on the narrow, sacred road downhill, to salvation. In that case, argument and uncertainty will only confuse your flock.”
“Your flock doesn’t seem confused,” she acknowledged.
He smiled. “I’ve had some success winning these hard men over to true orthodoxy. They dwell much of each year on the Plain of Sharp Sand, trapping the wild spike-sloths that lurk in caves, under the dunes. Most don’t read or write, and their few tools are handmade, so they were already far down the Path. It may prove harder convincing some other groups.”
“Like the Explosers Guild?”
The former scholar nodded.
“An enigmatic clan. Their hesitation to do their duty, during this crisis, is disturbing.”
Sara raised her eyes toward Kurt and Jomah. While the senior exploser snored atop an ambling donkey, his nephew held another one-sided conversation with the Stranger, who smiled and nodded as Jomah chattered. The star-man made an ideal, uncritical audience for a shy boy, just beginning to express himself.
“Maybe they figure they can blow it all up just once,” Sara commented. “Then they’ll have to scratch for a living, like everyone else.”
Dedinger grunted. “If so, it’s time someone reminded them, respectfully, of their obligations.”
She recalled Jop’s talk of taking Kurt somewhere to be “persuaded.” In more violent times, the expression carried chilling implications.
We may be headed back to such times.
The flinty insurgent shook his head.
“But never mind all that. I really want to discuss your fascinating paper. Do you mind?”
When Sara shrugged, Dedinger continued in an amiable tone, as if they sat in a Biblos faculty lounge.
“You admit that proto-Indo-European, and many other human mother tongues, were more rigorous and rational than the dialects that evolved out of them. Right so far?”
“According to books carried here by the Tabernacle. All we have is inherited data.”
“And yet you don’t see this trend as an obvious sign of decay from perfection? From original grammars designed for our use by a patron race?”
She sighed. There might be weirder things in the universe than holding an abstract chat with her kidnapper under a desert sky, but none came to mind.
“The structure of those early tongues could have risen out of selective pressure, operating over generations. Primitive people need rigid grammars, because they lack writing or other means to correct error and linguistic drift.”
“Ah yes. Your analogy to the game of Telephone, in which the language with the highest level of shaman coding—”
“That’s Shannon coding. Claude Shannon showed that any message can carry within itself the means to correct errors that creep in during transit. In a spoken language, this redundancy often comes embedded in grammatical rules — the cases, declensions, modifiers, and such. It’s all quite basic information theory.”
“Ffm. Maybe for you. I confess that I failed to follow your mathematics.” Dedinger chuckled dryly. “But let’s assume you’re right about that. Does not such clever, self-correcting structure prove those early human languages were shrewdly designed?”
“Not at all. The same argument was raised against biological evolution — and later against the notion of self-bootstrapped intelligence. Some folks have a hard time accepting that complexity can emerge out of Darwinian selection, but it does.”
“So you believe—”
“That the same thing happened to preliterate languages on Earth. Cultures with stronger grammars could hang together over greater distances and times. According to some of the old-timer linguists, Indo-European may have ranged all the way from Europe to Central Asia. Its rigid perfection maintained culture and trade links over distances far beyond what any person might traverse in a lifetime. News, gossip, or a good story could travel slowly, by word of mouth, all the way across a continent, arriving centuries later, barely changed.”
“Like in the game of Telephone.”
“That’s the general idea.”
Sara found herself leaning on the donkey as fatigue prickled her calves and thighs. Still, it seemed a toss-up — aching muscles if she stayed afoot versus shivering on a bruised coccyx if she remounted. For the little donkey’s sake, she chose to keep walking.
Dedinger had his teeth in the argument.
“If all you say is true, how can you deny those early grammars were superior to the shabby, disorganized dialects that followed?”
“What do you mean, ‘superior’? Whether you’re talking about proto-Indo-European, proto-Bantu or proto-Semitic, each language served the needs of a conservative, largely changeless culture of nomads and herders, for hundreds or thousands of years. But those needs shifted when our ancestors acquired agriculture, metals, and writing. Progress changed the very notion of what language was for.”
An expression of earnest confusion briefly softened the man’s etched features.
“Pray, what could language be for, if not to maintain a culture’s cohesion and foster communication?”
That was the question posed by members of Dedinger’s former department, who spurned Sara’s theory at its first hearing, embarrassing her in front of Sages Bonner, Taine, and Purofsky. Had not the majestic civilization of the Five Galaxies been refining its twenty or so standard codes since the days of the fabled Progenitors, with a single goal — to promote clear exchange of meaning among myriad citizen races?
“There is another desirable thing,” Sara replied. “Another product of language, just as important, in the long run, as cohesion.”
“And that is?”
“Creativity. If I’m right, it calls for a different kind of grammar. A completely different way of looking at error.”
“One that welcomes error. Embraces it.” Dedinger nodded. “This part of your paper I had trouble following. You say Anglic is better because it lacks redundancy coding. Because errors and ambiguity creep into every phrase or paragraph. But how can chaos engender inventiveness?”