“A language freights its history, its culture, inside itself. Its structure is the bare-bones blueprint for a mindset. Know one, gain insights into another.” —Bren
Explorer, p. 50
It’s not a stretch to say that former teacher C.J. Cherryh is a linguist, trained in Classics and fluent in Latin, Greek, and French, which means that she also understands other Romance languages and thoroughly knows the architecture of language. She is the definition of a polyglot.
Those of us who have studied more than two languages (a show of hands, please!) know something that most people don’t, and that is that language—any language—is a system whose internal architecture is more important to understand than vocabulary. You memorize vocabulary; the architecture makes it meaningful. Let me put it this way: when I was a baby medievalist and the Classics department wanted to woo me into its track, my Latin professor told me, “After you learn your third language, it gets much easier.”
Pfffft. Right, I thought.
Thing is, it’s true. Because that third language in the mix makes clear that, although each language has its own idiosyncrasies and encodes its own history, the architecture of the human mind is remarkably similar from culture to culture, and there are only so many ways to organize the information of that culture. In other words, learn the basics of the engineering — the underlying scaffolding — and everything else is memorization.
Why, you might ask, do I mention this at the start of a discussion about Foreigner? Because language is one of the many subjects at the heart of the series. Simple.
The Foreigner books are like popcorn. “Oh, there’s the next volume! Yeah, I can read that quickly, let’s go.” Betcha can’t read just one. And on one level, it is mind candy, great light reading, highly entertaining.
On another level, though, there’s a lot going on, and tonight I want to focus on the language. Not the language the book is written in, which is strictly PG, tending more toward the G side of the scale, but the concept of language, the realities of translation, and the difficulties therein.
The protagonist of the series, Bren Cameron, is a professional translator and diplomat, assigned to be the sole point of contact between the human colony on the atevi world, and the native atevi. Before Bren’s tenure, for two centuries the paidhi, the translator, communicated only through written media. The humans of Mospheira believed that too much familiarity with the atevi had led to the nearly apocalyptic (for the humans) War of the Landing, and too free communications would lead to too much risk of disastrous misunderstandings. Bren trained for an academic career; he planned to be a writer of dictionaries before Tabini-aiji rejected a whole string of potential candidates and settled on one his own age, who was willing to take the risk and talk.
Bilinguality is difficult to render in fiction. Making the switch from one language to another explicit, as in,
“Stop!” she shouted in Mandarin, and then again in English. “Stop!”
gets boring after a while. Sometimes, switching up the level of diction within conversation works, but that’s also hard to sustain, because one level is going to be close to the natural voice of the narrative, and one more foreign, more artificial. Any change of style within a novel is a high-wire act: one little slip (as in, use the second person singular pronoun thou wrong) and you’ve blown the illusion of fluency, along with the whole willing-suspension-of-disbelief thing that makes fiction work. Italicizing one language or doing some clever font-switching works sometimes, but not always.
Cherryh defeats this language-dexterity problem with signaling: familiar names and titles using the -ji suffix works, as does the use of some familiar constructions that echo thinking in Ragi: “By no means….” “One would assume….” etc. It’s subtle enough that a casual reader catches which language is which from context without having to be told exactly which language is spoken. And of course, after a few volumes, we know who can speak which language, so it’s not a stretch to know automatically that Shawn Tyers speaks Mosphei’ while Ilisidi speaks Ragi. When Bren is translating between two different speakers at the same time, Cherryh has to tell us which language he uses. She’s quite sparing in that technique.
But that’s not what I mean about the approach to language in the Foreigner books. Through Bren, Cherryh discusses language as culture and mindset, and dissects the difficulties in rendering concepts native to one language into a form another language can understand.
Above the entry to the cockpit, the bulkhead had the black and white baji-naji emblem, that tribute to Chance and Fortune, the devil in the otherwise fortunate numbers. Below it was a screen that showed them the runway.
It trued up in the view.
“Baji-naji,” Gin said, meaning, in human terms here goes nothing.
And in atevi — here goes everything.
Defender, p. 27
Several times during the rescue mission to Reunion, when Jase is close to panic, Bren reminds him to think in Ragi, knowing that the formality of the language with its almost-algebraic nuances of case and number, will calm him and force him to think analytically. To master Ragi requires sophisticated mathematical ability, which is why there’s a children’s form of the language, and why Cajeiri stuns his elders when he demonstrates the ability at a very young age to speak the adult form, and why Bren knows that he can use Ragi as more than a secure code with Jase, safe from the ship-speak eavesdroppers — it’s a communication mode that forces him to think differently than he is accustomed to.
That ability to switch mindsets becomes an essential skill in communicating with the kyo.
He tried to think of things. He tried to create a basic vocabulary of interactions: communicating the difference between coming and going to a foreigner who shared one’s planet was hard enough. Communicating that useful distinction to a species that might only have a single word for movement or that might have a dozen more specific words — or, God help them, communicate in something other than nouns and verbs — was no walk on the beach.
Explorer, p. 275
And, indeed, the kyo communicate in something other than nouns and verbs. Add to the mix a different biology and a lack of non-verbal cues, since kyo faces are fairly static, (Cullen calls them “bone-faced bastards”) so we add subsonics: thumps and flutters, varying in intensity, which affect the meaning of vocabulary, and which appear as notations in written kyo.
Anticipating their vital second meeting, vital to the survival of their planet, Bren is more than a little apprehensive and worried. He took notes of his first encounter, but that was two years ago and with a year of the fuzz of folded space in between. As the kyo ship approaches, Bren tries to calm his anxiety and focus:
To shut off distractions, he took the kyo dictionary to bed and thought and thought, recalling the circumstances and the locale and the expression behind the words he had written down himself, trying to get a clear focus on the syntax, difficult as it was. The language held nothing like the numerical content of the atevi language, and, like Mosphei’, was more than a little confusing regarding was was a noun versus what was a verb…
Tracker, pp. 223-224
He makes some headway, but not really, not until he is on the space station and dealing with a serious mental block:
And as if Jase’s words ... had tipped some scale, triggered something deep within his sub-conscious, his thoughts grew fuzzier and fuzzier and his eyes drifted shut, though he wasn’t sleepy. He recognized the state of mind, a thought trying to reach the conscious mind, a set of images, of impressions, bits and pieces bubbling up from the mental basement — widely separated elements trying to assemble into a meaningful whole.
Visitor, p. 160
Bren is trying to do more than remember a language; he’s trying to resurrect the mindset behind the language. As the formality of atevi forces a speaker to maintain a certain analytic distance from a subject, kyo requires a different mentality. Prakuyo an Tep, Bren’s counterpart among the kyo, does the same thing from his end, trying to assemble, not the words, but the mental activity behind the words. Building a bridge, as it were, with understanding located somewhere in the middle.
Comprehension is one thing. Fluency is a different matter; fluency requires the mental ability to cross the bridge entirely. Bren describes it to Cullen as a gateway:
You’ll rapidly reach a point you’ll think thoughts you can’t think in our language. You’ll know names of things you can’t think of except in kyo. That’s when you’ll start living in the language. But before that — let me warn you — you may reach a whiteout. Total panic. Inability to think of any word in any language. You may break down in tears. That’s all right. Many do. I have. It’ll pass, usually in less than an hour. Think of it as a gateway, one you’ll learn to pass, back and forth — and the better you do it, the faster you get out that no-words moment.”
Visitor, p. 348
Behind Bren’s words, I hear Cherryh’s experience. Because I’ve done the same thing, as has every person who has learned more than one language. It’s a universal. I’ve never seen anyone else write about it in fiction.
“These days I dream in Ragi,” Bren tells Shawn elsewhere in the series. Even as Bren becomes more and more comfortable and acculturated to the mainland, he recognizes his need to keep the Mosphei’ side of his personality. He is not atevi, and will never be atevi. As Jago will never know what it is to love, Bren can intellectually understand man’chi, even if he doesn’t biologically feel it. That’s his tragedy, that he will never exactly fit in the world in which he lives.
One might think that language fluency, and its role in Foreigner as absolutely a marker on the pro-languages side of educational reform, is a minor sidenote in a space opera, but one would be mistaken. The entire theme of Foreigner is about the need for communication and understanding. Miscommunication and lack of understanding lead to fear, defensiveness, and ultimately war.
But civilized entities — if one had a right to expect any behavior out of a species that had gotten off its own planet — ought to have some concept that the universe was wide, that differences were likely, and that shooting as a first response would ultimately lead one to ruin.
Explorer, p. 275
The same applies to species that haven’t quite gotten of their own planet yet, and to different clans and tribes within that same species. Language points the way toward peace and coexistence, and not simply because it makes communication easier; it’s because “language freights its history, its culture, inside itself.” To really understand another person, you must know the language. That’s one of the several lessons that Foreigner teaches, and it’s a potent one.
Sources
All of C. J. Cherryh’s Foreigner novels are published by DAW. Look ‘em up. Preferably in order of publication.
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