Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is a 1940 short story by Jorge Borges, translated into English in 1961 and appearing in the collection Labyrinths.
In modern terms, it describes the discovery of a secret society of sci-fi engaged in a multi-generational worldbuilding project--creating an encyclopedia of the world of Tlön. This is essentially the "explain a film plot badly" summary, but a proper summary is very philosophical and literary, and if you want that you can go read the Wikipedia page or something. I'm just here for the linguistic references!
There are no nouns in Tlön's conjectural Ursprache, from which the "present" languages and the dialects are derived: there are impersonal verbs, modified by monosyllabic suffixes (or prefixes) with an adverbial value. For example: there is no word corresponding to the word "moon," but there is a verb which in English would be "to moon" or "to moonate." "The moon rose above the river" is hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö, or literally: "upward behind the onstreaming it mooned."
This isn't actually particularly odd. Many indigenous North American languages--especially the Salish family--are famous for having a heavy preference for verbs, and deriving nouns from relative clauses or participle-like constructions. Native American languages are not particularly famous for monosyllabic roots, but there's no particular reason those features should not be combined. Such a language could easily turn up in nature, and I would not be slightest bit surprised if someone discovered a language exactly like that somewhere in Papua New Guinea! Borges clearly did not generate a complete Tlönian conlang for this short work, but there is some translated Tlönian there which we might as well try to analyze, just for fun. I don't know what the original text looked like, but at least in English translation, there is not a one-to-one correspondence between Tlönian words and English words, which is a plus. Many times, translations between arbitrary will end up with the same number of words just by chance, but by not matching up in number, we know that the words cannot match up one-to-one in sense, which gives us an excuse to think up different ways that information could be organized in the Tlönian sentence. Obviously, with such little data, it's impossible to settle on one obviously correct answer, but I like to think that Tlönian uses something like a relational noun construction (where the "noun" is of course actually a verb), and has reduplication for extended actions, leading to hlör = upward; u fang = at what-is-behind; axaxaxas = multiply-reduplicated form of ax, "to flow", maybe with an adverbial suffix as for "onward", "towards a goal"; and mlö "(it) is-the-moon". Incidentally, "Axaxaxas mlö" is also the title of one of the books mentioned in Borges more famous story The Library of Babel.
We get one other word of Tlönian, though, which seems very mugh like a noun: hrönir (singular hrön), referring to duplicate instances of things which are lost once and then found multiple times. Maybe it's actually a verb meaning "to be found multiple times" and -ir isn't so much a plural as a pluractional or something. About other parts of Tlön, we are told that
In [languages] of the northern hemisphere [..] the prime unit is not the verb, but the monosyllabic adjective. The noun is formed by an accumulation of adjectives. They do not say "moon," but rather "round airy-light on dark" or "pale-orangeof-the-sky" or any other such combination. In the example selected the mass of adjectives refers to a real object, but this is purely fortuitous.This, too, is actually not so strange after all. Per Topics in Warlpiri Grammar by David Nash, Warlpiri does not formally distinguish nouns from adjectives, and can string them together in any order to pinpoint a more precise concept which is the intersection of all the provided descriptors. What would be strange is if, rather than merely focusing on "adjectives", northern Tlönian in fact only had words for semantic attributes and not entities; but Borge himself seems to have had a hard time conceiving of that, given that he includes "sky" in the provided glosses. The philosophy of not having fixed words for specific objects, but just using contextually-relevant descriptions as needed, regardless of whether we think of any of those descriptors as "adjectives" or "nouns" is, however, strongly reminiscent to me of the communicative philosophy of Toki Pona. So even if this is a less naturalistic vision of language than the first version of Tlönian represents, it has at leat been shown to be emminently workable by a conlang community arising some 61 years after Borge posed this idea.
If you liked this post, please consider making a small donation!
No comments:
Post a Comment