It has been nearly a month since my last post, a delay which can be blamed entirely on A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (Amazon affiliate, yada yada).
A Memory Called Empire is a very linguistically interesting book; but despite featuring one-and-a-half secondary languages, it isn't particularly interesting from the point of view of my established framework for analyzing the usage of such languages. Arkady Martine is doing other things entirely, and it has taken forcing my sister to read it so that we can have book club, pondering a bunch, and serendipitously coming across several other analytical resources to get a handle on what I want to start to say about it.
AMCE is set primarily in the capital city / on the capital planet (it's an ecumenopolis, so they're the same thing) of the empire of Teixcalaan, and features numerous words of the Teixcalaanli language. Only individual words though; no sentences or extended phrases. Dr. Martine has unfortunately not been available for interview yet (though I hope that will change in the future), so I cannot yet know the answer for sure, but I have to wonder if this limited deployment of the language was all she ever intended or if it represents what was left after editorial cuts, as I do know other authors have faced reduction of linguistic content to make their books more marketable. This reddit post, which reads, in part
I'm having trouble with some of the titles and it pulls me out of the story every time.
I feel like I'm a fairly robust reader with at least an average reading level, but I get stuck every time I come across Teixcalaan. Ezuazuacat and asekreta are problematic too. And don't even try with Teixcalaanlitzlim.
is fairly representative of the attitudes I have encountered when surveying Anglophone readers and writers on their opinions about secondary language use, and it seems that editors are aware of this, which makes it all the more pleasantly surprising that any of the books I have reviewed so far ever got published!
Either way, though, it seems to have been the right choice, because AMCE got past those prejudices to be awarded the 2020 Hugo for Best Novel. If a novel with as much linguistic focus as AMCE does have (and despite not showing the language as much as I would've liked, it does have quite a lot) can win a Hugo, maybe this marks a turning point where trusting readers with secondary languages will become more normalized, along with broader encouragement for authors to include secondary languages in the many scenarios where it makes sense to do so.
While AMCE does not meaningfully expand on my typology for low-level language-showing techniques, though, it does exemplify a higher-level principle I like to call Don't Call a Smeerp a Rabbit (and as you can see from the link, I am not the first person to have come up with that). "Don't Call a Rabbit a Smeerp" is a dictum that comes from the Turkey City Lexicon, and it basically means "don't engage in false exoticism"--if your sci-fi or fantasy story features a creatures that looks and acts exactly like a rabbit, just call it a rabbit, not a smeerp.
False familiarity, however, is just as dangerous--especially when you are writing a story whose central themes are about engagement with an exotic foreign culture, and what impact that has on one's personal identity. If you have a creature that doesn't look like a rabbit, doesn't act like a rabbit, or doesn't fulfill comparable cultural roles as a rabbit... don't call it a rabbit! Similarly, if you have a government officer whose qualifications, social position, and official duties don't match up with a clerk, or a secretary, or a director, or anything else you can think of... call them asekretim. (I mean, not literally, 'cause your story isn't set in the Empire of Teixcalaan, but you get the idea!)
Incidentally, Semiosis by Sue Burke, which I have reviewed previously, is also a good example of not calling a smeerp a rabbit, although it approaches the issue from a different direction; rather than borrowing a foreign-language word for a foreign concept, the characters of Semiosis are presented with the issue of coming up with English names for entirely new alien creatures in an environment where no one else is going to tell them what to call them. And while the fippokats do have the word "cat" incorporated into their name, despite not actually being cats (a perfectly normal feature of human naming practices, as exemplified by animals like Guinea pigs and sealions), they are not just called "cats"--or "rabbits", or "kangaroos", all of which they share some salient features with. They are called fippokats, because to imply that they are not alien by coopting an existing English word would do a disservice to the reader and make it more difficult to understand their role in the story.
Arkady Martine makes excellent use of distinctive phonology to separate the Stationer culture, as represented by their names, from the Teixcalaanli culture, as represented by... lots of words that aren't their names! She also demonstrates regular phonological correspondences and adaptations between borrowed names which are cognate between the two cultures, something which you can't do without at least two languages available to show (and opportunity which shows up much less frequently than showing one). But getting back to those names... Teixcalaanli names, like, e.g., Chinese names and unlike Anglophone names, are compositional and meaningful; the cultural significance of particular naming choices is explained in the book, and choosing a proper Teixcalaanli name is part of the process of naturalization for new Teixcalaanli citizens. Making that part of the culture accessible to the reader thus, somewhat counterintuitively, actually requires presenting the names not in reader-facing Teixcalaanli, but in translated form!
Poetry is also a significant feature of Teixcalaanli culture, to the extent that highly regimented styles of verse are central to everyday political discourse--so, you might think that ACME would be a perfect vehicle for extended secondary-language poetry, such as Tolkien inserted in The Lord of the Rings... and you thought that, you would be wrong! Quoting from somebody else's interview with the author:
Teixcalaanli poetry is explicitly supposed to be in complex meter, and sometimes also in complex rhyme — this is that skillset use again — but I deliberately ignored that when I wrote the poetry for the book, because, well — writing in English meter wouldn't match up with what the Teixcalaanli meter would be. And also I'm terrible at metered poetry. I can fake being a genius political poet in free verse, but all my attempts at metered poetry come out twee as hell. The choice to gesture at poetry instead of trying to achieve the heights of the form let me not get trapped in having to be really, really good. It's a shortcut. But I wanted readers to think that Teixcalaanli poets were incredible, whether or not that particular reader liked English poetry — so I didn't want to trip them up with English poetry poorly done, or which might ring false or silly and throw them out of the story.
As much as I am personally saddened at not getting to see actual Teixcalaanli poetry, this is both a brilliant method of successfully portraying the characters as more brilliant than the author, as well as a breath of fresh air in light of all of those trite fantasy / horror scenarios in which someone translates an ancient inscription in a cursed tomb (for example) and it just happens to work as perfectly rhymed iambic pentameter in modern American English.
Dr. Martine also does an excellent job of gesturing at the complexities of grammar, pragmatics, and translation without actually showing the language itself. The main character, Mahit, a new ambassador to the Empire, consciously thinks about her command of language, and shows how good she is at it by describing the ways in which she adjusts her speech to seem less competent, more provincial, and less threatening; or to break out complex high-register grammatical constructions to prove that she is competent and threatening, as needed. In the real world, this is comparable to a politician like Barack Obama knowing when to code-switch into AAVE to connect with a black urban audience, and when to stick to prescriptively-correct standard General American Broadcast English. Or in fiction to Danaerys Targaryen making use of a translator until it is politically expedient to reveal that, in fact, Valyrian is her native tongue.
As for the nuts-and-bolts of how you actually pull that off... well, I don't have that broken down into a blog-post sized analysis yet. But go read the book, because Arkady Martine clearly knows how to do it!
Putting linguistics per se aside for a moment (gasp!), Arkady Martine employs linguistic knowledge as a central feature in a larger goal of examining the interaction of cultures. As the child of a former Air Force pilot who got assigned to a desk job at the US Embassy in Brussels, Belgium for a while, and as a former Christian missionary in the former Soviet Union, Mahit's experience as an outsider admiring and then living in a foreign culture, and connecting with that culture through its language resonated with me deeply. And after recently reading A Literary Case for Hard Science Fiction, I feel like AMCE could reasonably be called hard social scifi. That's not a pair of adjectives that usually goes together when describing science fiction, but if "hard" science fiction gains value over literary "realism" by forcing us to be aware of the impact of the physical world that we live in on the stories that we experience in this world... well, AMCE employs a solid understanding of history, sociology, urban planning and linguistics to force us to be aware of the impact that the cultural world we are embedded in has on the stories we experience. Today's episode of the Mad Genius Club blog discusses similar issues with regard to HBO's historical drama Chernobyl. And I am all for it!
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