Vance's Language of Pao

 Jack Vance's The Languages of Pao is a 1958 science fiction novel whose core science fictional premise is the forced introduction of engineered languages to the planet Pao in order to alter the culture of the inhabitants through strong Whorfian effects. We don't actually get to see much of any of the eponymous languages (which is fine, because that avoids the problem of having readers notice that they don't actually work in real life), and plenty of other people have written about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in science fiction, so I feel no particular need to rehash that--but we do get some significant exposure to the native Paonese language, and I am happy to analyze that!

I have written about Paonese before, so I don't know why it took me so long to realize that this novel would be a good basis for a blog post, but here we are now!

The first page contains a tour-de-force of linguistic info-dumping:

The plane of Pao's diurnal rotation is the same as its plane of orbit; hence there are no seasons and the climate is uniformly mild. Eight continents range the equator at approximately equal intervals: Aimand, Shraimand, Vidamand, Minamand, Nonamand, Dronamand, Hivand and Impland, after the eight digits of the Paonese numerative system. Aimand, largest of the continents, has four times the area of Nonamand, the least. Only Nonamand, in the high southern latitudes, suffers an unpleasant climate.

You may think Vance is just telling you some bland facts about geography, but, if you are paying attention, you have also just learned:

1. That Paonese has a base-8 number system.
2. That the numbers 1-8 in Paonese are something like <ai(m)>, <shrai(m)>, <vida(m)>, <mina(m)> <nona(m)>, <drona(m)>, <hiv>, and <imp(l)>.
3. That there is a word or morpheme that looks something like <(m/l)and> and means "land" or "continent" or something like that.

And you've already started to get some idea of what the shapes of Paonese words might be like. Now, it's not as straightforward as it could be--there are, after all, those <m>s and an <l> to worry about--but that's perfectly realistic. Real languages actually have edge cases like that whose correct underlying structure is not immediately obvious, because surface-level phonological or spelling rules blur the boundaries. That's why, e.g., things that aren't possible in English are impossible, but things that aren't correct are incorrect.

 Unfortunately, after that it gets... boring. There is only one actual sentence of Paonese provided, and that in a footnote:

The Paonese and Mercantil languages were as disparate as the two ways of living. The Panarch, making the statement, "There are two matters I wish to discuss with you," used words which, accurately rendered, would read: "Statement-of-importance (a single word in Paonese)--in a state of readiness--two; ear--of Mercantil--in a state of readiness; mouth--of this person here--in a state of volition." The italicized words represent suffixes of condition.

The necessary paraphrasing makes the way of speaking seem cumbersome. But the Paonese sentence, "Rhomel-en-shrai bogal-Mereantil-nli-en moun-es-nli-ro." requires only three more phonemes than, "There are two matters I wish to discuss with you."

 You could hardly have a more clear-cut case of whack-you-over-the-head-with-it Narrative Translation. The narrator isn't merely giving you a translation, he's giving you a morpheme-by-morpheme gloss, with the intention of highlighting the Whorfian characteristics of the Paonese language as "presenting a picture" rather than "describing an act". If you pay close attention, though, you can discover that the word for "two" is in fact "shrai" (not "shraim"), which provides insight into several other digits as well.

Our remaining exposure to Paonese comes almost entirely through names or titles, whose meanings are all Irrelevant or Obvious. Consider the opening to Chapter II:

PERGOLAI, AN ISLET In the Jhelianse Sea between Minamand and Dronamand had been pre-empted[....]

Pergolai--it's the name of an island. It might have a literal meaning in Paonese, but that's not relevant to its use as a name. Jhelianse--it's the name of a sea, and once again that's all the reader needs to know. A little further in:

To the right sat his brother Bustamonte, bearing the title Ayudor

 Ayudor--apparently, it's a title that can be held by the ruler's brother; there may be culturally-specific details that justify a unique title rather than translating it as "prince" or something, but what exactly those are never comes up, so the reader doesn't need to know!

This sort of thing happens quite a lot, but not exclusively with Paonese (as there are plenty of people and places not from Pao who also needs names), and the techniques used are not unique to secondary languages--everybody has to know how tooo introduce new proper names!

There is one additional mention (as opposed to use) of a Paonese word that is not a proper noun:

"An expansion upon the Paonese vitality-word praesens, with an effort at transposition into Breakness attitudes."

Which is a pretty clear-cut case of Making it Irrelevant; we are given a vague indication of the word's semantic category, but it's really just a throwaway mentioned as part of a quoted title. If the word itself holds any significance, it is only to show us another example of the possible range of Paonese word-shapes.

So, The Languages of Pao shows some significant sophistication right at the beginning, but then just kind of... gives up on making real use of the Paonese language. Perhaps the most significant thing we can learn from this is that, despite a lack of formal resources for studying techniques, and fairly limited popularity, the baseline sophistication of secondary language use in science fiction has improved significantly since 1958!

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