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ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

short short story

Patrick Breheny

Hello. I am writing to you in your language because you would not understand a twinkling of mine, ours being a language of light rather than sound. I have collaborated with the author, using his name for publication because there is no way to print mine on machines that impress symbols for sound. We have a graven alphabet for light, but it would take a lifetime of human years to learn our images.

You will, momentarily, appreciate why I am so familiar with your speech, and while you will no doubt find the tale amusing, it is also intended to forewarn. My occupation can most closely be translated as “computer”. However, I am not, as you usually associate computers, an apparatus. I am an advanced organism, with far greater memory capacities than my mechanical counterparts on earth, and it is my profession to feed back information in much the same fashion. It is, as you would say on your planet, in your country, what I do for a living.

I enjoyed, several years ago, the experience of working with an American. We came upon him quite unexpectedly, though to us his discovery was an accident comparable to one of your submarines discovering artifacts from Atlantis. We were on one of our first reconnaissance flights outside our own solar system when we came under attack from an alien craft. Our weapons were superior, and when we boarded the conquered ship, we made our first contact with sound languages. The American, we were able to surmise, was already a prisoner, working as a linguist aboard the foreign vessel, which coincidentally had also been a recon craft. I refer to him as an American now (rather than by his species) though at the time we distinguished him from ourselves and his very different abductors by calling him “the other”.

Despite some early animosity, Don and I eventually became friends. As we slowly learned to make the noises that approximate your variances of tongue to incisors, tongue to palate, puckering of lips, etc., we began the arduous process---very arduous because we don’t have those bodily features you call mouths--- of shaping them into words that only Don could define for us, and we simulated them by using machine computers. As an advanced computer organism, I could have a conversation with you, am having my end of one now, but the sounds don’t come physically from me. You’re reading this, and imagining sounds. It’s a little like that. I know you use codes, have light signals that translate to your language of sounds. We reverse that, change your sounds to our light language.

Don had been a Professor of Linguistics at one of your higher rated institution of learning. He had been a passenger on a plane over the infamous Bermuda Triangle, and as I’ve told you, his talents were utilized by his captors, and eventually by us. Though he was quite free in sharing his culture, often nostalgically, he made it clear from the beginning, even when we offered to take him home, that he would not reveal to us the location of his planet. His kidnappers were fanatically loyal to their own, and because those who survived became a constant security threat, we somewhat prematurely ejected them. Without them, we had no way of learning where Don was from, and he was too valuable to attempt coercion on. While he revealed much about his culture and taught us his language, he did not reveal to us what we know now, that on his planet there were many cultures and languages.

From the outset of our exploration of solar systems that employed sound for communication, Don was our translator, and we encountered intelligent life in many and diverse forms, on numerous planets, in solar systems spread through four galaxies. We permitted Don, of necessity, great freedom in choosing a method by which to learn a foreign language and thus gather intelligence data for us. It became standard procedure for us to take a sample species, and then allow Don, in isolation with the organism, to gain its confidence and learn its language. When he encounter linguistic difficulty, Don would feed to me all of the possible meaning for each word and phrase, especially if, as sometimes occurred, a particular planet was multi-lingual. Thus Don and I worked quite closely together, and I, more than any of my kind, developed an affinity for him.

The vignette I have to tell you concerns our contact with one of those planets back in the days when we were still quite primitive with sound, and had not yet mastered Don’s languages. We called the planet Aviary because we believed the dominant species to be a bird. On our initial ground landing we encountered a minor problem with the exhaust system on descent. The malfunction was corrected quickly enough to cause no navigational difficulty, but we had created in the sky one hundred feet above the surface such a roaring, fiery spectacle that we were not surprised upon touching down to find the area abandoned. We thought we were on a tropical jungle planet, and had apparently frightened away all specimens within miles of our location. All, that is, except one bird, which we discovered inside a hut in which it apparently lived, and which, when we entered, scolded us bucolically in a sound language characteristic of the solar system. Don said the bird had apparently stayed behind as a sentry, and warned us that though it did not seem to have a weapon, it probably had a poisonous beak, and might be capable of spiting venom into us from a great distance. Don asked to be left alone with the bird, to attempt to communicate and befriend it, and we were amenable to his request. He was alone in the hut with the creature for some time, and when he came out, he said the bird was apparently hungry, and had indicated, as far as he could ascertain, that it would come with us willingly if we would feed it.

Because of our indelicate arrival we decided it would be wise to depart immediately, and Don promised the bird we would feed it in flight. At this point, a description of the source of food during long space travel seems appropriate. Our diet consisted solely of vegetable protein, processed and packaged in a slab about the size of a loaf of bread in an American supermarket. It is bland and tasteless, and the best that could be said about it, by either Don or ourselves is that, even though we eat through our eyes, it is better than starving. And as you can imagine, having no mouth--- and therefore no teeth, tongue, lips, palette, vocal chords or larynx--- sound languages are very difficult for us (as in fact is eating).

Don said that he had heard about a planet dominated by birds from his former captors, and that if this were the one, he would encounter great difficulty because the cultures were diverse, and the birds’ languages and dialects prolific.

Once we were traveling again, Jim took the bird into the Isolation Suite to attempt a dialogue, and offered it the promised food. The bird did not take well to our processed protein. Don said that it seemed to be stating that it would not accept it unless we could present it in a thin, crisp form. We tried pounding the protein flat, but the bird still did not want it. We fried it on the alloy surrounding one of our motors, but again it rejected it. We impugned the Captain to donate his spices---our eyes have a sense of taste---but, alas, still no success. The Captain, having given up his stores, was becoming damned impatient with the feathery being. He insisted on a read-out, a procedure in which Don gave me all the data on the possible meanings of words from his knowledge of the major local languages and their roots. In the case of Aviary, Jim’s linguistic knowledge seemed quite extensive, due to the research already done when we found him.

For the sake of brevity, I have eliminated the definitions that accompanied each word. The fourth column list of nouns include a cultural intermix of food preparations Jim said existed on the planet. The following, then, is a copy of the print-out I received---or an approximation, at least, of what we translated to our language:

SUBJECT----------- VERBS -- -------- QUANTIFIERS------- OBJECTS

(phonetic given name

of unkown origin)

Bol-ee wishes one toast

desires one unit of biscuit

hungers for some motzah

wants a member of tortilla

loves any cracker

needs a cookie

demands

No, we didn’t shoot him. It was still some time before we knew enough about you to know what Don had done, and by then we didn’t need him anymore. Needless to say, the Captain wasn’t amused. To use one of the colorful if crude idioms of yours I am picking up as I learn to speak like you, he was as pissed off as a fly on a urinal. We didn’t shoot him because not only don’t we have mouths, we don’t have hands or guns. I didn’t tell you about our shape, our essence. Imagine a soft boiled egg that’s left to harden, then is shelled, and has the texture and elasticity of putty. That’s us. We do have a little taste in our eyes, which as I’ve told you, we eat with, thus the captain had his spices. (For me, the spices just burn, make my eyes tear.) And we hear through those same eyes. You could say we’re ALL ears and ALL eyes. Be careful. (Hey, I like you. We’re nice guys. Fuckin' kid!)

Otherwise, we’re not very sensual. We have tried rubbing together to see if we could get some stimulation that way, as you do, but we just get stuck to each other and it makes us itchy. How do we reproduce? We don’t. We don’t have to because we don’t die. We just ARE. And we don't sleep. Why do you sleep? To dream? I don't know what a dream is.

Where did we come from? Dunno. Where did you come from?

Actually, the Captain did shoot Don, except shooting to us is shooting out. Ejection ships, the fate of his former captors. If anybody ever finds him, maybe he can tell them a couple of corny jokes. Wonder how funny he thinks he is now. Laughing away in delirium. Ha-ha-ha.

That’s it. I do miss Don, he was fun, but Captain’s orders are Captain’s orders. One final thought for you to ponder.. When you look out at the stars at night, if you’re living some place where you can still see them, remember there might be a lot of other lights up there sending messages---and not intended for you, but for their own. It may not be your back you need to watch, but what’s in front of you. As a lot of your young people like to say these days---“Just saying….”

(2-27-2015) Mentioned Spock in the intro to this story on the index page. RIP Leonard Nimoy, great talent, Spock forever. Thank you and Star Trek for entertaining, enriching. enlightning us