Analog SFF, June 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Finally, Class 5 contains all abstract nouns such as barah ("year"), and all nouns derived from verbs such as tao ("shame") from tao ("be ashamed") and kui-si ("playground") from kui ("play").

  Criteria often overlap. The part-whole relationship between “fire” and “smoke,” “water” and “foam” is as significant as the metaphorical analogy body —] mucus [—] water [— foam.

  * * * *

  Yimas, a Language of Papua New Guinea

  Yimas, with 250 speakers, is one of almost 1,000 languages spoken in New Guinea. Yimas has eleven genders but the organization of the gender system is more elaborate than in Dyirbal and Jul'hoan, not only because of the larger number of genders but because only the first four classes are semantically based; the remainder depend on the phonetic shape of the word.

  Classes I, II, III, and IV contain respectively human males, human females, animals, and plants. Inanimate nouns, on the other hand, are organized according to the final consonant(s) of the word. The largest inanimate gender is Class 5, containing all words ending in a simple consonant like —p, —t, —k, —m, —n, —~, —r, —l, words like yan ("tree") or awak ("star"). The other genders are determined as follows:

  Class VI ending in —~k: kray~k ("frog")

  Class VII ending in —mp: impramp ("basket")

  Class VIII ending in —i: awi ("axe")

  Class IX ending in —aw: ~arwaw ("penis")

  Class X ending in —uk: awruk ("bandicoot")

  Class XI ending in —w~k: kaw~k ("wall")

  The major function of gender in Yimas is to keep track of noun referents in the complex grammar. For example in the sentence:

  * * * *

  ura~ki kia-mpu-~a-tikam-it mpu-yara-r-i~ki

  coconut-6 PL 6 PL-3PL A-1SG U-show-PST 3PL

  A-get-PST-6 PL

  "They showed me the coconuts which they got."

  The middle line in the example follows the symbolism linguists use to show the structure of a phrase or sentence. The first word, “coconut,” is in Class 6 because of its —~k ending and has a plural suffix —i. The second word is a complex verb, with base —tikam— ("show") preceded by three pronominal elements in the order “them(6)-they-me” and followed by the past tense marker —it. Notice that “they” is marked A agent and “me” is marked U undergoer. There is no relative pronoun but the second verb phrase “they-get-PAST” is linked to the noun “coconuts” by a Class VI plural suffix —i~ki.

  The gender system permits Yimas to have a much freer word order than English. The relative clause need not be adjacent to its head noun as it is in English. In fact, the three words in the example sentence could appear in any order. In effect “coconuts” and “they got them” are two parallel noun phrases linked by the repeated —~ki.

  As you can now see, gender is a much broader concept than experience with French or German may have suggested. Gender systems need not be restricted to the male-female axis, but may contrast animate-inanimate, concrete-abstract, human-nonhuman, and other criteria. And in spite of the fact that French and German gender has traditionally been considered arbitrary, several studies have shown otherwise. In fact, it seems likely now that most gender systems have assignment rules, though they may be very complex.

  Why do languages have gender? Much work remains to be done before this question can be fully answered. Only a fraction of the world's languages have been described in any detail. One probable answer is that gender helps in disambiguating sentences and keeping track of various referents in the discourse. One researcher has said of the Australian language Nungubuyu that gender is the glue “which holds the system together."

  Perhaps the most promising aspect of research into gender is the insight it may yield into how information is stored in the brain. But this subject will require the efforts of not only linguists but anthropologists and psychologists working together.

  * * * *

  Phonetic Symbols

  The “dy” in the Australian words is pronounced similarly to English “j” as in John. The “~” represents the —ng sound in “sing."

  Click symbols used are l for the dental click, ! for the alveolar click, and t for the palatal click. The other letters used with the clicks define click types: g! voiced alveolar click, n! nasalized alveolar click, !x alveolar click followed by friction like the German ach sound, and so on.

  Vowels followed by “n” are nasalized, like French bon or Jean. A raised “q” after the vowel indicates a harsh, low-toned pronunciation. The letter “h” after a vowel means breathy voicing like the way some English speakers pronounce the “h” in “ahead.” The tick ‘ represents the glottal stop as in the way some Hawaiian-Americans pronounce the name of their state (Hawai'i).

  Jul'hoan has four tones: the lowest is unmarked, low tone has a grave accent, high tone an acute accent. There are no examples of double-high in the text.

  Words from the click language Jul'hoan may be heard online at the UCLA Phonetics Lab data site:

  hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/appendix/languages/zhu/zhu.html

  * * * *

  References:

  Corbett, G. (1991). Gender. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.

  Dickens, P. (1994). A Jul'hoansi/English, English/Jul'hoansi Dictionary.

  Rainer Vossen (ed.), QKF 8. Rudiger Koppe. Koln.

  Dickens, P. (2005). A Concise Grammar of Jul'hoan.

  Rainer Vossen (ed.), QKF 17. Rudiger Koppe. Koln.

  Dixon, R. M. W. (1972). The Dyirbal Language of North Queensland. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.

  Foley, W. A. (1986). The Papuan Languages of New

  Guinea. Cambridge Language Surveys. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge.

  Snyman, J. W. (1970). An Introduction to the !Xu

  Language. Communication 34 of the University of Cape Town School of African Studies. A. A. Balkema. Cape Town.

  Copyright © 2010 Henry Honken

  * * * *

  About the Author:

  After over twenty year's residence on the West Coast, Henry Honken moved back to the Midwest, where he spends his time in writing and language research. Honken graduated from the University of Minnesota with a BA in anthropology and spent three years in Japan teaching English in a juku. He worked for many years as sales coordinator for Yasutomo and Company, an import-export company based in San Francisco.

  Honken has had half a dozen papers published on Khoisan linguistics and recently presented a paper on the semantic organization of the gender system in the Northern Khoisan language, Jul'hoan, at the June 2008 Khoisan Symposium in Riezlern. His other publications are a mainstream story in Lynx Eye, a story in the online magazine The 5th Dimension, which was voted best of issue, and an article in the Burroughs Bulletin on Burroughs’ use of language, all under the pen name Sam Cash.

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  Probability Zero: LIGHT CONVERSATION by Alastair Mayer

  I almost missed it. If I'd looked away as I closed the refrigerator door, I would have. But the light didn't go out. Poly explained later that they (he? it?) had shorted out the switch (at some personal sacrifice) to keep it on, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

  People joke about whether the refrigerator light really goes out when the door closes. If you look, though, you'll see it turn off just before that, when the door pushes the switch in. But this time it didn't. I'd been getting a late-night snack, didn't bother turning on the main kitchen light, and the refrigerator light stayed on right up until the door seal hit the frame.

  "That's odd,” I said to myself, aloud. I do that. I opened and closed the door again, watching closely. The light stayed on.

  I didn't know that the closed refrigerator was still illuminated, any more than Schrodinger knew if his cat was alive or dead, but a half-dozen schemes to decide came to mind. If I could find my meter I could check the current draw, but I'd have to drag the fridge away from the outlet. There was enough shelf space between the milk c
arton, the pickle and jam jars, and yesterday's leftovers to put my camcorder, but the battery wasn't charged. Out in the garage I excavated the weed whacker and unreeled a foot of monofilament from the business end. Now I had a crude fiber-optic cable. I closed the refrigerator door on the nylon line, one end protruding. The tip glowed; the light was still on.

  I opened the door and squatted down to examine the switch. I pushed it a few times to no effect. I didn't want to commit appliance repair at this hour, but neither did I want to leave the light on all night. As I reached in to unscrew the bulb, I saw Poly.

  My first reaction to the yellow-green slime growing on the fridge wall was to recoil in surprise and disgust. I've heard of weird things growing in the back of the refrigerator, but this! Resigning myself to the cleanup job, I moved the big pickle jar aside, then went to get a sponge and disinfectant spray.

  Back at the fridge, I noticed that the slime mold—it resembled chartreuse pudding—now had a raised pattern on its surface. I knew a little about slime molds—that they can move and change shape—but I'd never heard of one creating on itself the diagonally barred circle, 0, that usually means NO. “Odd,” I said to myself again. And yes, again aloud.

  I started to reach in with the sponge, and the slime rippled and changed as I watched. I hadn't thought they could move that fast, and was even more surprised when the surface formed, in raised ridges, the letter N. It held that for a few seconds then morphed to show the letter O.

  "'No'?"

  The slime mold raised two dots and a curved line within the O, like this: J. A happy face? Had it heard me?

  "Can you hear me?” I must be crazy, I thought, talking to a slime mold.

  The mold shaped the letter Y, then E, then S. Then: D, O, N, T, then went flat for a bit, then H, U, R, T, flat, U, S.

  "'Don't hurt us'?"

  "J"

  "But I only see one of you.” A detail like that shouldn't have worried me when here I was talking to a slime mold, but I was grasping at the mundane. This was getting decidedly weird.

  "C, O, L, L, E, C, T, I, V, E,” flat “O, R, G, A, N, I, S, M” it spelled out. It was getting faster.

  "You're a collective organism?"

  "J"

  "But, what are you? Who are you?"

  "Physarum polycephalum sapiens," it said. Well, spelled out.

  "That's quite a name."

  "Don't have name. Intelligent slime mold."

  "How about I just call you Poly?"

  "J"

  So, I had an intelligent slime mold named Poly in my refrigerator. I had too many questions to know where to begin—most concerning my own sanity. I needed more data.

  "Excuse me a moment,” I said. Politeness, even to a slime mold, couldn't hurt. “I'll be right back.” I headed for my computer.

  There was no such thing, according to Google, as "Physarum polycephalum sapiens." There are many kinds of slime molds, organisms with many nuclei in a single blob of protoplasm. Plain Physarum polycephalum is a yellow slime mold, easy to grow in the lab. It had been the subject of numerous experiments involving intelligence, of a sort. Years ago, Dr. Toshiyuki Nakagaki in Nagoya had shown that a slime mold could determine the shortest path in a maze. That might be a chemical tropism rather than “intelligence,” but I'm no expert. In 2006, Klaus-Peter Zauner at the University of Southhampton built a robot controlled by Physarum polycephalum. But that mold—and the robot it controlled—avoided light; why was mine huddled up to the bulb in the fridge? Warmth?

  I'd have to ask it.

  "4 NRG.” Now it was using texting shorthand. I'll translate.

  "For energy? Photosynthesis?"

  "J"

  "How?"

  "Absorbed chloroplasts."

  It was much greener than the web pictures I'd found. That's when I noticed that the salad greens in the vegetable crisper were now salad whites. I'd have to toss those.

  "But why are you in the fridge?"

  "Need cooling."

  That made sense. This communication must take a lot of energy. I didn't know how it was intelligent, but I knew that our brains and computers both need considerable cooling. So too must intelligent slime molds.

  We chatted in that vein a bit. Poly explained how they (he, it, whatever) had gimmicked the light switch, and assured me that it was reversible.

  Slowly I realized that I was missing the big questions.

  "Where did you come from?” I asked. “How did you get here? What do you want?"

  "Too much philosophy. Want to go home."

  "Oh.” I was tired from the late hour and my mind was numb. In my dazed state I didn't ask where “home” was. Another planet? A parallel world? Dr. Nakagaki's lab?

  "How will you do that?"

  "Recharge,” it began, then “O", “o", “.", “*” followed. This last sequence was animated, not spelled out. The circle shrank to a dot, then radiated out and went flat.

  "You explode? Disappear? Beam up? What?"

  "J"

  "But—"

  As I watched, the raised circle outlining the face flattened, fading, leaving just the eyes and mouth. Then the eyes went, leaving just the smile. A Cheshire slime mold.

  That was more than I could handle. As I closed the refrigerator door, I said to Poly: “Okay. But when the last of you leaves, please turn out the light."

  Copyright © 2010 Alastair Mayer

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  Novelette: SPACE ALIENS TAUGHT MY DOG TO KNIT! by Jerry Oltion & Elton Elliott

  What if they're right?

  Delmer Dawkins leaned across the circular bar table, pinning his copy of the National Revealer beneath one jacketed elbow while he gestured wide with his other hand only inches in front of his companion's saturnine face. “It's bigger than we thought,” he said in a whisper that echoed off the glass wall beside them. Beyond, the city of Seattle glistened in the late evening sunlight. “It's not just NASA. We're pretty sure SETI, the Air Force, and the Catholic Church are in on it, too."

  "Is that so?” Leo Stevenson leaned back a few inches, but Delmer followed him, his tie nearly dipping into the glass of mineral water he'd forgotten in his excitement.

  "Yes, it's so. But they're not as big as us. We've got our own people in high places. Very high places."

  Leo smiled. “Where, the Moon?"

  Delmer narrowed his eyes. Was Leo making fun of him? Or was he just putting on a front for the rest of the bar patrons? That was the trouble with conspiracies; even your friends could be in on them, and you never knew for sure. But Leo was above suspicion. Not because he was too honest to have secrets, but because he was too greedy. Leo was a Hollywood producer; if he knew anything about a clandestine space program, he would have made a movie about it years ago.

  "Don't laugh,” Delmer said. “That's where we think their secret base is. On the far side, of course, where astronomers can't see them.” He shook his head sadly. “The legitimate astronomers, that is. Not all of them are on our side. The conspiracy has spread to academia, too.” Delmer scanned the bar nervously. There were a dozen or so occupied tables; most of them held couples deep in conversation, but at one a lone woman nursed a drink and glanced at her watch, and at another sat a man reading a newspaper. Wearing sunglasses.

  Delmer glanced quickly back to Leo. In a real whisper this time, he said, “We're being watched."

  "Really?"

  Delmer admired the cool way Leo rattled the last few ice cubes in his empty rum-and-Coke glass, then sucked one into his mouth, never once looking up. He acted as if it didn't matter to him in the slightest whether federal agents shadowed him in hotel bars. As if the whole situation were inconsequential, a lark.

  "There's just one thing that bothers me about all this,” Leo said, not even bothering to lower his voice. “How could the government start a secret space program and put a base on the Moon and all that, and manage to keep it secret for twenty years? Come on now, you're talking about the same people that screwed up Water
gate and couldn't keep Clinton's sex life or the Bin Laden connection under wraps."

  "Clever diversions, all of them,” Delmer said softly, wishing Leo would quiet down as well. The guy with the newspaper wasn't even pretending to read anymore.

  "Diversions?” Leo asked.

  "That's right. Some of our agents were getting too close to the truth, so they started a scandal to mask the internal shakedown. It's one of the oldest tactics in the book."

  "Is it?” Leo crunched on his ice cube, swallowed.

  "Don't scoff at the government. They kept the F-117 Stealth Fighter secret for years."

  "Hmm.” Leo shrugged. “So what are you going to do about this Black Space Program of yours, now that you know it exists? Sell people UFO insurance?"

  Delmer ignored Leo's dig. Ever since Leo had scored big in the movie industry, he loved jazzing his former college buddies about their mundane professions. Well, Delmer would impress him before the evening was over, he knew it. “We're going to blow it wide open, that's what,” he said. “We'll start with—” He suddenly became aware of a person standing just behind his left elbow. He turned in his chair, expecting to see the muzzle of a gun pointed at him from beneath a folded newspaper, but instead he saw the single woman from the other table. She was tall, rail thin, with dark blond hair that fell in bangs just short of aquamarine eyes. She wore no makeup, and her clothes, from the blue and green flannel shirt to the tight Levis to the canvas hiking-boots, looked like a tourist's attempt to mimic the local grunge scene. Definitely not an executive look.

  "Excuse me,” she said, smiling shyly. Her voice had a slight drawl. Delmer guessed Texas or maybe New Mexico. “I was supposed to meet someone here at seven, but I just realized my watch isn't working. Do either of you have the time?"

  Both Delmer and Leo immediately looked to their wristwatches and said, “Seven thirty."

  "Seven thirty-one,” Delmer amended when he saw the digit change.

  "Oh. Yes, I'm sure I missed him, then. Sorry to have bothered you."

  "Not at all,” Leo said magnanimously.

  The woman took a step past them as if to leave the bar, but her hip bumped the table. Delmer's mineral water sloshed, and he reached to steady it, but she was quicker. “Sorry,” she said, setting the glass back down in front of him. She flashed a quick smile, then turned away again.