Acorna's Rebels
Page 29
So there were all those years spent doing things like transcribing tonal Oriental languages on staff paper (the Field Methods instructor was Not Amused) and tape-recording Swahili women at weddings, and then I got the degree and wandered off to play with computers and never had any use for the stuff again…until Acorna’s people appeared on the scene. It required a sharp ear and some facility for linguistic analysis to make sense of the subtle sound changes with which their language signaled syntactic changes; I quite enjoyed the challenge.
The notes appended here represent my first and necessarily tentative analysis of certain patterns in Linyaari phonemics and morphophonemics. If there is any inconsistency between this analysis and the Linyaari speech patterns recorded in the later adventures of Acorna, please remember that I was working from a very limited database and, what is perhaps worse, attempting to analyze a decidedly nonhuman language with the aid of the only paradigms I had, twentieth-century linguistic models developed exclusively from human language. The result is very likely as inaccurate as were the first attempts to describe English syntax by forcing it into the mold of Latin, if not worse. My colleague, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, has by now added her own notes to the small corpus of Linyaari names and utterances, and it may well be that in the next decade there will be enough data available to publish a truly definitive dictionary and grammar of Linyaari, an undertaking which will surely be of inestimable value not only to those members of our race who are involved in diplomatic and trade relations with this people, but also to everyone interested in the study of language.
NOTES ON THE LINYAARI LANGUAGE
1. A doubled vowel indicates stress: aavi, abaanye, khleevi.
2. Stress is used as an indicator of syntactic function: in nouns stress is on the penultimate syllable, in adjectives on the last syllable, in verbs on the first.
3. Intervocalic n is always palatalized.
Noun plurals are formed by adding a final vowel, usually -i: one Liinyar, two Linyaari. Note that this causes a change in the stressed syllable (from LI-nyar to Li-NYA-ri) and hence a change in the pattern of doubled vowels.
For nouns whose singular form ends in a vowel, the plural is formed by dropping the original vowel and adding -i: ghaanye, ghaanyi. Here the number of syllables remains the same, therefore no stress/spelling change is required.
4. Adjectives can be formed from nouns by adding a final -ii (again, dropping the original final vowel if one exists): maalive, malivii; Liinyar, Linyarii. Again, the change in stress means that the doubled vowels in the penultimate syllable of the noun disappear.
5. For nouns denoting a class or species, such as Liinyar, the noun itself can be used as an adjective when the meaning is simply to denote a member of the class, rather than the usual adjective meaning of “having the qualities of this class.” Thus, of the characters in Acorna, only Acorna herself could be described as “a Liinyar girl,” but Judit, although human, would certainly be described as “a Linyarii girl,” or “a just-as-civilized-as-a-real-member-of-the-People” girl.
6. Verbs can be formed from nouns by adding a prefix constructed by [first consonant of noun] + ii + nye: faalar—grief; fiinyefalar—to grieve.
7. The participle is formed from the verb by adding a suffix -an or -en: thiinyethilel—to destroy, thiinyethilelen—destroyed. No stress change is involved because the participle is perceived as a verb form and therefore stress remains on the first syllable:
enye-ghanyii—time unit, small portion of a year (ghaanye)
fiinyefalaran—mourning, mourned
ghaanye—a Linyaari year, equivalent to about 113&frac; earth years
gheraalye malivii—Navigation Officer
gheraalye ve-khanyii—Senior Communications Specialist
Khleevi—originally, a small vicious carrion feeding animal with a poisonous bite; now used by the Linyaari to denote the invaders who destroyed their home world.
khleevi—barbarous, uncivilized, vicious without reason
Liinyar—member of the People
Linyaari—civilized; like a Liinyar
Mitanyaakhi—large number (slang—like our “zil-lions”)
narhii—new
thiilir, thiliiri—small arboreal mammals of Linyaari home world
thiilel—destruction
visedhaanye ferilii—Envoy Extraordinary
Acknowledgments
Thanks again to Rick Reaser for science, salvage, and cultural consultation regarding Linyaari birth disks. Thanks also to Martin H. Greenberg for his support of the Acorna books, and to Denise Little, our editor at Teknobooks, for her careful editing and suggestions. Thanks also to Diana Gill, our editor at HarperCollins, for her suggestions on how to improve the book.
About the Authors
Anne McCaffrey is considered one of the world’s leading science-fiction writers. She has won the Hugo and Nebula awards as well as six Science Fiction Book Club awards for her novels. Brought up in the United States, she is now living in Ireland with her Maine coon cats, her piebald mare, and a silver Weimaraner and declines to travel anymore. She is best known for her unique Dragonriders of Pern series.
Elizabeth Ann Scarborough is the author of Channeling Cleopatra and the Nebula Award-winning The Healer’s War, as well as more than twenty science fiction and fantasy novels. She lives in the Puget Sound area of Washington State.
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BOOKS OF THE ACORNA SERIES
First Warning
by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
Acorna’s Triumph
by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
Acorna’s Rebels
by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
Acorna’s Search
by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
Acorna’s World
by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
Acorna’s People
by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
Acorna’s Quest
by Anne McCaffrey and Margaret Ball
Acorna
by Anne McCaffrey and Margaret Ball
See Also
Anne McCaffrey’s The Unicorn Girl
An illustrated novel featuring stories by
Mickey Zucker Reichert, Jody Lynn Nye,
and Roman A. Ranieri
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ACORNA’S REBELS. Copyright © 2003 by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of PerfectBound™.
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Mobipocket Reader July 2005 ISBN 0-06-087775-8
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