NaNoWriMo 3: Taurian

Robert Heinlein Cassidy's resolve wore thin after weeks of living with the natives on Tarsus without speaking a word of their language.

I didn’t learn Taurian because I wanted to. As a kid I never took to other languages, even though my parents tried to make me take French and Latin. I was one of those “I just need English to get by, now let’s get on to the practical stuff” -kind of people.

No, I learned Taurian because I hated being the Human in the tribe. The Taurians around me spoke to each other in that mumbling language, using grunts and hand signs and pats on each other’s bony shoulders to elucidate the meaning in all those garbled consonants. Then Chief or one of the other English scholars translated for Robert the stupid guest, who sat there like an idiot trying to understand what they were talking about. I would have got tired of hearing “What,” “Sorry,” and “Could you repeat that” much sooner than they did. At the end of that first month they would sometimes just pack up and start walking without saying a word, and I followed like a weird naturalist stalker.

Well those barbarians can shove it, I thought. How hard can it be to learn what they’re saying?

Turns out it was really hard. I got Red to start teaching me vocabulary, just a couple words a day that I would try to remember. He got all excited the first day I said something.

I held up a rock and grinned and pointed until I finally got a one word reply, mrbh. Then I picked up some dirt and pointed. Red got it. His nostril hole opened wide so I could tell he was happy. “Mrbha” he said, and he patted me solemnly on the shoulder, as a proud father would his son.

He started picking up everything he could get his hands on and rattling off the Taurian names, but of course I couldn’t remember all that and immediately forgot that mrbh meant rock and mrbha meant soil. “No more,” I said, and I waved my hands around. He put down that stupid sandwich-looking instrument he was trying to name and glared daggers at me.

Red stormed off and found Chief, who barked, “You learn my true words.”

“I can’t remember that many,” I said, too frustrated and embarrassed to laugh at his awkward grasp on New English. “I forget. Go slowly.”

Now both of them glowered, and then turned and stalked off, raising each leg high like the grass near me would contaminate them with human deficiencies. I crossed my arms and wished that in my misspent youth I’d learned to name all the stars as a Taurian. Oh what memory I would have.

So after that Red spoke only the true names of the things I asked him about, and I spent the rest of the day trying to lock those words in my memory. I recited them mentally while I helped splice rope and dig trenches and raise the evening altars. Sometimes I tried to write them down, but how do you transcribe yurgmn when a long R sound and a lilt on the end makes it branch and a subdued U with a clenched fist renders the word ancestor bones?

Sometimes I forgot the words. When I came to Red day after day asking about the same object, he took time to ponder my predicament, and then in an act of alien pity he spoke the mislaid word again. I wished he would just yell at me or refuse me or throw a spear or something, because his noble clemency made me feel a child in grade school again.

I won over the Taurian tongue not by human intelligence but by human stubbornness. Long after Red and Chief and the other Taurians tired of the name game, their faithful Human student brought knickknacks and drawings of animals before them and pointed at distant mountains or body parts. Learning grew easier the more I did it. I came to see some greater form in the Taurian lexicon, and to pick out familiar words in their laconic sentences.

Yet my language acquisition came to a stumbling halt as the list of potential items dwindled and as I grew curious about things that I couldn’t pick up and parade around—wind and love and time. I tried drawing pictures but they either laughed through their gaping nostril holes or slapped their knees or stared at me like they did their prey until I slumped away graciously.

I absorbed these last words slowly, through listening carefully to the grating barbarian noises of their palaver at the evening circle or at the end of a meal or sowing with the women and kids.