A Xenolinguistic Analysis of a Few Lines of Ancient Verse
Here's another typical preliminary paper from a first-year student working on a core course assignment. Its roughness should not be expected to exemplify the standards we demand from finished work.
Consider this poem:
After you jump
With eyes shut tight
Against abrading wind
How will you know
If you fly or fall
Until you hit the ground?
Xenolinguistic analysis suggests the following concerning the author to be true at the time the poem was written:
The author is more than likely…
made of physical matter
not sessile (i.e., not anchored to the ground or some durable object)
sapient (i.e., capable of reflection and self-reflection)
familiar with at least one serial and linear form of communication involving symbolic linguistic representation (probably verbal) of real-world phenomena and manipulation of those symbols for poetic rhythm and meter
resident of a mass in a gravity well with moderately dense atmosphere (dense enough to allow for flight) over a solid enough surface, where flight is common enough to be understood as a phenomenon
capable of experiencing worry over potentially indefinitely delayed self-damaging consequences of an action
…although if the poem is not in the original language, it tells us much more about the translator and/or the expected audience for the poem. I say this last because I believe I found the original (or at least a much, much older) version of this poem in the Library.
To burst into the Void
Braced against the derangement
Of the shredding Roiling
Unknown if the path goes through
Until there is an end
An excellent example of “the more you know, the less you know.” Almost certainly the language in which I found this, being a human language, was not the original language for this poem—or it was not the native language of the original author. And of course I’m showing you my translation into English from the language I found it in, rendered by stylus-in-clay cuneiform, reportedly discovered among a stack of discarded exercises in a corner of a room used for training scribes, waiting to be pulverized and recycled.
But now we know substantially less of the original author. The word I’ve translated as Void had suffix-like inclusions to denote that the term referred to a place and (in modern terms) a deity, something incomprehensible and worthy of terror and respect. These inclusions were only hubristically applied to interior sancta of temples where only the highest priests were allowed after purifications and annointments some hundreds of years after a period when these inclusions were only applied to (assumed) mythological contexts.
Likewise, the glyph-pattern for Roiling is often also translated as void and has many of the same characteristics, but in this case also had the inclusions for place and mythological personification, but reversed, emphasizing agency over placeness, or so I would guess, because evidence of this reversal happening elsewhere is sparse, as is support for my inference.
In fact, the grammar for the cuneiform rendering of this poem is archaic, especially with respect to the stack of exercises among which it was found—a stylized form with elements found only among tales categorized as mythology. But it contains yet another element of weirdness.
It has the feel of a piece excerpted from a retelling of a mythological tale, something you’d expect to be prefaced by “[deity X] spoke of the hardships of their travel.” But even the oldest of those would resort to a first-person pronoun somewhere. Preserved in all the translations is a hypothetical casting that makes it all feel a bit sourceless. Linguistically, however, that matches with a version of the language that is truly ancient, where an “I” point of view is assumed in the absence of a specific designation of an other.
In that interpretation we’re not dealing with a bit of poetry extracted from a mythological fictional or pseudo-historical tale told from a third-person viewpoint, but a literal first-person account, possibly imagined, possibly factual, but from the viewpoint of someone for whom we cannot assume much at all.
In this latter version, the author is more than likely:
sentient and sapient (capable of feeling, of reflection, of self-reflection)
non-sessile (capable of travel)
capable of rational thought sophisticated enough not just for expectations of outcomes but also thinking about the ability or inability to judge likelihoods of outcomes
capable of linguistic (serial, symbolic) communication
has a physiology that can be endangered or at least temporarily inconvenienced by “derangement”
…and that’s about it for possible assumptions. In a language that even in its oldest forms has a vocabulary for all kinds of damage and smiting, derangement was my best choice for deciphering a term the could just as easily have been either confusion or scrambling, complete with cuneiform inclusions denoting “imposed by an external agency,” in contrast to naturally occurring or self-inflicted.
What I’m trying to get at here is that there were many terms that were available to be used for a physical body that could have been smashed or cut or ripped open or had bones broken. One implication of the older translation is that the body of the speaker was not vulnerable to such ordinary damage. Another is that the Void (through which the path is forced) is capable of responding with “scrambling” through the agency of a defending force I’ve translated as the Roiling, which also bears a term designating it as capable of a more mundane form of destruction in the form of tearing something into smaller pieces. (The term I’ve translated as shredding is one of the few words that is more common in later versions of the language.) Yet the speaker in the poem is worried about derangement, not shredding.
My conclusion is that there is a significant-to-strong likelihood that the original author of this poem was either not human or traversing an environment that was not remotely terrestrial, or possibly both.
I admit to a strong temptation to pass it all off as mythology. But I have to take into account that the mythology of pretty much all historical eras involves human-shaped or animal-shaped deities residing in areas similar to Earth-like geographies, even if the environments are inhospitable (but in ordinary ways that cause ordinary damage) and the attributes of the entities are exaggerated or amplified to divine proportions or strengths.
As mythology I would deem the oldest version of this poem extraordinarily unusual and perhaps even unique. It would also be exceptionally rare (or even unique) for it to be the first person account from the travels of a nonhuman entity through non-Earth-like places, but I cannot dismiss the likelihood, and consider the latter just slightly more likely than the former, from a xenolinguistic standpoint.
[On one hand, this is solid C- work and I can’t tell if I’m disappointed. On another, we should determine whether this poem was the careless work of one of the original professors describing their trip to Earth or—a much worse scenario—one of the prisoners of Tartarus relating the tale of having escaped through the abyss many thousands of years ago. Pass this around to the rest of the faculty and we’ll discuss it at the next all-hands meeting.
[If one escaped eight or nine thousand years ago and we’re just now noticing—and it was discovered by a C- first-year student in a routine xenolinguistics assignment—then yes, I am disappointed.
[— [REDACTED], Professor of Applied Xenolinguistics, Deputy Chair of Unconscionable Harm]