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We Have Always Spoken Panglish
We Have Always Spoken Panglish
We Have Always Spoken Panglish
by Suzette Haden Elgin
"Oh ha, Alyssa! You look like a flower blooming; you move over the land like a white sailboat over the
sea; sweet fragrant grass springs up under your feet as you pass; you bring radiant light with you!"
"Oh ha, Bru," I said to him. "Oh ha, Fadrien," I said to his wife. And that was
all
I said. It was hard
enough to have to listen to the Yegerrian expats' endless compliments-of-greeting with a straight face; I
only tried to produce them myself when I was meeting a Yegerrian for the first time and in my official
capacity. I had memorized one relatively brief example for that purpose: "You bring pleasant images to
my mind; you distract me from my cares." I used it the way we've always used "It's a pleasure to meet
you" in Panglish, and with an equal lack of commitment to honesty.
To be fair, the compliments didn't sound quite so bad when they were spoken in the Yegerrians' native
language. In Beydini they had to rhyme, and that was at least pleasant for the ear. But in Panglish? What
they remind me of most strongly is the flowery compliments ancient French used for closing personal
letters, all about thousands of warm embraces and thousands of faithful vows and pretty little cabbages.
They're a nuisance and a waste of time, but no one has had any luck convincing the Yegerrians to leave
them out when they're speaking Panglish.
The Beydini language doesn't deserve U.S. Corps of Linguists fieldwork; there's no need for a detailed
study of yet one more run-of-the-mill humanoid subject/verb/object language. We can all safely assume
that USCOL's interest is linked not to linguistic theory but to the current administration's political
agenda. But I'm not complaining—not when I have a luxury posting like this one. Seagarden, on the
planet Estrada-Blair, is every linguist's dream assignment. (Well, every
lazy
linguist's dream
assignment!) Seagarden is an elegant modern city, right on an ocean very much like Earth's
Mediterranean Sea, but with pleasanter weather. Lovely restaurants and museums and shops and parks …
broad streets lined with beautiful homes in the full range of galactic styles from Ancient Classical to
Pseudo-Stochastic … Who could complain? If I'd been posted to the planet Yegerry, way out behind the
end of nowhere, I would have complained nonstop. But USCOL isn't about to spend the money
that
would cost, not when they can so much more cheaply send me here to the expat district on Estrada-Blair.
My only problem has been how to do my fieldwork with the Yegerrians slowly enough to extend my stay
in this wonderful place, but not so slowly that I make them suspicious back in Washington. I've had a
delightful two weeks, and I intend to keep my head down and drag this assignment out for just as long as
I can.
This evening, Bru and Fadrien were taking me out to dinner. It would be my first opportunity to see the
vast slum called Benedict's Gate, behind the high wall that separates it from the rest of Seagarden. I saw
Benedict's Gate as I flew in, of course, just before landing; it seemed to go on forever, and I'm told that in
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We Have Always Spoken Panglish
fact it covers almost ten square miles. It's a rectangle, bounded on two sides by high white cliffs, on a
third by the ocean, and on the other by the boundary wall. The people who live there look, physically,
just like the people beyond the wall; the difference is that the Losheffas from the slum look (and are)
desperately poor, and the Hisheffas from beyond the wall look (and are) pleasantly wealthy. (In Sheffa
Panglish, "beyond the wall" is a phrase that means "expensive and highly valued," as in "That house is
truly beyond the wall, but I plan to buy it anyway.") Sheff is divided only by a gulf of money and
material things and privilege, and that suffices; every Sheffan city has its boundary wall in honor of that
gulf. There are no Midsheffas, just the high and the low. I doubt that the system can be justified in any
system of Terran morality; but then I don't know much about it. I'm here to work with Beydini, not with
Sheffa Panglish, and I give my full attention to the Yegerrians.
We got into Benedict's Gate by going through an
actual
gate built into the boundary wall. It was a
windowless white-walled tunnel with barriers at each end, staffed by two hulking robots programmed to
keep us moving briskly along.
"It takes a lot longer going the other direction," Fadrien told me. I liked Fadrien; I wouldn't have wanted
to live the way she lived, with nothing to do but shop and go out for fancy lunches with her friends and
follow Bru around on request, but I liked her all the same. She was good company, and she was always
willing to answer yet one more silly question about Beydini verbs.
"Is Benedict's Gate worth the trouble?" I asked her. More importantly, I thought, is the restaurant worth
the trouble? I was more interested in food than in slum architecture.
"Would we be taking you there if it wasn't?" she said, smiling at me. "You'll see. Any minute now, when
the barrier goes up."
I wasn't prepared for what I saw then, in spite of having watched a long training threedy for Seagarden
back on Earth. In the threedy the slum had looked colorful and busy and exotic—and slightly tacky. Up
close and real, it was different; it took your breath away. I stood there staring at it, and then after a
minute or two I realized that the Yegerrians were watching me the way I'd watch a giraffe at the zoo,
amused by my totally unprofessional reaction, and I snapped out of it in a hurry. Linguists aren't
supposed to be subject to trances of astonishment.
"That's amazing," I said. "How is it done? I seem to remember from the pre-post briefing that they use
mud … But is that right? It doesn't seem likely, somehow."
"Well, it's a special
kind
of mud," Bru said. "Not Earth mud—not Yegerry mud either. The Losheffans
mix it with different liquids, depending on the color they're after, and they stabilize it somehow—sorry, I
don't remember the details—and then they spread it over the walls in all those patterns and borders. It
goes on nonstop, I guess; no matter when you come here, even late at night, you'll see Losheffans
working at it. I think their goal is for every vertical surface except the windows—they don't like to
obstruct the view through the windows—to be a work of art. Whether they succeed, I'm not qualified to
say; tastes differ. Fadrien thinks it's gorgeous, and I'm inclined to agree."
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We Have Always Spoken Panglish
In all directions, the buildings and walls stretched away from us, covered with the glowing patterns of
color. Sometimes the patterns were flowers or birds or ocean waves, sometimes they were simple
geometric shapes, sometimes they were fractals; sometimes they looked like calligraphy, but not in any
language I was familiar with. Sometimes they were truly alien and I wasn't at all sure how to classify
them. Every detail seemed to me to be carefully chosen … nothing glaring, nothing shocking, nothing
tawdry; always, the choices were subtle and harmonious.
"I've seen some of those patterns before," I said slowly, "but I don't remember where."
Fadrien laughed. "You've seen them on Hisheffan dishes and curtains and shirts and swimsuits," she said.
"The Hisheffans are very fond of them."
I nodded, remembering. "Like the shirt I bought yesterday."
"Yes."
"Do they pay the Losheffan artists when they use the patterns?"
"Oh, no," she said. "
You
know how they are."
"Losheffans start working on this stuff when they're just toddlers," Bru told me. "They practice with
plain mud on flat rocks until some adult says they're good enough to move on to the real thing."
"Everybody does this?"
He shrugged, and looked at Fadrien, who shook her head to tell him she didn't know either. "So far as I
recall, it's everybody," he said. "If anybody is excluded … or maybe just doesn't want to be involved, and
doesn't take part … I don't know about it. I never thought about it before, Alyssa. I'm afraid I'm not very
interested in the Losheffans."
"Oh? Why not?"
"Well … It's interesting that they want to make the slum attractive to look at, I suppose, but it's still a
slum. A ghetto, really. I'm not interested, basically, in people who don't care enough to try to get ahead in
their world."
How do you
know
they don't try?
I thought, but I kept still. When I was with Bru and Fadrien I was on
duty, and the more shallow I kept our conversations, the better. Sightseeing. The weather. Food. And the
words and grammar of Beydini, of course; in that one area, it was safe not to be shallow, as long as I was
careful not to say anything about how ordinary and
typical
the language was.
"I hope you don't think Bru is a snob," Fadrien said then, sounding a little uneasy, which meant that my
body language was giving me away in spite of my best intentions. I'd been finding it a little hard to
maintain my professional persona with the Yegerrian expatriates, because I kept losing my awareness
that they weren't Terrans. It's easy to stay "on duty" when the creatures you're interacting with have two
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We Have Always Spoken Panglish
heads or look like giant caterpillars or some such thing. When they're like the Yegerrians and the
Sheffans, and they look and talk just like the people you know at home, it's not so simple. So Yegerrians
have two appendixes instead of one, and their pancreas is located in their upper chest, and their hair is
always curly … so the Sheffans are a bit taller than Terrans and have six toes instead of five … they both
could still move right into any home or office on Earth and never be spotted as ETs.
"Of course I don't think he's a snob," I said, trying to sound entirely casual, no judgment of any kind
implied. "He's a physicist—why should he be interested in the people of Benedict's Gate? Fortunately,
however, even physicists are interested in
food.
Which way to the restaurant?"
It was close by, close enough that we decided to walk. The streets were narrow and twisting and
crowded; the buildings that lined them were rarely separated from the sidewalks by more than a flat
steppingstone under the front door. And calling the walkways "sidewalks" was using the term loosely,
since they were so narrow that we had to walk in single file. I wasn't surprised. In any slum where the
population keeps growing but the boundaries are fixed, so that space grows ever more precious, that
happens, and is in no way unusual. There
was
something unusual, however, and it wasn't just the
decoration: Benedict's Gate was the first
clean
slum I had ever seen. Since endangered languages
ordinarily are spoken by
poor
people, I've worked in dozens of slums, and I'd never seen a truly clean
one before. Benedict's Gate was grotesquely crowded, and in many ways very strange-looking, but the
word "squalid" just didn't apply. Which meant that the word "slum" didn't apply either, strictly speaking,
because "Squalid" is one of the defining semantic characteristics of "slum"…
Oops.
That line of thought wouldn't do—I must
not
let myself get interested in Benedict's Gate or its
inhabitants. That was always a danger when you did fieldwork; USCOL sent you to find out about the
Whuffledinger verbs, but you found the Whuffledingers living among the Baffleclangers, and
their
verbs
turned out to be far more interesting than the ones assigned to you, so you thought you'd just look at two
or three of them, just gathering knowledge for the sake of knowledge, what could be more pure? And
first thing you knew, you were deeply into the analysis of the Baffleclangers' language and far behind
with the job you were being paid a very handsome salary to do. There was no quicker way to find
yourself assigned—permanently—to a desk in Washington, D.C.
Focus on the restaurant, Alyssa.
The Lavender Lamp Cafe was a small square building with a tiny front courtyard and a door opening
directly into the dining room. A lavender lamp hung over the door, justifying the name, and the
decorative patterns were rows of white-tipped ocean waves in various shades from the palest lavender to
deep purple. Not my favorite colors but pleasant enough.
"How do they make the mud-colors
glow
like that?" I asked Bru as we went inside.
He shrugged. "I have no idea," he said. "Something about the native soil, I suppose, or something they
put in the liquids they mix it with. We can ask somebody while we're here, if you like. The family that
runs this place is always willing to join a conversation."
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We Have Always Spoken Panglish
"No," I said. "Thanks, but it's not necessary. It's not important."
I forgot my questions when the food came; I tend to forget everything when the food comes, if it's at all
good. On the other side of the boundary wall we ate well, but we ate the things you eat everywhere in the
cities of the Panglish-speaking worlds. The Lavender Lamp Cafe had food that was
different.
We kept
calling the young waiter back to ask him what this was and what that was and how it was made. And
then, as we were talking to him about a soup that he told us was made with three different kinds of
flowers,
I asked the wrong question. "I understand that in Panglish this is called Three-Flower Soup," I
said. "But what do you call it in
your
language?"
The boy frowned at me, looking baffled; I was sure he couldn't be more than fifteen, and it was
disgraceful that he was working. "Panglish
is
my language," he said.
"I'm not making myself clear," I said. "Look … Wait, what's your name?"
"I'm called Fyee," he said. One syllable. A good old Panglish name, never mind the fact that starting
words with an FY cluster was totally unPanglish. "Fyee Bahron."
"Well, Mr. Bahron—"
He raised his hands. "I'm Fyee," he said quietly. "My
father
is Mr. Bahron."
"I'm sorry. Fyee, then. Fyee, what I meant was this: What is Three-Flower Soup called in your native
language? The native language of the Losheffans?"
"Three-Flower Soup," he said.
I should have stopped then. I had no business whatsoever pursuing the matter, and it was obvious that I
was embarrassing the boy. But I'm a linguist, and I really did think that Fyee and I were just involved in
one of those standard "What are your people called?"/"We're called The People" loops.
"Then could you tell me," I said, trying a different path to the information I wanted, "how you would
translate 'Three-Flower Soup' into your own native language? If you were eating it at home, for example,
with your family?"
"Excuse me," he said. "I will call my father." And the man who came back with Fyee from the kitchen to
our table looked at me as if I were being the Ugly Terran—which I was; he was quite right—and said
immediately, "Miss, Panglish
is
our native language. And we call this soup Three-Flower Soup."
I did shut up then, hoping I could salvage the situation and restore the sort of atmosphere that's
appropriate for a pleasant evening out and a good dinner. I thanked him for his help, adding almost-
Yegerrian compliments for his restaurant and his son and his food until he seemed to me to be mollified.
But my mind was racing. Because Panglish isn't
anybody's
native language; Panglish is an artificial
synthesis of the many different Englishes that spread over Earth in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. Linguists had finally scrubbed the bugs out of it and written a thorough grammar, and it had
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