Analog SFF, May 2008 Read online

  Swami gazed at one of his trees for a long time, then turned to me again. “That's a tough nut to crack. I have no idea—” Instead of finishing his sentence, he turned to his SmartDesk, and began to surf.

  * * * *

  Though Tyler had been out of his daughter's life for many years, their recent reunion and then her sudden death had been a shock to him. He insisted on a service in the prison, where he could have a little more time with her. The Freedom of Religion Act meant that they almost had to allow the funeral in the prison chapel.

  I'd been in church before, dressed up, for my grandmother's funeral. The church felt like a prison to me then. I think I was about nine. Strangely, this church, which literally was a prison, felt completely free, as if being there was like being in a heaven imagined by that nine-year-old boy.

  It was also strange to be on the same side of the Plexiglas as Tyler. It was strange imagining Tina's ashes in the colorful urn before us. The urn was cloisonné, with lots of little geometric shapes that looked like the stained glass window above the simple altar. It was strange to stare up at that window and imagine Tyler hacking our computer from there.

  A few of Tyler's inmate friends came, patted Tyler's shoulder, and then sat down, leaving him alone. I was the only outsider in the chapel until Tina's mother showed up.

  "Look there,” Tyler said. “The devil in a deep blue dress."

  She was a worn but attractive woman with heavily teased blond hair and a beauty scar on her lip. She cried when she saw the urn. Then she loudly informed Tyler that he was in prison. Other than that snide remark and his raspberry reply, they did not speak to each other. I sat on the front bench, next to Tyler. I didn't want to look at anyone because if I saw someone cry, I might choke up too, so I fixated on the urn.

  "Why did Tina do it?” I found myself asking while we waited for the preacher to arrive.

  "I think she was looking for love, but couldn't find it,” he said. “There's an old Beatles song where the singer refuses to live in a world without love."

  "I don't know. That's pretty old-fashioned. Love, I mean. I happen to know that Tina thought so. She thought love was impractical, unenlightened, unattainable, and all that jack. It's a sign of weakness, to need someone, isn't it?"

  "Ah, I see. She told you all that?"

  "Yeah."

  Tyler had a twinkle in his eye. “She must have loved you quite a bit then."

  "Very funny."

  "I've heard that some Asians don't like to show affection because it places a burden on the one you love, making them feel indentured. Some people have to love like that, in secret."

  "That's jacked,” I said. “If love has to take a back seat to all that, what good is it?"

  Tyler didn't answer, but he squinted slightly, looking pained.

  "No, man,” I said. “Love is dead."

  It was true, but it was the wrong choice of words. I pursed my lips in apology, just as the preacher came in from the back.

  We had to be quiet when the service started. I pretty much ignored the sermon because I was afraid I might actually cry. So I fixated on the windows that made a colorful pattern that reached to the top of an A-shaped frame that pretended to be a vaulted ceiling. No one there but Tyler and I knew what the windows really were. And only I knew that Swami was tuned in at the receiving end of a prayer.

  "Send and pray,” they called it, when you sent a message, not knowing whether it was received. The phrase fit my little scheme, only in this case it was more of a “pray and send,” like putting a five-dollar nickel in a slot machine and hoping you hit the flapjack.

  The service ended and everyone left, just like that. No one really cared. Tyler and I lingered, and then he was ready to go too, but I stopped him.

  "Do me a favor,” I said.

  "What's that?"

  "Pray to the system.” He looked confused, so I said, “The great Swami in the sky is listening."

  "Oh ho!"

  The two of us knelt at the altar, acting as serious as could be, me with my hands folded and my head “upfull,” as Swami called it. Tyler started chanting passwords, glancing up at the stained glass window with each one. Three of the colored panes were pulsing with oily patterns, but the one at the apex remained sky blue. After several attempts, pale letters appeared on the blue window: CREDENTIALS AUTHENTICATED.

  "All set,” said Tyler.

  "I've got a little prayer of my own,” I said, pulling out a paper note from my pocket.

  My boss, Dave, had once sent out copies of a book called The Pharaoh's Headstand, which was all about employee empowerment. The idea was to turn the corporate pyramid upside-down, hence the “pharaoh's headstand.” Obviously, the book was propaganda to make us think the company cared, when all they really did for us was to buy the lousy book. “Employees are the most important stakeholders,” and crap like that. Well, if that's the way they wanted it, I was more than willing to put them on their heads.

  My notes were a carefully worded set of parameters to the board of directors program. I prayed for a new profit paradigm. I prayed for a new definition of human capital, one that would make us assets that more than paid for ourselves. I prayed to reverse hyperownership and to reassess the priorities of Good Fortune. It was my own test signal, injected into the most vital organ of the company. Maybe the results would project more profit in the long run. Who knows?

  Tyler was gazing up at the window. “Look,” he said. “The writing on the wall."

  It was the return display, and as I watched, words appeared: INPUT ACCEPTED.

  Tyler looked at me like a proud father. “Still sure love is dead?” he said.

  I shrugged. Well, I sure as hell wasn't feeling any love. I was just thinking that it would be good if Kaitlin could keep her job, if Swami could find his holy grail, and if I didn't take all the company's money.

  It would also be good to discover something really important by accident. I was getting the hang of that.

  Copyright (c) 2008 David Bartell

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Science Fact: STRANGE CROAKS AND GHASTLY ASPIRATIONS by Henry Honken

  The Khoesan family, also know as the Click family, contains some thirty or so languages spoken by small populations in Botswana, Namibia, and adjacent regions. Formerly, these languages, famous for their distinctive click sounds, may have occupied much of Southern Africa.

  To the first Europeans to make contact with Click languages, the clicks were startling enough. The name Hottentot[1], originally applied to herding Khoesan like the Cape Khoekhoe, is Afrikaans for “click and clack.” But the unusual vowel colorings of some Khoesan languages also impressed the settlers who complained of “strange croaks and ghastly aspirations."

  [Note 1. There are many theories about the name's origin. Per Schapera (1965: 44), it is from Huttentut, an onomatopoeic word for “stutterer” applied to the people by the early Dutch settlers.]

  Khoesan speakers are aware that their languages are distinctive. The South African linguist Dorothea Bleek wrote that one of her /Xam informants said that “Europeans speak with the front of their mouths and Bushmen speak with the backs of their mouths.” The Khoesan language Ju/'hoan contrasts kokxui “to speak” with maqni “to speak a non-click language” and other Khoesan speakers make a similar distinction.

  While European languages like English don't use the click sound category, the symmetries exhibited by consonants are actually fairly similar in both groups. The roughly six thousand languages now spoken or signed by human beings make use of about two hundred sounds. Of that number at most a score are universal, in the sense that they are found in nearly all languages and are the most common sounds in those languages.

  The number of sounds used in any given language varies enormously, from a minimum of eleven in Rotokas (spoken in Bougainville, an island off Papua New Guinea) and Piraha (spoken in South America) to one hundred sixty-three in the Khoesan language !Xoo. Most languages have thirty to forty sounds an
d English, the language of this article, falls in that range with thirty-six distinct sounds[2].

  [Note 2. The phoneme inventory of English discussed here is based on my own speech: standard Midwestern American with a light overlay of Minnesota and Wisconsin regional speech. Many speakers of English will have different contrasts. For example, Americans from the Dakotas, lacking the a/o contrast, pronounce dog and log as “dahg” and “lahg” to rhyme with Prague. But in the UK, many speakers pronounce the words not and cot (for me [nat] and [kat]) with the same vowel as my dog, law, fought and all; that is, their not rhymes with my naught. Similarly, many Americans only have ‘zh’ within a word like leisure [leezher] and never at the beginning.]

  One striking property of human sound systems is symmetry: the sounds of a language can normally be divided into groups based on shared properties. I will illustrate this with examples from English. The distinction between vowels (resonant sounds with minimal turbulent airflow) and consonants (sounds with some degree of constriction) is universal. There are twelve vowels and twenty-five consonants in English (my version, see note 2). Table 1 will give some idea of the internal structure of the consonant part of this system.

  * * * *

  Table 1: Consonant System of English

  * * * *

  In Table 1, p, t, k represent the initial sounds of pat, tap, cat. The symbol

  represents the ch—in chat. Similarly, b, d,

  , g are the initial sounds of bat, dot, jot and got. The sounds p, t, k and their voiced equivalents are technically known as stops because they are formed by completely stopping the flow of air from the lungs out of the mouth for a short interval.

  English also has fricatives—sounds formed by allowing air to escape through a constriction. The symbols f,

  , s,

  represent the initial sounds of fink, think, sink and shrink. The v,

  , z,

  of vine, thine, zeal and genre[3] are their voiced counterparts.

  [Note 3. English speakers who have zh only word-internally in words like leisure [leezher] pronounce this word [janre]; others, like me, pronounce it [zhanre].]

  Finally, English has the nasals m, n,

  in same, sane, sang, the continuants r, l in right, light and the approximants w, y,

  , h in wet, yet, what and hat. In producing nasals, the air, stopped from exiting through the mouth, escapes continuously through the nose, causing nasals to sometimes pattern with the oral stops and sometimes with the continuants. Continuants are consonants which are normally voiced and can be prolonged like vowels. Approximants “approximate” two articulators (the active articulators are the movable parts of the mouth, the lips, tongue and glottis) but not closely enough to produce much friction.

  The information in Table 1 has been introduced here for two purposes: first, to give an example of how sound systems are structured. The data in the second part of this article will show that the sound systems of the Click languages are like that of English in many ways. For example, there is a clear division between vowels and consonants, and the consonants, both click and non-click, can be divided into stops, fricatives and nasals.

  The second purpose is to illustrate the way in which sound systems are both symmetrical and asymmetrical. In the upper rows of the table, each column has the same point of articulation—for example p, b are both labial (made with the lips)—but the sounds in row 1 are voiceless, those in row 2 voiced (made with the vocal cords vibrating). Likewise, rows 3 and 4 have a voicing contrast.

  But there is an asymmetry between the two stop rows and the two fricative rows. English has two fricatives, interdental

  and sibilant s in the T-column, but lacks a fricative in the K-column. As it happens, English used to have a fricative here, a throat scrape like the ch in German lachen “to laugh.” The gh in night is a fossil of this sound which has been lost in modern English (compare the German nacht “night").

  * * * *

  Table 1 doesn't include all the sounds used by speakers of English, only those sounds used in normal speech. Interjections like wow, uh-huh, and ugh sometimes have unique sound structures. For example, to hush someone we may say shhh!, a prolonged sh sound not followed by a vowel, although normal English syllables always contain a vowel. And the interjection of agreement, uh-huh, contains a nasalized vowel like the vowels in French Jean, vin, or brun, even though in normal vocabulary English doesn't have a contrast between oral and nasal vowels.

  Among such unique sounds in English are two which are technically called clicks. The first is usually spelled tsk-tsk and used to express mock pity or sometimes annoyance. It is produced by placing the front part of the tongue behind the upper front teeth and palate in such a way as to enclose a body of air, moving the center of the tongue downward to rarefy the air in the cavity, producing a sucking sound when the closure is released and air rushes into the pocket. The second, traditionally used to urge horses to move, is made by pulling the right side of the tongue away from the upper side teeth with a sharp sucking sound and has no accepted spelling in English.

  Human beings can make many sounds that are never used in speech. So far as is known, no human language uses slaps on the cheek or finger snaps as speech sounds. In the majority of human languages, clicks, if used at all, are minor sounds as they are in English. But a few languages, almost all spoken in South and East Africa, employ clicks as standard speech sounds. Indeed, in some of these languages clicks are the most common type of consonant.

  In spite of sharing this unusual phonetic feature, the languages that use clicks as speech sounds are not all related. Roughly speaking they fall into three groups. The first of these groups is traditionally referred to as Khoesan[4], and comprises what are usually regarded as the indigenous languages of South Africa, those languages spoken there before the incursions of Europeans and Bantu-speaking populations. According to current views among Khoesanists, the thirty-odd surviving Khoesan languages fall into three unrelated families: Northern or Ju, Central or Khoe, Southern or Tuu, and several isolates[5]: Hoan, Kwadi, and two languages spoken in Tanzania, Sandawe and Hadza.

  [Note 4. The traditional scholarly name for these languages is derived from the Khoekhoegowap words khoe “person” and saan “gatherers.” In earlier literature, it is usually spelled Khoisan; at present, the spelling Khoesan, closer to the etymology, is preferred.]

  [Note 5. A language isolate is a language without known relatives. For example, the Basque language, spoken in Spain and France, is the sole modern survivor of a group of languages spoken in the Iberian area before Indo-European speakers arrived.]

  The second group consists of those Southern Bantu[6] languages which appear to have borrowed clicks from Khoesan. The third is Dahalo, a Cushitic[7] language spoken in Tanzania, which again is presumed to have borrowed the clicks.

  [Note 6. The Bantu language family includes well-known languages like Swahili, Herero, and Kikuyu.]

  [Note 7. The most familiar Cushitic language is Somali.]

  The only language outside Africa known to use clicks as regular speech sounds is Damin, a ceremonial language formerly spoken in Australia, which is phonologically so unusual in other respects that some linguists think it was an invented language. The Lardil themselves say Damin was invented by the legendary figure Kalthad.

  Bantu languages are spoken over a wide area including South Africa. Speakers of Bantu languages are thought to have begun to enter the Cape and displace the indigenous populations about 2,000 years ago, resulting in a long and intense history of intercultural contacts. Since only those Bantu languages spoken in South Africa have clicks and many of the Bantu click-words can be related to Khoesan words, scholars are certain the Bantu clicks result from borrowing rather than independent development. Especially strong evidence for this is provided by closely related Southern Bantu languages like Northern and Southern Sotho, only one of which has click words.

  Only some of the South African Bantu languages use clicks, among them Xhosa
, Zulu, Southern Sotho, and Yeyi. Xhosa is notable as the native language of South Africans Nelson Mandela and the singer Miriam Makeba and its name begins with a click (the lateral or English “horse-cluck” click). Borrowed sounds though they are, clicks are quite prominent in these languages. One estimate is that in Xhosa and Zulu, some 15% of the vocabulary consists of click words.

  The Cushitic languages are spoken in North and East Africa from Sudan to Tanzania. Dahalo, a dying language spoken by less than 500 individuals in Tanzania, is the only Cushitic language to have clicks. Again, since clicks can't be reconstructed for the ancestor of Cushitic, they are taken to be borrowed in Dahalo, although so far, none of the forty or so click words in Dahalo can be clearly related to Sandawe or Hadza, the two other click languages spoken in Tanzania. It is also possible the Dahalo replaced their original language with a Cushitic language retaining a few of their ancestral words.

  Damin is a curiosity. Until recently, it was used by initiated men of the Lardil tribe in Australia as a secret language. The grammar is identical with that of Lardil, though simplified, and the vocabulary is very small with one word having many meanings. Damin has a number of sounds unusual not only among Australian languages but unusual worldwide, including a voiceless l (like the Welsh ll) pronounced with breath sucked in, an ejective p formed by pressure between the tongue and the closed lips, and four nasal clicks in different positions.

  The click languages par excellence are the Khoesan languages, at present spoken mostly in Botswana, Namibia, and Angola. Only around thirty Khoesan languages are still extant, many others having vanished as the Khoesan populations were pinched between the Bantu filtering down from the north and Europeans pushing up from the south. Still others may simply not have been noticed. A few years ago, a Tuu language called N/u which had been thought to be extinct turned out to have a dozen surviving speakers and a number of partial speakers[8].