The Sylph Speaks! (Patreon)

Listener Jackson took the rare step to pre-um, actually us, and as promised in the last episode, here is his analysis of the German Linguist's interrogation of the Slender Sylph:

I, Jackson Crawford, M.A., Ph.D., FPh.D., have tumbled to the fact that some readers will be unaware of what's going on with the captive woman's language and why Serviss calls it "Aryan." I'm no David Becker, but I've taught what's now called Indo-European historical linguistics at a couple universities even Charles Kim would raise an eyebrow at, so let me see if I can clear this up cozily for 372 Pages.

The nameless professor from Heidelberg, who can't even speak English without using German word order that makes him sound like Yoda, realizes the woman is speaking the language at "the roots of the great Indo-European, or Aryan stock."

The basic science that Serviss is assing around with is this: Most languages of Europe and the northern half of India go back to one common ancestor language about 5,000 years ago, which we call Proto-Indo-European (and Serviss usually calls Aryan, which I'll get back to in a second). Think of the different languages as different branches on a tree, or as the long, slender fingers on a hand if you like. The further you go back in time, the more each language looks like each other one at the same time. What linguists have done, starting in the 19th century, is triangulate from the regular changes we can see in the historical development of attested languages to reconstruct what their ancestor language was like. We have a good degree of confidence in our reconstruction because it produces predictable, testable results: there's kind of a "formula" for deriving basic English from it, or basic Albanian from it.

The term "Aryan" got applied to this ancestor language in the decades before the 1940s because that term is used in one of the earliest known languages on the tree (Sanskrit) as a self-designation for the Indic peoples who spoke it. It was mistakenly assumed that this was a self-designation of the proto-language speakers themselves, but we now think it wasn't. Unfortunately, some prominent Nazis were into historical linguistics, and saw themselves as reclaiming this ancestral legacy, and so their party adopted the term. Note that modern linguistics does not make claims about the ethnicity of speakers (any person can learn any language), but in the 19th and early 20th century it was common for people to speculate on the "race" of the speakers of the ancestor language, and to see Proto-Indo-European as the foundational language of the "white race," as the Nazis did, and as Serviss does in a less malicious way.

The problem with both the Nazis' interpretation, and with Serviss's interpretation, is that all languages are constantly changing--they can't *help* but change--every generation. What we reconstruct as Proto-Indo-European is the last common ancestor of all the Indo-European languages from English to Albanian to Hindi, but importantly *that language had ancestors too.* It's a link in a chain, not the original chain. The claim the Heidelberg professor character makes about the captive woman belonging to "the oldest family of the human race" was absurd even in the 1890s when scholars knew that humans had something like a one-million year fossil history (again, Proto-Indo-European gets us back to only maybe 5,000 years ago).

So this is what's really stupid about her language. If Martians kidnapped speakers of Proto-Indo-European thousands of years ago, by 1898 they'd be speaking a language as different from Proto-Indo-European as English is. Not all languages change as much as every other (my specialty is Icelandic, which has famously changed less than other related languages in the last millennium). But in every language community, kids talk different from how their grandparents did. Would Thomas Edison even understand what you meant if you told him his flying space car was a "hell of a rig"? I doubt it, and he died in 1931. You can also already hear that the accent of Americans today is different from the accent in 1940s movies. Not to mention my confidence in Edison's team is low when I reflect that English and German split only about 2000 years ago and yet the great professor of linguistics from Heidelberg still speaks English through a thick filter of German syntax.

Oh, and Proto-Indo-European wasn't spoken in "the Vale of Cashmere" as he says in a part a little later than this week's reading selection. It wasn't a written language so we can't be 100% sure, but the reconstructed vocabulary itself plus hints from archaeology suggest it was spoken near the Black Sea.

Anyway if I accept Serviss's premise that the captive woman somehow speaks a language that hasn't changed in a few thousand years, it's not *as* absurd to think that linguists could figure out how to understand and communicate with her--like I said, we're confident about our reconstruction of the proto-language. But my confidence is again shaken a little bit when I see that I don't even recognize most of the words and phrases Serviss gives in Chapter 13. Either Serviss made them up mostly, or 1890s linguistics was way behind where I thought it was. The word for "copper" looks about right but that's it. I also assume that her name, "Aina," is meant to mean something like "The One" or "The Only."

Of course, learning to be fluent in any language in two weeks is idiotic, no matter how much prep and specialized knowledge you have.

I have a video that sums this stuff up at https://youtu.be/9UQnSmEzxMI

I hope I made that half interesting (and of course reach out by email or twitter or text if I can clear this kind of thing up further).

All the best,

Jackson

Jackson Crawford, Ph.D.

JacksonWCrawford.com