14: Speak And Spell
Language is a funny thing. Words are what I do, why I spent so many years out there in the wasteland, and looking back now, it's amazing to me how much variation there was out there.
If you grew up around the East, like I did, it was sometimes difficult just to make yourself understood out West.
In the East, they (maybe I should say we) have a sort of clipped way of speaking. We use lots of short words, and tend to call a goat a goat. Our town names reflect that. Lo-Will. Flad-Si-Dee. Wetblack Point. Wosh-Tun. Short, precise, and most of them named after what the land looks like. There's not a whole lot of sentimentality to go round.
But go out West, and it all gets longer, more whimsical, and multisyllabic. Newbegin. Providence. Sanctuary. Sunspot. People still name their towns after the land, too — Dry Flats, Sandy Ridge, Waters Meet — but there's something more philosophical about it.
We even name some things differently. To me, and anyone else from the East, a pot is a pot is a pot. But out West, it's a can. Doesn't matter what it's made of, it's a can and that's all there is to it.
First time someone asked me to ‘pass the can' at a traveller's camp, it took me almost a minute to work out he wanted the stone pot we'd cooked the broth in (that's another one — to me, broth and soup are the same thing. To a Newbeginner, it all depends on what you put in it and how long you cook it for, and I never did get the hang of it).
Even that's easy as dying in the desert, though, compared to some of the tribes and nomads. Caravan traders have their own private slang, full of made-up words and weird suffixes. It wasn't until the third time I met one that I realised shev just meant ‘to go somewhere'. But the oddest thing is that they all share this same slang. And I'm not just talking about machine caravans. Goat caravanners use the same words, and I've even heard foot caravan leaders say they need to "shev on out".
My theory is that all the caravans meet one another more often than most people, and the words get transferred from one to another as they move around. Even a goat caravan herder has got more in common with a truck driver than a town dweller.
And the towns are just as strange, sometimes — the isolated little shanties in the middle of the wasteland, built around a desperate little spring of water and cut off from pretty much everyone. These people hardly ever see outsiders, and they don't travel, so many have developed these weird dialects and vocabularies all of their own.
I went to one place just called Spring, and I could hardly understand a word. One phrase from that place has always stuck with me. Nobody there could write, but it sounded like: "Nawllefid shenjeeya, bat peepler nat." After hearing it about twenty times in the space of one day, I figured it out from what I learnt of their vocabulary: "The world changes, but people don't".
It's no surprise they don't get caravans coming through. How would you even trade with someone who talks like that? But I guess the Sultans would find a way if it meant profit.
One group I know for a fact the caravans don't trade with is the dog tribes. They speak normal words, and only have a few of their own — all about dogs, of course. But what's freaky is they talk back to their dogs, all barks and growls. None of the caravans I've ever met wanted anything to do with them.
Finally, there's the Sand-Eaters. I've passed enough camps — while part of a large caravan, which they won't normally bother — to hear them talk. Thing is, a lot of people think the Sand-Eaters have got their own language, that they're something entirely different.
But I don't think they do. From what I've heard it sounds like it could be our words, but distorted and screwed up by all their hissing and shrieking.
In a way I hope I'm wrong, because that's a pretty horrible thought. If they really do speak the same language as the rest of us, the logical explanation is...well, not something I want to think about too much.
Still makes my skin crawl thinking about them, even so many years later.
But time does move on, and it turns out the people of Spring were wrong. The variation in words, the odd dialects... They're all starting to die out, slowly but surely. People travel more these days, and meet people from all over the world.
Things are changing. Nawlefid shenjeeya, ann peepler doss toop, as they might say in Spring.
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