A Course in Rawàng Ata: 1.2

LESSON TWO

The Accusative Case

Rawàng Ata is a language with multiple noun cases. One of the most commonly encountered is the accusative case, into which the objects of transitive sentences are usually placed. This is usually indicated by the suffix –ma.

datta wohola lutàma

the sailor strikes the ball

However, Rawàng Ata makes use of a process named sandhi, in which the sounds of certain affixes may be altered by the sounds within the word they are added to. In this case, the case suffix can be affected by labial dissimilation sandhi, in which the sounds m, and w are replaced by n and h if the preceding consonant is b, m, l or r, unless the intervening vowel is long.

datta wohola kòmana

the sailor strikes the young woman

As can be seen in both these examples, the unmarked word order is usually Subject-Verb-Object, as in English.

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Topic

However, word order can often be disrupted by the concept of topic. The topic of a sentence is what it is ‘about’. It is usually something that has already been mentioned in conversation, or made clear through context, or considered to be something that is already known to the listener. In Rawàng Ata, the topic of a clause must be moved to the front of the sentence to make this role clear. In English, this often requires more explicit marking, usually involving pronouns

datta wohola kòmana

regarding the sailor: he strikes the young woman

kòmana datta wohola

as for the young woman, the sailor strikes her

Although the object has been moved to the front of the clause, it is still visibly the object, because it retains the accusative suffix.

It is important to note that there is only one topic, and everything else is not the topic: that is, once the topic is selected, the remaining elements are not ordered by topicality. Nothing is more topical or less topical – either it is the topic or it is not.

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Vocabulary

runta = floor, floor module, collection of floors

A runta is a floor – but it is a social entity, not an architectural one. The houses of the speakers of Rawàng Ata are typically elevated, and their floors are constructed of wooden boards resting on beams, in turn resting on plinths and piers and stilts; but these floors, only ever seen from beneath, are not runta. The runta is the floor as seen from inside the house – and this is a superstructure constructed from light wooden box-frames. These runta play a key role in the organisation of the house and its inhabitants – the boxes can be arranged in many different ways, and can be of differing heights, so that differences in runta colour and areas of different height (sometimes as great as a six foot height difference) divide the internal area into psychologically and socially distinct spaces, minimising the need for walls. The runta is not only every individual piece of this floor, but also every distinct space – and those spaces in turn combine to form larger spaces, and ultimately the entire house. The runta can therefore be used as a metaphor for a family or a household. Only separate buildings, or entirely distinct storeys are counted as having different runta – and these are usually avoided, by making upper stories into mere mezzanines, joined by broad stairs that remain conceptually united with the base runta. Furthermore, the runta can serve many functions that would otherwise require distinct objects: most tables are merely higher parts of the runta, as are beds, while the most luxurious seats are formed by including recessions in the front of higher sections of runta. Finally, the runta, being composed of modular units, is not a fixed thing, but may be modified to reflect changes in station, fortunes, or fashion, or to meet different requirements when hosting guests of different numbers and stations. The ‘floor’, for speakers of Rawàng Ata, is not merely a soulless plain, but the changeable, interest-filled, value-laden soul of the house itself.

hàni = mat

The runta, wooden and hard, would by itself be somewhat unforgiving a surface, were it not for the hàni, the traditional mat. The hàni does not cover the entire floor, but is reserved for informal and family areas, and thus provides another important social cue. The hàni is not made of fabric; instead, it is made of certain dry leaves and bark that have been mulched together, compressed, dried, and aged. The result is a thin but surprisingly heavy sheet that breaks at once if folded, but which can be gently rolled for transport; the surface is solid, but slightly yielding, not dissimilar from corkboard, making walking (and falling over) rather more comfortable; the hàni is also effective at absorbing spilt liquids. The nature of the material is such that it cannot easily be dyed, although a variety of shades of brown can be created by altering the manufacturing process slightly, and the material can also not be easily cut or shaped. As a result, the hàni, which comes in rectangular mats that are laid side-by-side to cover the floor, is a symbol of honesty, tradition, and austerity. In previous eras, it was banished entirely from the homes of the wealthy because of its dullness, replaced by expensive rugs, carpets, and cushions, but since the Discord two centuries ago, it has returned universally, as families vie to prove their greater humility.

However, the hàni is not confined to the home. It may also be carried by travellers – a thick hàni can make a tolerably soft mattress to lie on, and can remain dry overnight even when placed on wet ground. However, rural travel is not commonplace on the island, and so this use of the hàni has become associated with vagabonds, rebels, brigands, adventurers and monks – the latter of whom carry a hàni with them whenever they travel, even if they do not intend to sleep outdoors. Hàni are also used as sleeping mats by the poor, who cannot afford softer, stuffed mattresses. Metaphorically, it may be used for sleeping mats in general, but this carries connotations of poverty, humility, or depravity.

Because the hàni cannot be folded tightly without breaking, it must be carried rolled around a haniyàttu, a light wooden-frame cylinder. These cylinders are symbolic of journeys and of monasticism.

taita = nail, bolt

The taita is a cylinder of hard material (wood, stone, metal, etc) that is used to join items together by piercing them. In general, they are made of wood, as it is both readily available and easily shaped, but stone or bone taita are also found. Metal taita are a mark of wealth, as metals are rare on the island and most be imported. Taita include not only small household nails but far larger items of the same function – the wooden taita that are used to hold ships together may be immense.

fōna = foreigner

The fōna is anything that is not native to the island, and specifically to its major tribe. In its older use, it is anything that has unwantedly penetrated an area or a container – dirt, dust, rain, and so forth. It is also colloquially used as a derogatory term for a rapist or adulterous man, or for a traitor. The term has the connotation of inhumanity, even inanimacy.

A Course in Rawàng Ata: 1.1

UNIT ONE.

LESSON ONE

The Alphabet

Although Rawàng Ata has its own script, which will be dealt with in a later lesson, it will be more convenient for now to transcribe it into the Latin alphabet.  In doing so, we will use the following letters: a, b, d, e, f, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, ng, o, r, s, t, u, w and y. In general, the pronunciation of these should be clear from their English usage, with a few notes: the vowels are pronounced cleanly, with Continental values, as in Spanish, rather than either their long forms in English or their clipped short forms. Phonetically, that is, they are pronounced as the X-SAMPA vowels /a e i o u/. The letter j is pronounced as X-SAMPA /Z/ – that is, as the sound in English ‘illusion’, ‘measure’ or ‘mirage’. The couplet ng is treated as a single letter; when it is not followed by a vowel, it is pronounced as /N/, which is the final sound in ‘sing’, or ‘bang’;  when it is followed by a vowel, it is pronounced as that sound followed by a g-sound, as in English ‘finger’ or ‘linger’, never as in ‘singer’ or ‘flinger’ (in accents that pronounce the latter two words in a different way from the former).

These pronunciations are only approximate, and the details should vary depending on context, which will be discussed in a later lesson, but these values will do for now.

It should also be mentioned that the vowels may appear with gràvè àccènts above them. This affects the pitch and intonation of the word in ways that will be discussed in a later lesson, but does not affect the quality of the vowel. They may also be written with mācrōns written above them: these indicate that the vowel is to be pronounced with the same quality, but with greater length.

All written letters should be pronounced.

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Vocabulary

lutà = ball

A lutà is typically a man-made roughly spherical item. The larger it is, the less exactly spherical it must be. It includes any ornamental bead, and any small ornament that does not have a more precise word for it. Amongst other things, it also includes a child’s toy, slightly larger than a fist, formed of a plant gum and an aggregate (sand, dirt, sawdust), wrapped in fabric; the result is soft and pliable. It is heavy for its size, so young children are confined to rolling it, while older children play throwing games. It is able to bounce to some extent when hitting something with force, but this bounce is unpredictable and small.

datta = sailor

Rawàng Ata is an island language, and its speakers mostly cluster on the coastline, shunning the wild, confusing interior. Their culture revolves around the sea, and most men will serve on ships at some point in their life, from small fishing boats to the great trimarans that protect the nation’s interests. Some women also work on boats, but they are never considered sailors.

wohola = to strike, to collide with intentionally and forcefully

This verb can be used for most forceful comings together. It is not used for collisions between careening or wobbling objects, only those travelling in straight lines or intentionally, and it is not used when both objects are equally affected – there must be a clear striker and a struck.

kòma = a young woman

Originally this word applied to children, but as time has passed, and as marriage ages have risen, it has come to be applied to any woman who is an adult but not yet of marriageable age. Like men and children, they wear their hair extremely short (often shaven), as the hot, humid climate encourages those who labour physically (like men) or run around unnecessarily (like children) to do as much as possible to allow sweat to disperse.

A Course in Rawàng Ata: Introduction

This is probably a bad idea.

As you may know, I create languages. The one I’ve spent an unprecedented time on is Rawàng Ata. I’ve posted on it a fair few times – and most of those posts have contradicted each other. I don’t work progressively, you see, I keeping re-doing things. It’s like pruning a plant: you’ve got a vague control over how it looks, but at some times it’s been cut back too heavily, at other times it’s grown too far beyond where you want it. So every year you have another go at it, and hopefully the overall shape takes form over time, through trial and error.

My current error is a series of lessons in the language. The idea is that they should be less boring, and more understandable, than a simple grammar – and I’ve never found a grammar that simple, anyway. In all fair warning: these will probably not be repetitive enough, slow enough, to be real ‘lessons’ in the sense of allowing anyone to learn to speak it. For a start, I’m not going to concentrate on vocabulary. What they should do is present some features of the structure of the language, with examples, in what is hopefully a coherent format.

These lessons are likely to contradict everything I’ve previously said about Rawàng Ata. Never mind.

Finally: the idea is to have discrete ‘lessons’, clumped together into ‘units’, each unit ending with a little exercise. Each lesson will give some grammatical information, and a few words of vocabulary, with cultural explanations. Unfortunately, the lessons vary widely in how much information they contain.

I’ve currently written twelve lessons, which should be three units, though I’ve only written the exercise for the first. I think I’ll post a lesson a day until the end of a unit, and then wait until I’ve got a buffer before moving on to the next. So, this may take quite some time to finish. And I’m going to violate that format today, because the first lesson is so small and worthless. So, two up today.

Hope somebody finds it intriguing – or useful for their own projects.

The H.P Lovecraft Omnibus (part 3)

Two more Lovecraft tales!

The Colour Out of Space continues the themes and style of The Whisperer in Darkness, and takes them to a purer extreme – which is odd, because chronologically it sits a year after The Call of Cthulhu and a year before The Dunwich Horror. However, Lovecraft himself considered this story to be his best; perhaps, after a time of attempting to continue in the old way, he intentionally re-oriented himself along the lines of his most successful story. Certainly, it has more in common with later pieces like Whisperer and At the Mountains of Madness than it does with The Dunwich Horror, for all that they are given similar settings.

As usual, Colour takes place in the wild places of New England, at a site where a new reservoir is to be built. An engineer with the water company visits the area and discovers a strange, desolate patch of land; later, he inquires as to its origin. The bulk of the tale is therefore taken from the account of an old local man, Ammi Pierce, although it is mostly told through the voice of the anonymous traveller, who remains refreshingly sober about things, all things considered. The story that is told is that of the arrival of a strange meteorite on the farm of Ammi’s neighbour and friend, Nahum Gardner; it takes its name from strange bubble-like formations in the rock that display an impossible and incomparable colour.

In some ways, Colour is both the antithesis of the Cthulhu Mythos and its apotheosis.  Throughout the Mythos, Lovecraft attempts to summon up the unfathomable, the indescribable, the incomprehensible, the truly alien – but again and again, he lets slip enough hooks that we are able to get a grip on the stories. Far from being unknowable, the actors of the Cthulhu mythos are well-known. Entire books can be written on their origins, purposes and interrelations. They are shrouded in rumour and folklore in the stories, and out of the stories they have developed a life of their own. The Colour out of Space seems both a rejection of that baroque superstructure of the myth, and a fulfilment of its basic premise: the threat of the truly alien.

There’s no doubt that this is a science fiction story, plain and simple. Myth and folklore and magic play peripheral roles if they occur at all – though it is science fiction dressed up as something else. Lovecraft plays with the expectations of a Dunwich-like story – some reawakened horror from before the dawn of time as spoken horribly of in generations of dark legend and rural superstition – but what actually plays out is pure SF. Ridiculous SF, it is true, which doesn’t stand up to modern scrutiny, but it has that core of plain, straightforward scientific thinking, a certain coldness and matter-of-factness that most of his stories lack. That coldness actually accentuates the horror of the story, rather than detracting from it. In that respect, I think it is probably the most successful of his stories, thematically. Indeed, it’s one of the most successful SF stories of all time, in one respect: the sheer, limitless, inscrutable alienness of it all. Lovecraft disliked pure SF on the grounds that the aliens were always humans with masks – he tries his best in many of his tales, but this is the only one where he truly succeeds in avoiding that, and as such it has been an inspiration for many writers since – most directly, Stephen King, never embarrassed about his deep debt to Lovecraft throughout his career, has admitted that Tommyknockers was based on this story (though it seems that narcotics may have played quite a role in the interpretation process…). More generally, Lovecraft combines the alien with themes of disease, madness, brainwashing, mutation, and the fear of contagion into an extremely heady mix which has helped inspire much later horror and SF (The Thing, for instance, while ostensibly based upon At the Mountains of Madness, seems to me to get a lot of its animating force from Colour).

All that said, it’s not a perfect story. It’s not frightening – the ‘horror’ of the genre name is not a relic in this case, as it horrifies rather than terrifies. It’s a little detached – which is essential to the tone, but which stops it from hitting home as hard as it might. It’s also, frankly, not as well written as The Whisperer in Darkness, in terms of prose style.

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The Haunter of the Dark, alas, is a step back to something more stereotypically ‘Lovecraftian’. In fact, much of it feels nine-tenths of the way to parody. There are, I think, two reasons for this. Firstly, by this stage of his career, Lovecraft was moving beyond the basic premises of his mythos, and trying to use them as the basis for more conventionally horrifying stories; this has the upside that his stories were now being given genuine pay-offs instead of ‘ah! the horror!’ moments… but it also has the downside that the mythic basis has to be dumped on us very quickly, in case we’re not au fait with it. And by now, Lovecraft feels almost bored with these infodumps. In consequence, the “horrible forbidden manuscripts telling of horrific ancient rites” section of the story is physically painful.

Secondly, this story WASN’T entirely serious. It was written in response to a story by a young fan, Robert Bloch, in which a character based on Lovecraft met a horrible fate, and in turn sets out to give a nasty ending to the admirer, in the form of a “Robert Blake”. Blake is also clearly a vehicle for Lovecraft’s own gentle self-mockery, and there are subtle references not only to Bloch’s works but also to Lovecraft’s friends and colleagues, Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth.

However: it isn’t just a parody, and it isn’t entirely familiar, either. The conceit of the story is ingenious, and the ending is both exciting and unnerving. It is also, alas, rather confusing, since Lovecraft is experimenting here with leaving conclusions unsaid – what happens can be worked out if you’ve been reading carefully, but the practised Lovecraft reader used to hysterical revelations may not have been paying enough attention up to that point. Lovecraft is also taking the opportunity to experiment with narrative structure, interweaving the reports of Blake’s diaries with second-hand anecdote and reconstructed narration told as though by an omniscient narrator. At times, the junctions are too visible, but in other places, the mix works well to build up tension.

Overall, as the last story written under Lovecraft’s own name, there is a fitting note of retrospective about this tale; yet Lovecraft was not yet expecting to die, and there are signs of further experimentation and possible new directions [the danger of the Haunter, for instance, is far more sophisticated and promising than the danger of being eaten, from stories like ‘Pickman’.

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Adrenaline: 3-3. ‘Colour’ never hits a peak of being truly exciting – but it builds the tension up pretty steadily throughout, and kept me reading easily. ‘Haunter’ doesn’t built up tension well, but the ending really picks it up.

Emotion: 3-2. There’s not enough engagement with the characters to be exceptional here, but there IS horror and revulsion. However, in ‘Haunter’ that revulsion is a bit too familiar, and the characters are TOO forgettable, to the point of nonexistence.

Thought: 2-2. The antagonist of ‘Colour’ is so alien that we can’t think too much about it. The images and ideas are compelling, but they are intentionally uncognitive. That of ‘Haunter’ is perhaps too unalien, and although it has some interesting possibilities, they are only hinted at.

Beauty: 3-2. Some imagery in ‘Colour’ is beautiful, but it lacks any expanse of beautiful prose. The prose overall doesn’t hit the heights of Whisperer, but it’s also more reliable, more sensible. In ‘Haunter’, it is all entirely forgettable, and parts are irritating.

Craft: 4-3. The combination of lower-risk prose style, more sober narrator, and the very simple plot outline make ‘Colour’ perhaps the most respectable, unobjectionable Lovecraft story I’ve read so far. It isn’t perfect, at it feels a bit archaic at times, but overall it’s very well done. ‘Haunter’ is lazy and slipshod, only elevated by its ending.

Endearingness: 4-2. Not sure why, but I really liked ‘Colour’. It’s memorable and effective, and not hard work. There’s not enough to it to really demand repeat readings, and nothing to love about it either, but it’s a story I know I’ll want to re-read in the future. I can’t think why I would re-read ‘Haunter’ – the ending is memorable, but not worth waiting for unless you’re a Lovecraft, Bloch or Cosmic Horror aficionado.

Originality: 3. ‘Colour’ is historically inventive, but too simple and straightforward to be too unique by today’s standards. ‘Haunter’ is far too predictable, with but has a bit of ingenuity in the final nature of the beast, and in the narrative structure.

Overall: Good; Bad, but with redeeming features.