Astounding Science Fiction (British Edition) — page 89: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

HOW TO TALK TO A MARTIAN $7 enough to build up all the words in Webster’s dictionary. If the inhabitants of other planets use speech-sounds as we do, their language should yield to analysis by our methods as easily as any Earth language. The same would be true if they use any combination of other types of visual, audible, or tactile signals. A language might be based on _musical notes of varying pitch and duration. An idealist named Francois Sudré once invented a _ language, Solresol, whose entire vocabulary was formed by combining the names of the seven notes of the musical scale, do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si. Solresol, which the inventor hoped would become the international language, could be spoken, sung, or played on any instrument except a drum. The Ma- zateco Indians of southern Mexico actually have a “‘whistle speech”’ beside their spoken language. Telegraph and blinker codes and the hand alphabets of the deaf-and-dumb sub- stitute electronic impulses or gestures for letters, which in turn represent phonemes more or less exactly. In one of Gilbert K. Chesterton’s stories, a professor invented a language of dance steps. Whatever the “bricks” of Martian language may be, it should be possible to discover them as we discover the sound-patterns of earthly speech. Finding the larger patterns—words and sentences—into which they fit will be the real drudgery. Some lan- guages have grammatical patterns so different from those of European speech that it is quite impossible to draw up a list of word-for-word equivalents. English is a somewhat extreme example of a pattern that is fairly rare. It breaks down its ideas into short units of expression—words— that undergo little change in form to show their relationship. The order of words is much more significant in English than their endings, and chang- ing the order changes the meaning. “The man kicked the boy” is quite different from ‘The boy kicked the man.’ Chinese, which has no word- endings at all, is another language where order is supremely important. On the other hand, Latin and many other languages show relationship by changing endings. The three words Marcus Mariam amat may be com- bined in six ways, but in any order they mean “Mark loves Mary.” The only way to make the affection mutual is to change the form “of the two words to Maria Marcum amat *“*Mary loves Mark.” . In still other languages, ideas that we express by separate words are fused into one utterance. Nootka, an Indian language of Vancouver Island, has such a structure. According to the late Benjamin Lee Whorf, Nootka tlihisma means ‘‘the boat is grounded on the beach” and Jashtskigistama “the boat is manned by picked men.” In many languages, the parts of such expressions have no more independent existence than the -ed of English kicked. Look at those Nootka examples again, because we are going to use them to expose the Telepathic Martian for the fraud he is. The English trans- lations of the Nootka sentence-words are constructed much alike. Both are statements about a boat, and we could formulate them: “The boat is x-ed preposition y.” Our speech- habits lead us to think that the two situations they describe must be something alike because our verbal descriptions of them are alike. Nootka shows that it isn’t necessarily so. The parts of the two utterances mean: tlih: “moving pointwise”; hence, travelling as in a canoe.” is? “‘on the beach” EComichbooks.co m=