Meta-Conversation: Trying Too Hard

“You’re trying too hard,” Haraa says absently from her desk.

I look up from my own, where I’m constructing sentences. “Pardon?”

“This ‘verbs ending in vowels and nouns ending in consonants’ thing,” she says. “You’re trying too hard to regularize it. Some verbs end in vowels, some don’t. Some nouns do, some don’t. Your own language doesn’t follow similar rules constraining the construction of verbs and nouns… why do you try to make ours?”

“Because you decline nouns with leading vowels and conjugate verbs with trailing consonants?” I reply, pained.

“And?” she says. “You conjugate verbs too, you know, with consonants. And yet you end verbs with consonants all the time. ‘Walk, walks, read, reads, perambulate, perambulates’…”

“Perambulates?” I say. “Really?”

She pats the book in her lap which is, I realize, a thesaurus. “I like nuance. Let’s not even start on your conjugations that start with vowel sounds—‘be, being’? Our language is no more consistent than any another language that’s been spoken for thousands of years. You need to embrace the inconsistences.”

“But then I might get things wrong!”

“Then you get them wrong,” she says, unperturbed. “That’s fine. Getting things wrong is how language changes. You need to stop thinking like an author, where the point is to get things ‘right’, and start thinking like a linguist, who realizes there’s no correct way to speak. There’s only the way people actually do so.”

“I want to get things right because…”

“Because you want Ai-Naidari to feel like a real language, rather than a badly made-up one,” she says. “But even if you were creating our language, rather than finding it, you know too much about language to create badly conceived ones. Your languages will always sound like pieces of existing, true things.”

“That’s…” I pause. “Kind of you.”

She snorts. “I’m telling you the truth so you will stop worrying about the vowel sounds on the end of verbs, and anyway I will tell you a rule of thumb.” She pauses to look at her hand and wiggle hers, as always intrigued by our metaphors. “When in doubt, it’s ‘eh’.”

I squint at her.

“Your mouth, when lazy, defaults to an ugly sound—” I want to say something, but it’s hard to argue about schwas, especially when she makes an effort to reproduce it: ‘uh.’ “Ours, when lazy, defaults to ‘eh’.”

That baffles me. “Is your mouth a different shape or something? On the inside?”

“If you want someone to gape his jaw at you so you can check, go find Ajan,” she says dryly. “I don’t know why we fall into ‘eh’ when we aren’t paying attention, but that’s what you want.”

“What will we do?” I ask, suddenly. “When this book is over.”

“I don’t know about you,” she says, “But I plan to live happily ever after.”