Work Text:
The subject of language, naturally, came up while Ampersand was working on the translator portion of Cora’s post-natural enhancements.
“Human language is confusing.”
Cora was surprised. “We’re confusing? Amygdalines have dozens of morphemes attached to any given concept. Even a four-word phrase has hundreds. How is that not more complicated than anything humans have?”
Ampersand shook his head, something he had picked up from Cora. “No. Amygdaline language is more complicated. Every amygdaline language has around the same level of morphemes as each other. But human language is still confusing to a species that hasn’t evolved to process it.”
“In what way?” Cora asked.
“In amygdaline languages, you have all the information you need. There is much less possibility for miscommunication. Most thoughts can be expressed in a single sentence, and then the other person can respond.
“But human languages leave ambiguity everywhere. In the sentence, ‘I ate yesterday at 2:00 PM, then went home and talked to my mother,” there is so much left for the listener to figure out. What type of food did you eat? Why did you eat it? Was there a correlation between eating the food and seeing your mother, or are you just mentioning two unrelated events?
“Learning how much in human languages is left to context, and how to account for that, was by far the hardest part of designing my translation interface.”
“Huh,” Cora said. “I guess I only thought about which parts of amygdaline language were hard for us, and not the other way around.” It seemed so effortless when Cora had imagined it, like Ampersand just casted a spell and knew everything about English in a couple minutes.
“It was grueling work.”
“Yeah.” Cora thought for a bit. “In one of the first linguistics classes I took, my professor talked about how hard a language was to learn to speak was mostly based on which languages you already knew. No language is really more complicated than any other, because any language can express any idea. They must all be the same level of complicated if they can say the same things. Like, the example she used was that some languages have unique conjugations for where the speaker got the information from. It’s called evidentiality, I think. And for every sentence where you’re saying something happened, you are grammatically required to say where you got the information from. There’s no way to form a sentence without conjugating the verb with something like, ‘I saw this firsthand,’ or, ‘This is generally known.’”
“This is in almost all amygdaline languages.”
“That tracks. And like I just said, there are ways to say those things in English, it’s just not required. And you could say that having grammatical rules for it is more complex, but my professor pointed out that without the grammatical rules, you have to use more words. Is that not more complex, at least arguably?”
Ampersand thought for a moment, then ended with a word Cora wasn’t sure she’s heard him say in this context. “Neat.”