Beltös – Author Notes

The Premise

A fantasy or science fiction story often starts with a premise. What if the world were like it is today, except some impossible assumption were added – What if there were dragons and we could talk to them? – Or, what if you could go backwards in time? The Beltös language (and its culture) starts with a similar impossible premise: What if the Whorf hypothesis were true?

Benjamin Lee Whorf was a famous early 20th century linguist who, among other things, hypothesized that the language one speaks limits or constrains the thoughts one can think. If a certain idea could not be expressed in a certain language, then the speaker could not even conceptualize that idea. Subsequently, linguists studied the hypothesis and found it to be untrue. It was still posited that although one’s language did not constrain one’s thought processes, it might still influence them, by making some ideas harder to conceptualize in certain languages. Further studies showed that also not to be true, so if there is anything to the Whorf hypothesis, the linguistic influence is so weak as to be undetectable.

However, in this fantasy world, it is true. And therefore, by constructing a language in a particular way, it should be possible to constrain and influence the culture of the people who speak that language. If this sounds similar to the plot of the science fiction novel, The Languages of Pao, you are correct. However, the author, Jack Vance, never specified exactly what any of those languages were like.

Beltös is such a language.

Before we construct a language to limit thought, we should consider what type of culture we want. The main idea for Beltös is to eliminate every possible means of confrontation. The culture is a peaceful one, where no altercation, no argumentation, no disagreement, nor even any cruel or sarcastic comments are possible to express. This leads to the most important restriction of Beltös:

There is no negation.

Really. None.

There is no word for “no.” There is no word for “not.” There is no word nor morpheme to express “un-” or “anti-”.

Surely, you might think, one can express opposites simply by using the antonym of what has been expressed. If one wished to negate: “He is tall,” then one can simply state: “He is short.” Yet, that actually is not true. “Tall” and “short” are positive attributes of objects; to say that a person is short is not necessarily demeaning or pejorative or negative in any way. Similarly, the negative of “black” is not “white,” it is “non-black”; and red or blue or any color is equivalently negating to the attribute of black.

Every negative word, any concept that could be construed as negative or diminishing or cruel, has been ruthlessly stripped from the vocabulary. Only in the most roundabout way, using the most inconvenient and indirect phrasing, is it possible for a speaker even to express the faintest glimmer of disagreement or disapprobation.

(And why did I choose such a utopia? Well… My wife and I were watching the news one evening, and there was a series of heart-rending stories: war, terrorism, school shootings, murder-suicides, riots, and the failure of diplomacy and civilized discourse. “If only people couldn’t argue,” I exclaimed. “If only they couldn’t even express a negative or contrary thought!” Then, the lightbulb in my head blinked on. “What if there were a language without negation? What sort of culture would that engender? With what qualities would such a people be endued? And how would the grammar be structured?” And from that inspiration arose the idea of: Beltös.)

The Phonology

After much thought (i.e. day-dreaming) and iterations of the grammar and culture, whose development mutually influenced each other, it became clear that I couldn’t test anything unless I had a phonology for the language (and an orthography, too, but that didn’t concern me as much).

Considering that, in the real world, there is no relationship between the sound of a language and the culture of the people who speak it, I felt I could do anything I wished. I grew up in semi-rural Illinois, surrounded by orchards and farms and forests, and I have always felt comfortable in the company of trees. I decided that I wanted the sound of the language to be close to how a human would attempt to pronounce the language of trees, if in fact trees could speak.

Of course, Tolkien created Entish, the language of the Ents, the tree-shepherds of Middle-earth, but he didn’t say a great deal about that language, and I didn’t feel constrained to copy what he had described, regardless. I did “borrow” the long and discursive structure for formal speech, but that was predicated partly by the social hierarchy and importance of rank in Beltös culture.

Instead, I started with a mixture of the sounds of ancient Greek and ancient Persian (which fit together quite naturally), and Cheyenne (because I thought that the voiceless vowels were the closest mimic to the sound that the wind makes when it blows through the branches). The frequency of fricatives is meant to imitate the susurration of the leaves when tickled by gentle breezes; and the prevalence of geminated nasals, the low groaning of the trunks under a strong storm wind (which is mostly infrasonic, but you can feel the vibrations if you are young and foolish enough to hug a tree in the middle of a rainstorm). Finally, assimilative sound changes were stirred into the batter to give the phonology a naturalistic flavor.

I experimented for a long time with the sound of Beltös. I modified the phonemic inventory, and played a lot with the phonemic frequencies and the various phonotactic constraints. When in doubt, I followed whatever sounded “right” to my ears, rather than what the professional linguists said would be most likely to occur (e.g. epenthetic “ss” doesn’t occur in natural languages, but it does in Beltös). As such, the sound of Beltös is what I, personally and subjectively, feel is the closest speech that humans could utter, if they learned to converse with the trees.

Abstractness

The basic lexemes of most natural languages are concrete terms. From those, in some circumstances, words are derived to form more abstract qualities, such as a verb denoting the action of the original lexeme.

Thus, in English for example, “strong” is a basic word, from which is derived: “strongly”, “strength”, “strengthen”, and other words. In Beltös, on the contrary, the abstract word is seen as the basic lexeme, from which more concrete terms are derived: “ ‘enjam” (strength), “ ‘enjamli” (strong), “ ‘enjamazma” (act of strength), “denjam” (to be strong).

In a sense, the fictional world of the Beltös is a reification of Platonic realism, in which the abstract ideals (such as “strength”) are the archetypes from which the concrete, but imperfect, copies (such as a strong person, or an act of strength) are manifested. The Beltös people see their lives as attempts to live up to the preexistent ideals of peace and love and harmony, which are understood preconsciously to be the primary qualities of existence, and of which the objects and actions of the physical world are only pale shadows. Of course, if one is hungry, one still must collect and prepare food, so there isn’t much of a difference between the daily life of the Beltös and many a pre-technological culture. Rather, it is in the semantics of the grammar and the lexicon of the Beltös that these Platonic ideals can be seen in action.

Syncretism

In Beltös, pronouns decline for number, person, gender, case, and honorific. That would give 480 personal pronouns, and that does not count the demonstrative or relative pronouns. That’s a lot of pronouns to memorize! The reason for this is that in “old Beltös,” cases and honorifics were represented by separate particles, but diachronically these fused to form separate words, resulting in a superabundance of pronouns.

But, some forms are unattested, and there is a great deal of pronominal syncretism. That is, the same form of a pronoun may represent multiple morphosyntactic features. For example, in English, “you” may represent both the second person singular and plural. The result is that there are only 236 pronouns total in Beltös. Still, that is so many that they have been tabulated in a separate document from the grammar, and because of the “overloading” of the morphosyntactic features, they have not been listed in the lexicon, as that proved to be rather confusing.

Every natural language, it seems, has one aspect that is very difficult to learn (in Arabic, it is the pluralization of nouns), and for Beltös, that difficult aspect is definitely the pronouns.