First Warning: Acorna's Children

Brief notes on the Linyaari Language

By Margaret Ball

As Anne McCaffrey's collaborator in transcribing the first two tales of Acorna, I was delighted to find that the second of these books provided an opportunity to sharpen my long-unused skills in linguistic fieldwork. Many years ago, when the government gave out scholarships with gay abandon and the cost of living (and attending graduate school) was virtually nil, I got a Ph.D. in linguistics for no better reason than that: (a) the government was willing to pay; (b) it gave me an excuse to spend a couple of years doing fieldwork in Africa; and (c) there weren't any real jobs going for eighteen-year-old girls with a B.A. in math and a minor in Germanic languages. (This was back during the Upper Pleistocene era, when the Help Wanted ads were still divided into Male and Female.)

So there were all those years spent doing things like transcribing tonal Oriental languages on staff paper (the Field Methods instructor was Not Amused) and tape-recording Swahili women at weddings, and then I got the degree and wandered off to play with computers and never had any use for the stuff again . . . until Acorna's people appeared on the scene. It required a sharp ear and some facility for linguistic analysis to make sense of the subtle sound changes with which their language signaled syntactic changes; I quite enjoyed the challenge.

The notes appended here represent my first and necessarily tentative analysis of certain patterns in Linyaari phonemics and morphophonemics. If there is any inconsistency between this analysis and the Linyaari speech patterns recorded in the later adventures of Acorna, please remember that I was -working from a very limited database and, what is perhaps worse, attempting to analyze a decidedly nonhuman language with the aid of the only paradigms I had, twentieth-century linguistic models developed exclusively from human language. The result is very likely as inaccurate as were the first attempts to describe English syntax by forcing it into the mold of Latin, if not worse. My colleague, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, has by now added her own notes to the small corpus of Linyaari names and utterances, and it may well be that in the next decade there will be enough data available to publish a truly definitive dictionary and grammar of Linyaari; an undertaking that will surely be of inestimable value, not only to those members of our race who are involved in diplomatic and trade relations with this people, but also to everyone interested in the study of language.

Notes on the Linyaari Language

1. A doubled vowel indicates stress: aavi, abaanye, khleevi.

2. Stress is used as an indicator of syntactic function: in nouns stress is on the penultimate syllable, in adjectives on the last syllable, in verbs on the first.

3. Intervocalic n is always palatalized.

4. Noun plurals are formed by adding a final vowel, usually-i: one Liinyar, two Linyaari. Note that this causes a change in the stressed syllable (from Ll-nyar to Li-NYA-ri) and hence a change in the pattern of doubled vowels.

For nouns whose singular form ends in a vowel, the plural is formed by dropping the original vowel and adding -i: ghaanye, ghaanyi. Here the number of syllables remains the same, therefore no stress/spelling change is required.

5. Adjectives can be formed from nouns by adding a final -ii (again, dropping the original final vowel if one exists): maalive, malivii; Liinyar, Linyarii. Again, the change in stress means that the doubled vowels in the penultimate syllable of the noun disappear.

6. For nouns denoting a class or species, such as Liinyar, the noun itself can be used as an adjective when the meaning is simply to denote a member of the class, rather than the usual adjective meaning of "having the qualities of this class"-thus, of the characters in Acorna, only Acorna herself could be described as "a Liinyar girl" but Judit, although human, would certainly be described as "a linyarii girl," or "a just-as-civilized-as-a-real-member-of-the-People" girl.

7. Verbs can be formed from nouns by adding a prefix constructed by [first consonant of noun] + ii + nye: faalar-grief; fiinyefalar-to grieve.

8. The participle is formed from the verb by adding a suffix -an or -en: thiinyethilel-to destroy, thiinyethilelen-destroyed. No stress change is involved because the participle is perceived as a verb form and therefore stress remains on the first syllable.

enye-ghanyii-time unit, small portion of a year (ghaanye) fiinyefalaran-mourning, mourned ghaanye-a Linyaari year, equivalent to about one and one-third earth years gheraalye malivii-Navigation Officer gheraalye ve-khanyii-Senior Communications Specialist Khleevi-originally, a small vicious carrion-feeding animal with a poisonous bite; now used by the Linyaari to denote the invaders who destroyed their homeworld. khleevi-barbarous, uncivilized, vicious without reason Liinyar-member of the People

linyaari-civilized; like a Liinyar

mitanyaakhi-large number (slang-like our "zillions")

narhii-new

thiilir, thiliiri-small arboreal mammals of Linyaari homeworld

thiilel-destruction

visedhaanye ferilii-Envoy Extraordinary

About The Authors

Anne McCaffrey is considered one of the world's leading sci-ence fiction writers. She has won the Hugo and Nebula awards as well as six Science Fiction Book Club awards for her novels. Brought up in the United States, she is now living in Ireland with her Maine Coon cats and a silver Weimaraner and declines to travel anymore. She is best known for her unique Dragonriders of Pern series. Elizabeth Ann Scarborough is the author of twenty-three science fiction and fantasy novels, including the 1989 Nebula Award-winning Healer's War and the Powers series co-written with Anne McCaffrey, as well as the popular Godmother series and the Gothic fantasy mystery, The Lady in the Loch. She lives in a Victorian seaport town in western Washington with her cats, beads, and computer stuff.