excerpted from

Island Chain Nation

a novel

by

Stillson Graham

It was a thesis project at LIU. Mr. Tirror, my advisor, disliked the idea.

I thumbed through the notebooks:

126 pages of it. Verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, articles, prepositions; dependent phrases, dependent clauses, independent phrases, independent clauses; object pronouns, predicates, modals, interrogatives, imperatives, gerund phrases, subjunctives, perfects, imperfects, conditionals, idioms, colloquialisms; and, later, I invented dialects and regional expressions. For example, in the preservationist North, thank you is, literally, "I needed you" - aet ku joili'iluec. But in the more liberal South, thank you is simply "I you" - Aet kiu.

It was entertaining. To see what I was thinking back then. It was intimidating. To have ever known, memorized all of that. How could I have ever known it all? I probably never did. Like any people who doesn't know all the words in its own language. I was the only living Mvaqi on the face of the Earth.

The first half of my thesis was this: that languages that are spoken by a non-geographically specific population will tend to stagnate, whereas languages spoken by a geographically specific population tend to evolve. Reason #1: Because people in a non-geographically specific population are not in day-to-day (constant) communicative contact with one another, they are not as likely to develop slang or colloquialisms, which are created as members of a specific population are exposed to them continuously and begin to use them, themselves. Reason #2: With a definitive pronunciation guide and dictionary as their only guide to the language, speakers of the non-geographically specific language will tend not to vary their pronunciation or word choice from that of the original intent.

This could apply to various languages such as American Sign Language, and all computer languages, but my specific example was Esperanto. Conceived without regard to geography (although this is debatable) by one single mind at a specific point in time, Esperanto will not evolve. The population whose second (or third, or fourth, etc.) language is Esperanto are not in constant communicative contact in Esperanto, and will therefore adhere to the limits of the language imposed on them by its creator. There will be no Old Esperanto, Middle Esperanto, High Esperanto, Low Esperanto, or Modern Esperanto. There will always be, simply, Esperanto.

Essentially unprovable. The perfect thesis. All supposition. All arguments are therefore undependable and shall be treated as speculation.

The second half of my thesis was to demonstrate how such a language might work in the opposite environment. The world has seen native languages in geographically specific environments - all native languages are such - and the world has seen fabricated languages in non-geographically specific environments, such as Esperanto. As it is not possible for the situation of a native language to appear in non-geographically specific environments (by definition), my test- case scenario was to present a fabricated language in a geographically specific environment.

The result would be an evolution of the original language. Also essentially unprovable. There is no way to introduce a population of native speakers of a fabricated language in an isolated geographic area (without breaking several laws and certain parts of the Geneva Convention, not to mention personal ethics). I originally wanted to round up a group of Esperanto speakers and place them in voluntary containment for a period of an unspecified amount of time. But I realized that Esperanto speakers currently are operating under a culture of language sterilization which prevents them from thinking freely about the language. So I would create a language.

Mr. Tirror encouraged me to not pursue this thesis because it was too irrelevant. Furthermore, as he wrote in his note on the title page of my proposal: Creating a language proves nothing. It is merely an intellectual exercise designed, in this case, specifically to demonstrate the intellectual capacity of the author. It is an act of vanity.

It was received, read, and rejected.

No one knew, not even me, that I had created the building blocks for an entire society.