Third Watch (35 page)

Read Third Watch Online

Authors: Anne Mccaffrey

Vriiniia Watiir
—sacred healing lake on Vhiliinyar, defiled by the Khleevi.

Wahanamoian Blossom of Sleep
—poppylike flowers whose pollens, when ground, are a very powerful sedative.

White Star
—see
Estrella Blanca
.

wii
—a Linyaari prefix meaning small.

yaazi
—Linyaari term for beloved.

Yaniriin
—a Linyaari Survey Ship captain.

Yiitir
—history teacher at the Linyaari academy, and Chief Keeper of the Linyaari Stories. Lifemate to Maarni.

Yukata Batsu
—Uncle Hafiz’s chief competitor on LaBoue.

Zaami
—a high mountain peak on the Linyaari homeworld.

Zanegar
—second-generation Starfarer.

Brief Notes on the Linyaari Language

By Margaret Ball

A
s 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 which 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
LI-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-civilizedas-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
:
thi inyethilel
—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

ghaanyie
—a Linyaari year, equivalent to about 1 1/3 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

thiilel
—destruction

thiilir, thiliiri
—small arboreal mammals of Linyaari homeworld

visedhaanye ferilii
—Envoy Extraordinary

Acknowledgments

W
e’d like to thank Richard Reaser, our science and salvage consultant for these books. We’d also like to thank Denise Little of Teknobooks and Diana Gill at HarperCollins for their editing and inspiration throughout this series. Finally, we’d especially like to thank Anne McCaffrey’s collaborator in the first two books, Margaret Ball, for her brilliant contributions to the characters and cultures in this series.

About the Authors

A
NNE
M
C
C
AFFREY
, a multiple Hugo and Nebula Award winner, is one of the world’s most beloved and bestselling science fiction and fantasy writers. She is the author of the hugely successful Dragonriders of Pern series and makes her home in a castle in Ireland.

E
LIZABETH
A
NN
S
CARBOROUGH
is the author of
Channeling Cleopatra
and the Nebula Award–winning
The Healer’s War,
as well as more than twenty science fiction and fantasy novels. She lives in the Puget Sound area of Washington State.

www.annemccaffrey.org

www.eascarborough.com

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

ALSO BY ANNE MCCAFFREY AND ELIZABETH ANN SCARBOROUGH

THE WORLD OF ACORNA

S
ECOND
W
AVE
: A
CORNA’S
C
HILDREN

by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

F
IRST
W
ATCH
: A
CORNA’S
C
HILDREN

by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

A
CORNA’S
T
RIUMPH

by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

A
CORNA’S
R
EBELS