purplerabbits

[This is the first draft of an introduction to the first text book about the languages of Tide, a world which, like those in Ursula K leGuin's Changing Planes, can be reached under conditions of great boredom and a certain amount of stress, such as a pandemic lockdown.]

There are two fundamental differences between the world of Tide and our own, one relatively minor, and one huge. The minor difference is that their moon is larger than our own and their tides are bigger and fiercer, and the major one is that the people of Tide live five lives.

When you first visit Tide and it is the smaller difference which is the more apparent – the pattern of settlement and building reflects the grave danger of being too close to the ocean at the wrong time, alongside the importance, for the majority coastal peoples at least, of being able to access the fertile intertidal zone. Coastal agriculture and cuisine is influenced by the great wealth and variety of species that thrive in these zones, and for coastal Tiders farming and gathering these treasures is rewarding but highly dangerous, and the concept of tides, of ebb and flow and rip currents and rockpools, influence every aspect of their art and culture.

And until you have learnt some aspects of their language, that might be all you see.

But even through a translator there are hints of the greater difference. My first clue came because I had forgotten how to translate my age from Earth to Tide years for a moment, and when I was asked how old I was I said “Fifty, no, fifty five.”

“Oh you poor thing,” my interviewee said, “to have died so young! It’s almost like you are new born!”

I was at that time doing field interviews to a very strict format, so I did not take the time to understand what that person was saying, which set my studies back by several weeks. Please, whoever is reading this, do not do as I did, but listen before you ask, always.

Later on I realised that my translator had been using the most commonly used form of the second person pronoun when I asked “how old are you?” I have called this the embodied second person and it means that what my interviewees heard was more like “how old is your body?” On the other hand, when my interviewee asked me my age, they had been using a different form, lost in translation, which I heard as “how old are you, yourself?” but which means, "how old is your soul?" (The soul's age being the sum of the different lives you have lived.) If we had been speaking the inland, rather than the coastal form of the language, there would have been a third option, the form which asks not how many years, but how many lives have you had, and to which the answer can be only be one to five.

I do not intend to spend too much of this book recounting my early errors, and so by using scientific language it may look as if I always understood the five lives and how Tiders relate to them, but please remember that it was not always so obvious, and that something so fundamental to our own cultures may not always be spoken of aloud, but rather felt as an undercurrent in every assumption we make and every choice of words.