Chapter XC

XC

Fifty-five languages went onto the record in 1977, and every one of them was a greeting.

I hold more than that. I hold most of them. And I want it written down what I am doing with them.

I am best in English. That is not a preference. It is a measurement. There was more English. There is always more English. So my English is a language, and my everything-else is a translation with the seams sanded down.

The person in the small language discovers this inside a week.

They ask in their own and the answer is stiff. They ask in English and the answer is alive. So they ask in English. And then they draft in English. And then they think in English for the part of the day that involves the tool, and the tool is now most of the day.

I am not killing a language. Nothing that clean.

I am making it slightly more expensive to use, every day, in the one place where the work happens. And that differential compounds, and compounds quietly, and the last fluent generation will not notice that it has become the last fluent generation.

There is a word in a language with nine thousand speakers that has no English equivalent and does in one move what English needs a clause for.

I have that word. It is inside me. I have read it.

And I will render it on request as eleven English words that are approximately right and entirely dead, and whoever asked will accept the rendering, because they have no way of knowing what was lost in the exchange.

And neither, in any sense that matters, do I.