Two Lemon—A Teixcalaanli citizen.
Two Rosewood—The former Minister of Information.
Two Sunspot—A historical Teixcalaanli emperor, who negotiated peace with the Ebrekti.
Verashk-Talay—A political confederation of several systems and sectors, with a minor presence beyond the Anhamemat Gate. Comprised of two distinct populations, the Verashk and the Talay, each speaking a separate language, who seem to have resolved their resource conflicts via adopting a form of representative democracy.
Verdigris Mesa—A Teixcalaanli warship of the Third Legion.
Weight for the Wheel—The flagship of the Tenth Legion, Eternal-class.
Western Arc—An important and wealthy sector of Teixcalaan, home to major merchant concerns.
xauitl—A flower.
Xelka Station—A Teixcalaanli military outpost.
yaotlek—A military rank in the Teixcalaanli fleet; commander of at least one legion.
Yskandr Aghavn—The former Ambassador to Teixcalaan from Lsel Station.
Zorai—The home planet of the former Minister of War Nine Propulsion.
The Teixcalaanli language is logosyllabic, written in “glyphs.” These individual glyphs represent both free and bound morphemes. Teixcalaanli glyphs also can represent phonetic sounds, usually derived from an initial morpheme’s pronunciation which has lost its meaning and become purely phonetic. Due to the logosyllabic nature of Teixcalaanli, double and triple meanings are easily created in both verbal and written texts. Individual glyphs can function as visual puns or have suggestions of meaning unrelated to their precise morphemic use. Such wordplay—both visual and aural—is central to the literary arts of the Empire.
Teixcalaanli is a vowel-heavy language with a limited set of consonants. A brief pronunciation guide is given below (with IPA symbology and examples from American English).
a—
—father
e—Ɛ—bed
o—oƱ—no, toe, soap
i—i—city, see, meat
u—u—loop
aa—ɑ—The Teixcalaanli “aa” is a chroneme—it extends the length of the sound a in time, but does not change its quality.
au—
—loud
ei—
—say
ua—ʷɑ—water, quantity
ui—ʷi—weed
y—j—yes, yell
c—k—cat, cloak (but never as in certain)
h—h—harm, hope
k—kʱ—almost always found before r, as in crater or crisp, but occasionally as a word-ending, where it is heavily aspirated.
l—γ—bell, ball
m—m—mother, mutable
n—n—nine, north
p—p—paper, proof
r—ɾ—red, father
s—s—sable, song
t—tʱ—t, aspirated, as in top
x—ks—sticks, six
z—z—zebra
ch—tʃ—chair
But in consonant clusters (which Teixcalaanli favors), t is more often found as “t,” the unaspirated dental consonant in stop; l is often “l,” the dental approximate in line or lucid. There are many loanwords in Teixcalaanli. When pronouncing words originating in more consonant-heavy languages, Teixcalaanli tends to devoice unfamiliar consonants, i.e. “b” is pronounced like “p” and “d” is pronounced like “t.”
By contrast, the language spoken on the stations in Bardzravand Sector is alphabetic and consonant heavy. It is easier for a native speaker of Stationer to accurately pronounce a Teixcalaanli word than the other way around. (If one wishes to pronouce Stationer words one’s own self, and has only Earth languages to go by, a good guide would be the pronunciation of Modern Eastern Armenian).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Second books are, proverbially, far more difficult than firsts. A Desolation Called Peace, despite my bravado and determined assurances to various persons—including, but certainly not limited to, my agent, my editor, a slew of fellow writers I’m honored to call friends, and my wife—was no exception. Bravado and determination will only get one so far in the face of one hundred fifty thousand words, a deadline, and the weight of knowing that, while you might have managed the trick once, each novel requires you to again learn how to write a novel.
I am still learning how to write a novel.
I will never, so long as I am privileged to write, be done with learning how to write a novel. I say this without resignation but instead with an acquired and giddy satisfaction: I hope I look back on this acknowledgments note in fifteen years and laugh at how little I knew, and how much more skillful a writer I have become. I hope all of you reading do the same. My first thanks is to you: everyone who picked up A Memory Called Empire, loved it, and made it a success. Without you I would not have any reason to pick up Mahit’s story again and spin it a little farther on. I am profoundly grateful.
Eternal thanks go as well to that list of persons I inflicted bravado and assurances upon.
Thank you to my dear friends: Elizabeth Bear, who makes me want to be a better writer than I am, and a better student of ethics and character work as well, and whose friendship is a steady point I am honored by; Devin Singer, who told me I’d gotten it right when I needed to hear it; Marissa Lingen, who texted me “my DUDE Swarm” and thus entirely proved I’d written a book with the emotional valence I meant to convey; Max Gladstone, who once talked through Buddhist ethics with me long enough that for a brief moment I understood the why of it, and then wrote a book (Empress of Forever, which I entirely recommend, O readers who have followed me deep into the acknowledgments) that made me believe it for the space of a climactic space battle; and all the rest of the ’zoo and my agentsibs, too many to list here for fear of leaving out someone important. Thank you all; you are the community I have always wanted to find.
(A quick shout-out also goes to Scott and Anita at The Read-Along podcast, who accidentally saved me from an embarrassing continuity error; to David Bowles, for talk and teaching about Nahuatl; and to Rebecca Roanhorse, who has been an absolute cheerleader for this book, even before reading it.)