The same thoughts dominated his mind all day and the next. He was here. Not wanting to be here was meaningless. He was here. Simply sleeping in the small room they provided, eating three meals, shitting, and walking around agonizing over what had happened wouldn’t work. What was he actually going to do?
The immediate answer was obvious. He didn’t know.
Though he didn’t have a long-term plan, he needed to act on the proverbial advice “Don’t just stand there, do something!” Since he didn’t know what he was going to do long term, at least he needed to do something, if only to get ready for when he did have a plan.
He stopped in the middle of a garden path and spoke aloud, oblivious to his surroundings and an approaching man.
“Language. No question. It’s the unavoidable priority. Nothing long term is going to happen or be decided until I know enough of the language to communicate.”
The man passed, eyeing him carefully and stepping aside to avoid contact with the stranger conversing with the air. Yozef didn’t notice.
“Yes. Language. That’s what I have to do first.”
Having a clear, immediate goal both reassured and intimidated him. To know what he needed to do, even if short term, was a rock to stand on. However, it could also be shifting sand. He had had two years each of Spanish in high school and German in college—the latter a chemistry degree requirement left over from the days when much of the world’s best chemistry work was published in German. That those days were many decades past by the time he got to college was evidently irrelevant to the Berkeley chemistry department. Neither language stuck with him, leaving him enough to pronounce the menu items at a Mexican restaurant and stumble through German chemistry publications.
This was going to be ugly and grueling. But he had no choice. He had to understand and speak the language.
Having an action plan, he sought out Carnigan at the next morning’s meal and found him eating by himself as usual. Yozef plopped himself down at the same table, facing Carnigan, who appeared a little taken aback at the effrontery of someone sitting with him until he recognized Yozef. The initial frown changed to a twinkle, as Yozef started talking to him in English.
“Well, Carnigan. Congratulations on being appointed my first tutor in whatever you people call your language. Hope you appreciate the honor.”
Carnigan grunted, his usual response to bursts of English, and continued eating. Yozef picked up the two-pronged local version of a fork, held it up with one hand, pointed to the utensil with the other hand, and said, “Fork . . . fork . . . fork.”
Carnigan looked at him speculatively, then raised his eyebrows and said back, “Sonktie . . . sonktie . . . sonktie.”
They moved on from there: head, eyes, hand, foot, chair, bowl, and knife. Once they finished eating and went outdoors, the lesson continued: tree, sun, clouds, path, wood, rock, on and on. Yozef forgot many of the words immediately, but repetition encouraged him that the overall task wasn’t hopeless.
The lesson ended when Carnigan shook his head and made pushing and chopping motions with his arms.
“Work. You’re saying you need to get to work. Thanks, Carnigan for picking up so quickly what I was trying to do.” Yozef patted his shoulder and watched him turn and stride toward the barns.
It was a start, but he needed to write down what he heard. He needed a pen and paper. Or a quill and papyrus, or whatever the equivalent was here. Brother Fitham. He was the one to check with.
It took an hour to find the elderly brother who had helped him in his first weeks. Fitham was hanging laundry on lines behind the guest quarters. After exchanging unintelligible comments to each other, Yozef mimed for writing materials. Later that evening, when Yozef got back to his room, on his table sat a stack of blank pale-brown paper, several sharpened quills, and a stoppered vial of ink. Thus began the first, and certainly the only ever, English dictionary to the local language. He wrote down everything he could remember from Carnigan, perhaps twenty nouns in English and how he transcribed the equivalent local word.
He grimaced at the results. It looked pathetic. Oh well, the longest trip starts with one step, he recited.
The next morning, he brought paper, quill, and ink to the morning meal. Carnigan filled in nouns Yozef forgot from the day before, then left for work without further contributions to the dictionary. However, word had spread, whether by Carnigan, the abbot and the abbess, or the general observation the stranger was learning their language, and other staff took up the lessons. Whenever a staff member served a meal, he or she would point to each item and pronounce its name. When walking on the grounds, men and women pointed to buildings, doors, hoes, rocks—on and on. As he passed people, they greeted him with phrases whose exact meaning he didn’t understand but assumed were versions of “Hello,” “Good-bye,” “Good-day,” or whatever were common greetings.
After a few hundred nouns, he moved on to verbs. By the end of the first sixday, Abbot Sistian approached him with a boy about thirteen years old. The boy carried several thin, bound books and additional writing materials. Sistian and Yozef managed to communicate enough for Yozef to understand the boy would provide lessons in the local language, both spoken and written.
Thus began Yozef’s serious study of Caedelli, as his young tutor gave him the name of the language and the people. He came to suspect Caedelli was an ancient ancestor of Indo-European, which, if correct, put the transplantation from Earth probably no later than 5,000 years BC. As he had noticed while bedridden, about one word in three or four seemed related to one or more of the Earth languages he was familiar with: English, Spanish, and German. He remembered from an anthropology course that among diverse Indo-European languages, some of the most common and important words had similarities—words such as mother, father, water, and occasional other nouns, although the similarities varied. While Caedelli words for mother and father sounded familiar, sister and brother didn’t. The color blue sounded like “blue,” and “red” and “black” were familiar, but no other color sounded similar enough to stretch credulity of ancestry. “Cold” sounded like cold, but “hot” sounded closest to a local animal, and “warm” was a female body part whose specificity he didn’t explore further.
As his vocabulary and knowledge of Caedelli grammar increased, he learned details of his environment. The enclosed cluster of buildings he found himself in was a center of medicine, religion, and learning, and he conferred to the complex the title of “abbey,” which he translated as making Sistian and Diera the abbot and the abbess, respectively. The abbey was formally named the Abbey of Saint Sidryn, commonly referred to as St. Sidryn’s—Sidryn being the name of some past religious figure. The nearby town was Abersford, the Province Keelan, the land a large island named Caedellium, and the planet was Anyar. From observing activity around the complex, Yozef had already figured out the cycle of days was by sixes, a sixday—five days of work and one day of rest and worship services in the large cathedral-like building. He learned the seasons (four), the months (nine, plus a five-day start-of-year festival), and a thumb pointed upward from a fist meant the equivalent of a raised middle finger and not approval, a good thing to know.
Language by total immersion. His brain often felt fried by the end of a day spent memorizing words, practicing phrases and pronunciation, and a gradual increase in the morning reading/writing lesson from two to four hours each day with the boy assigned to him by the abbot. By the end of two sixdays, Yozef had enough words to try asking questions and understand answers. He learned that his tutor was Selmar Beynom, the youngest son of Abbot Sistian and Abbess Diera Beynom. Another son, Cadwulf, was about eighteen years old and studying at the abbey. There also were also two Beynom daughters, older, married, and living with their families elsewhere. Selmar was diligent and tireless, so much so that several nights Yozef dreamed of being back in the fifth grade and drilled by a relentless Mrs. MacMurty.