Finally, Caroline said, “Nazareth… the vocabulary is so limited.”
“Is that it?” Nazareth stared around her. “Is it the size of the vocabulary that’s bothering all of you?”
“Well,” Caroline told her, “we know what a language has to have. We did all those things long ago, and you are right about the ones we’ve been discussing. But we can’t begin speaking Láadan to the babies until there is a vocabulary sufficiently large, sufficiently flexible — ”
“To what?”
“What?”
“Sufficiently large enough and flexible enough to what, Caroline? Write the Encyclopedia Galactica? What are you waiting for? The specialized lexicons of the sciences? The complete lexicon of wine-tasting? What, precisely?”
Now they were genuinely cross, and their needles flew.
“Certainly not! We simply want it to be possible to speak it with grace and ease in the affairs of ordinary life!”
“Well,” Nazareth pronounced, “it is ready for that.”
“It isn’t!”
“How many words do you have? How many freestanding whole words, even without all those that would come from adding the affixes?”
“About three thousand,” said Susannah. “Only that.”
“Well, for the love of Mary!” Nazareth cried, and they all shushed her together.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized, “but really! Three thousand! The way you were carrying on… I thought perhaps you had only a few hundred lexical items.”
“Nazareth,” said Susannah, “English has hundreds of thousands of words. Do think — and don’t shout, please.”
“And Basic English, in which the entire New Testament has been most adequately written, has fewer than one thousand. As all of you know quite well.”
“But we cannot have the language begin in a state that requires constant paraphrase,” Caroline objected. “Bad enough that it must begin as a variant of a pidgin — at least let it have an adequate vocabulary!”
Nazareth took a long slow breath and laid the length of wool in her lap.
“My dears,” she said, as seriously and as patiently as she could, her voice steady and her eyes holding theirs, “I tell you that language is ready. Ready to use. And what is more, you know it. All of you, every last one, you know languages with no more lexical items than this Láadan of yours has. You are telling yourselves fairy tales, and I don’t understand why. If we begin today, if those of you tending infants for the main house begin this very day murmuring to those babies in Láadan instead of English, it will not be until they are adult women and are doing the same for the next generation — or maybe the generation after that, because no language has ever, as far as anyone knows, been started in this way — it will be at the very least the generation after those infants before Láadan is a creole. And still another before it can be called a living language with the status of other living languages.”
They showed her defiant faces, and she could hear their minds ticking, spinning the excuses; she stopped them before they could work their way into another tangle.
“Now, wait!” she said. “I know as well as you that in the days when every educated person learned Latin as a second language for the carrying on of scholarly and legal discourse, people managed. It must have been a barbarous sort of Latin, but they managed. Do not go jumping from what I’ve said to still more reasons for delay! If it takes five generations, or ten, before Láadan goes beyond being a barbarous auxiliary language and becomes our native tongue, that is all the more compelling reason to begin at once! Of course it will be dreadful at first, there’s no way it could be anything else… but my dear loves, we are talking of at least one hundred years to get past that, if we begin this very day! And you sit there, and you tell me that we must wait until we have… what? Five thousand words? Ten thousand words? Ten thousand words and ten thousand Encodings? What arbitrary number have you set as your goal?”
“We don’t know. Not exactly. Only that what we have isn’t enough.”
Nazareth frowned, and bit her lip, and Susannah reached over to put the neglected stole back in her hands.
“Crochet, Natha,” she directed. “That is what we women do… ask the men and they will tell you. Any time they come here, they find us chatting and needling away. Frittering our time. Use your hook, please, child, and don’t look so intense. It makes wrinkles.”
Nazareth obeyed, absentmindedly putting the small hook through its paces, but she did not change her expression.
“There is something more,” she stated flatly. “Something that you’re hiding. This ‘limited vocabulary’ excuse is just as phony as the ‘not enough Encodings’ you gave me when I was a little girl. You use it to soothe the children, and I’m not a child — it won’t placate me. I want to know the truth. No more lies, now.”
“Nonsense!”
“You are forever saying that!” protested Nazareth. “You could save yourselves a lot of trouble by getting a parrot to say ‘nonsense’ for you all the day long. And it won’t wash… there’s something else. Something I’m too stupid to see. Something that isn’t just a question of whether the language is ‘finished’ or not. And I know exactly who to ask, too! Aquina Chornyak — what is the real problem here, hiding behind a silly wordcount?”
When Aquina didn’t answer, Nazareth reached over and pulled her hair. “Aquina! You tell me! What sort of radical are you, anyway?”
“All right,” said Aquina. “I’ll tell you — but they won’t be pleased.”
“Never mind that.”
“The real problem is because decisions have to be made, and these… persons… won’t make them.”
“What decisions are these?”
“You feel that Láadan is finished, right?”
“In the sense that any language is finished. Its vocabulary will grow, as the vocabulary of any language grows.”
“All right, then. Suppose we begin to use it, as you say we should do. And then, as more and more little girls acquire Láadan and begin to speak a language that expresses the perceptions of women rather than those of men, reality will begin to change. Isn’t that true?”
“As true as water,” Nazareth said. “As true as light.”
“Well, then, milady — we must be ready when that shift in reality begins. Ready to act, in response to the change! Once that begins we will not be able to go on sitting here in the parlor tatting and twiddling and playing at revolutionary ideas. We will not be able to spend our days like placid cattle, thinking of the time, centuries away, when someone will have to do something! And that is where the sticking point is, Nazareth — there’s not a woman in this house, or in any of the other Barren Houses, with guts enough to come to a decision about what we are to do then. That’s what keeps us, as you put it, adding one more brush stroke and one more line and going ‘oh no not yet!’ and ‘nonsense!’ and ‘pray spare us!’”
“Oh,” breathed Nazareth. “I understand. Yes.”
“Do you understand, Nazareth? Do you really?” Caroline’s voice was bitter and angry. “Consider, for example, what Aquina would have us do! We would start stockpiling emergency rations and supplies, if she had her way, and bundling them into packs that we could carry on our backs as we fled into the wilderness, each of us with one kidnapped girlchild on our hips, fleeing just one step ahead of the hordes of men determined to slaughter us all!”