I have my head in my hands when I feel a shadow cross my shoulder.
“Kiqirini,” the Calligrapher says, “why do you despair?”
“All this time,” I say. “I’ve been doing it wrong! These nouns? You have even been teaching us. Belevan, belevani. Osulked, osulkedi. But your nouns have declensions, so those aren’t right at all!”
He turns my notes around to face him, eyes grave, lit by the slanting afternoon sunlight. “No,” he says. “You have done it correctly. The uninflected form exists in both declensions. For Ai-Naidari words, it forms the nominative case. For non-Ai-Naidari things, it forms the accusative.”
I squint at him. “What?”
“Osulked, osulkedi,” he says. “That is the nominative case. When you say “osulked,” you are implying ‘several Public Servants of the highest rank, who are also the subject of the sentence, doing the action.’ But when you say “belevan“, which is not a person, then you are implying ‘several love-gifts, which are the object of a sentence or clause.’” He turns the notes to face me again. “You see, you have not been reporting it incorrectly. The uninflected form of a noun reveals its purpose.”
I eye him. “People, to act—”
“And things, to be acted upon,” he agrees.
“Why is it,” I say dolefully, “that some of these words don’t have singular forms? How can there be only one form for ishas, and that be plural?”
“The ishas does not belong to any single person, nor is it singular,” Farren observes.
“That makes no sense to me,” I mutter. “And ajzelin?”
He smiles. “When one is ajzelin, one enters into the pool of all ajzelin that ever have been and ever will be. You are one.”
“Let me guess,” I mutter. “That’s a verb tense.”
He smiles again and leaves me to decline nouns. Badly.
I was right, you know. Developing this is the work of years, not weeks. And the moment I really felt that in my bones, it became okay to slow down. I get the feeling the Ai-Naidar don’t care if I start out by speaking pidgin Ai-Naidari. So we will take it slowly, and maybe this will fill the interstices between our visits to Kherishdar.
Though Ereseya keeps showing up…
Mirrored from MCAH Online.