Linguist No. 8: Father Emilio Sandoz, in the novel The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell (1996)
I’m seeing a pattern to this series. The first linguist was trying to communicate with an alien intelligence. The third linguist was trying to communicate with an alien intelligence. And today’s linguist is trying to communicate with an alien intelligence.
Meet Father Emilio Sandoz, S.J. He is a native of Puerto Rico, and grew up speaking Spanish and English. Jesuits are famously multilingual, so he becomes proficient in Latin and Greek during his long period of study. But he doesn’t stop there: he adds three Romance languages (French, Italian, and Portuguese) to his toolkit.
So far, his progress is realistic, even predictable. But then, due to various assignments around the world, he becomes multilingual to a freakish degree. “Within thirty-seven months, he became competent in Chuukese, a northern Invi-Inupiak dialect, Polish, Arabic (which he spoke with a rather good Sudanese accent), Gikuyu and Amharic.” Let’s break these down according to language family. Chuukese belongs to the Trukic family; Inupiak is Inuit; Arabic and Amharic both belong to the Semitic family; Gikuyu is a Bantu language; and Polish is Slavic, thus making it the only Indo-European language in this list.
Father Sandoz, before he embarked on his missionary activities, mastered or learned to some degree of competence seven different languages. This is impressive, but what binds these languages together is their common membership in the Indo-European family. Knowing one language of the family gives you an automatic advantage when you want to learn others. In addition, four of the modern languages that he knows evolved from Latin, which he also knows.
His feat of learning six additional languages is vastly more impressive, because these languages represent five different language families. Only Polish is Indo-European – and notwithstanding the family resemblance, it presents formidable challenges if you are coming from a non-Slavic Indo-European background.
But even that is not the limit of his talents. As the designated linguist on an expedition to an inhabited planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, his job is to learn the languages of the intelligent creatures living there. He thus becomes the first human to learn non-human languages. This should cement his place in history just by itself.
His subsequent fate is a reminder that even the greatest experts can make mistakes. As a prisoner of an extraterrestrial merchant, he agrees to accept hasta’akala – a term which he at first interprets to mean some form of hospitality. Instead, his hands are grotesquely mutilated, a ceremony marking his dependence on a new master. It is only later, on Earth, that he realizes his linguistic mistake:
“The word hasta’akala is a K’San compound probably based on the stem sta’aka… Sta’aka was a kind of ivy… it would climb on larger, stronger plants…it was symbolic of something.” He concludes: “Hasta’akala: to be made like sta’aka. To be made visibly and physically dependent on someone stronger.” To make matters worse, one of Sandoz’ fellow Jesuits on the mission consents to this procedure, and bleeds to death.
Earlier in the book, Russell touches on the theme of Jesuit martyrdom. She references Isaac Jogues, whose hands were mutilated for his missionary work in New France. The parallel to Father Sandoz is clear.
The Sparrow is about a lot of things: religious faith, space travel, contact between cultures, organizational rules and ways of living, and a lot of anthropology (the last-named being the author’s academic specialty). But the moral of the story for linguists is: Don’t try to guess the meaning of a word you’ve never heard before. The consequences could be dire.
Here’s an interesting article (referencing The Sparrow) dealing with the problems of human-alien communication in science fiction.