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follypersistBorges uses it in the name of the setting of Tlön (and the title of the story, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius), as an easily identifiable unplaceable other. It's intentionally otherized, but not treated as a salad of letters like a Mxyzptlk — instead, Tlön is unexpected and unique to the mouth, but easy to say. When Borges speaks of "a generation of Tlönistas", we immediately understand what he means; Tlön passes the wug test. My instinct is to call "tl", as non-Nahuatl speakers would pronounce it, a kind of voiceless alveolear lateral fricative; but those who know more phonetics than I do call it a voiceless alveolar lateral affricate, which makes some sense, because it starts with a stop. The tip of the tongue tips us off to Tlön, and the soft l shapes our vowel to the n.
When our protagonists fail to find Uqbar in their encyclopedias, they begin searching for other literations of the easily spoken phonemes: Ukbar, Ucbar, Ooqbar, Ookbar, Oukbahr, before returning to our titular Uqbar and its aberrant Anglo-American appearance. This digression makes it easy for any reader to approximate the sounds expected by the title.
The Orbis Tertius we will arrive at by the end of this story and of Teaching Tlön, but I will for now say that it is simple latin, and not a fantastic neologism at all. Pronounced in the latin style or in the english interpretation, you, your students, or your interlocutors will do just fine.
Which brings us back to tl. Since Borges wrote Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, we've seen another major "Tl___" show up in popular culture: the Tleilaxu of Frank Herbert's Dune universe. Creepy transhumanist genetic engineers, they perhaps reflect the idealist nature of Tlön in their own unique way, by resolving all of humanity into a small number of recursively reborn bodies and relived experiences. To them, it is copulation and not mirrors that are abominable, as their methods of rebirth have no need or want for the contemptible procreation of our contemporary era. Their methods ultimately arise from the determination against thinking machines; I admit to being unsettled by their approach, and perhaps would rather leave this reference in its past. To my memory, I would remember Arkady Martine's novels as having given us "Tleixcalaanlitzim", but that would be in error; while much of the language of A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace is drawn from Nahuatl, its central empire is Teixcalaan, without the digraph.
Consider this altogether then to be an opportunity to teach and to learn of Nahuatl as a language, of the Triple Alliance as a polity, of parallels your students will recognize between it and the Athenian Leagues. You might even delve deep into the poetry, into the role of the Valley of Mexico city states, and their reflection in their contemporary merchant city-states of Italy. By what right have your students been starved of this? What comprehensive study of Hamlets could leave out Nezahualcoyotl? Let that starvation end with a sumptuous feast. At the end of your journey with Tlön, you may have both romanticized these pasts and considered a danger in that romanticization.
A problem with a different kind of romanticization—with latinization—is evident in how letters and names become locked in constant place, and how we derive pronunciation from them. In this way we can have "coyote" and "axolotl", which have in common speech entirely diverged to meet their spelling, despite the fact that both should historically have been borrowed through Spanish to English from the same Nahuatl final phoneme (coyōtl, āxolōtl). Of course, the Nahuatl that emerges from empire is too a product of empire, and its most recognizable modern feature, the spelling of "tl", is almost certainly the result of Spanish colonial efforts to unify disparate aspects of the languages of the conquered. Sapir and Whorf both studied the /tɬ/, from which we get Whorf's law! If your students are still with you, and if you are still with me, let us next dig deeper into the unusual languages of Tlön in-the-fiction, and what their nounlessness might mean under the more general Sapir-Whorf.
Yes ...
Date: 2024-10-23 03:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-23 04:13 am (UTC)EDIT - found a video tutorial on how to pronounce this cursed thing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ77wzuoEs0