An Introduction to Philology

Foreword to the New Expanded Edition (G-88.4)

[The only correct way to read what follows is to click on each of the links in the order they appear, and to watch each numbered clip in its entirety (for the lettered clips a few seconds will suffice). —JSR]

Most of my fellow philologists are willing to concede, at least in whisper, that what we managed to capture from the Earth’s satellites just before the solar flare hit is rather slim pickins indeed: a few “Cuck Fantasy” gifs now constituting the Tumblr Codex; a handful of Crazy Frog videos (e.g., this one (a)) making up the Archivium Amphibianum; the YouTube Cache, which includes one video of some sort of celebratory numerological rite in worship of the series of natural numbers (1), another of an unidentified paramilitary faction boasting of its mighty war-engines (b), and, as we all know from day one of Intro to Codicology, a clip of the “Brooklyn science comedian” Molly Gottstauk getting robustly booed when she tries out her new one at open-mic night: “So the guy at Chopt said ‘Now pick your protein!’ And I was like, ‘Uh, guanine?’”

I will not include in this rapid overview the “treasure of our human heritage”¹ known as Monkey Baby Bon Bon Bathing in the Bathroom with Eating Ice Cream with Puppy Side Swimming Pool (c)² — yes, that great epos of the titular monkey god and his herald, the duckling-divinity Clem, who so captivated the feverish and suggestible imaginations of Generations 51-58. Their towering temples to Bon Bon and Clem still take up the great bulk of Modules 42 and 43, which continue to be off-limits to everyone but the remaining members of that archaic sect, as well as the technicians who must enter in emergency situations. The reason for exclusion is simple: although this magnificent epopee will someday have its rightful place in the science of philology, at present there is simply too much danger involved in working to reveal its rather mundane origins (some anonymous scholars have even suggested it is some sort of children’s educational video, and that the figures at the center of it are “only a monkey”, “only a duck”). I for one have no interest in dying for philology, no matter how deep my love of it is, and I will not risk any conflict with the dead-enders of the Bon-Bonist movement holding out from the G-50s.

Therefore if we stick to the official canon of the philological profession, there remains to mention only the Iacutica Trove, consisting of a clip of a “Russian Grandpa Speaking Yakut” (2) as he scrapes the hair off of what appears to be an amputated cow’s foot; a musical paean to Chėėkė, the portly, green-mustached god of dance, and to Künneï his muse (3); and a handful of videos from NVK, the state television network of the former Sakha Republic of what was, at the time of their transmission, the Russian Federation.

And that’s pretty much it, as far as direct documentary evidence goes for what life was like on our ancestral planet.

It’s been 88 Generations now, and until only the last few we were all too preoccupied with building up the Modules of our Vessel and with maintaining the Incubators to grow our population throughout this frightfully long voyage. It was the sages of Module 64, back in Generation 81, who first had the idea of studying these transmissions as a source of knowledge of our ancestors’ lives, rather than to worship them as inscrutable objects of mystery and power.

More advanced students of philology will likely know that I myself have had a rewarding career spent in long study of one of the most enigmatic documents in the Iacutica Trove, the so-called Kytaïga oloror saqa kyrgyttara (4). I was the first to offer a complete transcription of this work’s dialogue, as well a translation of just over 82% of it into the standard Anglo-Sino-Igbo Space Creole that, although it had died out as a living language already by G-14, remains, for better or worse, the lingua franca of scholarship.

This is a peculiar document for a number of reasons. You probably know that there is no record of its existence prior to G-38, unlike the other documents in the Iacutica Trove that have been proven to have been with us ab initio. You may also know of the rich tradition of apocryphal tales that emerged organically over the course of the G-40s, mostly in Modules 90-113, which had been hastily constructed just after our ancestors learned how to synthesize new alloys from cosmic dust and in this way to continue to add to the Vessel as they went. The inhabitants of these ad-hoc annexes, who lived and died within a near-total vacuum of history and heritage, seemed particularly adept at embellishment and invention, ever able to spin out new legends and lore from even the most minimal of initial source material.

At the heart of the Kytaïga oloror is a dynamic interaction between three characters:

1. Alena:

2. Lia:

3. And finally, the character conventionally known, ever since Module 64’s own Pant Gomüte’s pathbreaking work on this document back in G-83, as, simply, “The Interviewer”:

Prior to Gomüte’s work, the vernacular traditions of the above-mentioned Modules cast these three women into a delirious variety of unlikely roles, often with no evident grounding in the rather static and monotone setting of the TV studio that frames and limits all of their motions in the document itself. Completely ignorant of the language the three women are speaking, their devotees in the G-40s imagined them to be relating stories of majestic feats, elevated them into the role of half-divine heroines, sometimes imagined the Interviewer as their homely younger stepsister who seethed with envy at Alena and Lia’s beauty. Sometimes Alena and Lia were themselves cast as enemies. For several generations the inhabitants of Modules 92-97 lived under what they themselves described as the “Alena Moiety”, often descending into vicious troll warfare with the “Clan of Lia” in Modules 98-102.

At times these two groups represented the characters lying at the origin of their split in ways that were almost completely disconnected from the available evidence of the document. Thus the epigrammatist of G-47 known only as Pang wrote a now-classic post, which I translate here from the Module 94 dialect of that era:

Thus doth the fulvous, fangèd Alena avenge herself, eyes blood-red,
On the flaxen-haired Lia, as she hangs unsuspecting in her sleep-chamber.

Next door in Module 95, throughout roughly the same era, the inhabitants delighted in creating chatbots that generated new conversations between Alena and Lia. These conversations, they insisted without argument or evidence, captured the true meaning of the undeciphered dialect of the original Kytaïga oloror. Some of these survive down to the present day, and continue to surprise us with their unhinged inventiveness. I will cite here only a few lines of what is perhaps the most surreal moment of the 126 lines of conversation that survive:

Alena: Seriously? Mine is like super yellow even when, I mean especially when, it’s completely odorless. Am I weird?
Lia: Yes you are weird. Every color has an odor specific to it, whether you can smell it or not.
Alena: What is the odor of black?
Lia: I believe it smells like asafœtida.

And so on. Just completely incoherent nonsense, with no connection, as we’ll soon see, to the actual content of their original dialogue.

Sorry, someone’s trying to break in on my Pek channel now. It’s a forced interruption so I have to let them in. My apologies I’ll be back as soon as possible.

Hey wait a minute hold up there hold on now Justin, hey, remember me? This is Walter, from Mobile? I mean not Mobile, really, it’s technically Escatawpa. I just always say Mobile for people who aren’t from here. You remember me right? The guy with the pig’s-guts story haha? Well look we love your work down here man but listen are you ok? You’re veering into some serious glossolalia these days. You’re sounding like, fuckin, Shelley Duvall on the Dr. Phil show (d), you know? You’re sounding like if your writing were drawing it would be you drawing all these fractals and paisleys and shit on every square millimeter of your cell wall. What are you trying to do? Break, fuckin, Substack? Shake off more “fleas”, as you’ve called them? Get your paid-subscriber list down to just your mom? Look please man just slow things down and smooth them out a bit you don’t have to be so recondite and obscure all the time I mean nobody can even follow what you’re talking about I mean l….

Lost him, I guess. Oh well. Again, I’m so sorry for the interruption. I really don’t know what that was all about. I have no idea who “Walter” is, let alone “Justin”. This was probably just one of those trolls over in Module 71, which they say is going to come detached in another Generation or so and drift off into empty space (the new synthetic alloys aren’t holding up so well, it seems). Good riddance, as far as I’m concerned. Those people think philology is dangerous and so keep trying to mess with us however they can. I’ve heard they recently formed a strategic alliance with the Bon-Bonist nihilists. Nothing would surprise me at this point. But let us try to move on.

As I was saying, it was Gomüte’s generation that first made significant progress towards cracking…