MOUNDSBAR MULTILINGUALISM
The recent scarcity of reports on the linguistic _rara avis_
Moundsbar will, I am sure, be understood by all upon perusal of
the present communique; indeed I have placed myself, as the reader
will see, in certain bodily danger in order to update the matter.
The existence of the curious phoneme /5/, once erroneously
termed a "voiced snore," and of the square vowels in particular,
persuaded recent researchers that their uniformitarian assumptions,
triumphant as they had been thus far in our noble discipline,
must be suspended in the case of Moundsbar.
Their idea was, essentially, that the Moundsbarian speech
apparatus must be different from that commonly encountered. This
idea was at first greeted with derision by the scholarly community,
but once assurance was given that no one was saying the
Moundsbarians were inferior, merely that they were different,
opposition waned. Desiring to show themselves second to none in
the celebration of diversity, Higgins and his students obtained
several grants, and eventually spent one of them on the problem. In
spite of their suspicions they were not wholly prepared for what they
found.
It turns out that all Moundsbarians are multilingual. That
is, they actually have several tongues, each equipped with
partially separate musculature, and so amazingly dexterous (if that
is the correct word) that an individual is able to lift a single
garbanzo bean out of a bowl without a spoon, to say nothing of the
fact that, in the case of the square vowels, the first formant is
actually above the second formant.
Individuals differ as to which tongue predominates; this is
now known as "tonguedness" and has some relationship, as yet
undetermined, to regional specialization in the brain. There is a
tendency toward prognathism and very high cheekbones; even so, a
Moundsbarian is very likely, especially when speaking rapidly, to
accidentally bite one of his tongues, which is probably the cause
of their rather mean disposition and the popular, heretofore
bewildering saying, "Sharpness of tooth yieldeth wisdom."
Several issues are raised here for universals, both linguistic
and, one might say, lingual. For one thing, inhalation is
phonemic, which accounts for the "voiced snore." (Yes, I mean
exactly that; you cannot predict when a Moundsbarian is going to
inhale, and when one does, a token of /5/ occurs. Linguists must
simply gird up their loins and deal with it.) The question of
whether we are confronting a new species here I concur with Higgins
in leaving up to the exobiologists. They have had entirely too
much time on their hands, in my opinion. In any event: it is clearly
the multilingualism, that is the polyglossia, that produces a great
deal of fleshy tissue in the velic and pharyngeal area causing
strident ingression of air.
Thorough anatomical studies are being planned; these will of
course require more funding, and also a bit of luck. A disgruntled
former student of Higgins maliciously spread the rumor that autopsy
was to be the preferred stratagem, and now the people tend to
scatter when a linguist approaches them, and there has been a
certain amount of sniping in the towns. Higgins and I in fact barely
escaped from our last visit, and we lost Higgins’s laptop.
We bide our time.
– Metalleus