The Lost Language of Oysters

Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld sat back in his chair and closed his eyes. It was mid-afternoon on a sultry June day, and he could easily have dropped off to sleep, had it not been for the fact he was at a conference, sitting in the front row, and there were seventy other people in the room. Of these seventy, at least forty, perhaps more, would have been delighted to see his head begin to nod. They would not have been charitable in any reporting of the event, unlike most of us who sympathise with those who doze off at odd times. Quite the opposite, in fact: they would have taken considerable pleasure in telling others that they had seen Professor Dr Dr (honoris causa) (mult.) Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, author of that towering work of Romance linguistics, Portuguese Irregular Verbs, falling asleep in the middle of a conference.

‘Right there,’ they might say. ‘Before our eyes. Falling asleep in the middle of the conference session.’

‘You would have thought,’ they might continue, ‘that somebody in his position would be more careful.’ And that statement would be accompanied by a knowing look, tinged with reproach, implying that von Igelfeld was perhaps beginning to slip a bit. After all, Portuguese Irregular Verbs had been published over a decade ago, and nobody could be expected to remain at the top of his game indefinitely…

That is what such people might have been expected to say, and their motivation, in almost every case, would have been pure jealousy. For von Igelfeld, on his academic mountain, on the Parnassus that was Portuguese Irregular Verbs, had many detractors whose tents were pitched on the less fortunate plains below. None of these lesser professors, of course, had ever published anything approaching Portuguese Irregular Verbs in its scope and magisterial authority. It was true that some of them had produced monographs that had attracted a certain degree of attention, but none of them, von Igelfeld was confident, would have written anything with quite as many pages as his groundbreaking disquisition on irregular verbs. Of course, the length of a book was no guarantee of quality, anything but, in fact—many second-rate books were excessively prolix, sometimes prolonging the discussion of a minor point for twenty or thirty pages, without counting a lengthy coda of obscure and long-winded footnotes. In the case of Portuguese Irregular Verbs, however, every page earned its keep, as von Igelfeld put it, and an Occam’s razor approach to footnotes had reduced the length of that particular section of the book to a mere one hundred pages.

But it was not only the state of Portuguese Irregular Verbs that triggered jealousy among other scholars: it was the fact that von Igelfeld’s Institute in Regensburg was better funded than any other linguistics department in Germany. This was the result of a historical error made by the University as long ago as 1973, when a misplaced decimal point had resulted in the Institute of Romance Philology receiving ten times more funding than it needed. Attempts by the University to rectify the mistake the following year were met with outrage from the wider academic staff, who realized that if one department could be singled out for budgetary cuts, then none of the rest of them was safe. The cause had even attracted the attention of a faction of the Baader-Meinhoff gang, a radical terrorist group of the time, that saw in the threatened reduction of the Institute’s funding a chance to pick a fight with the University, which they considered to be a pillar of the system they were seeking to overthrow. The Baader-Meinhoff warning that they would be prepared to blow up the entire University if the proposed cut in funding went ahead had been taken seriously. The University was keen to protect its staff and was in no mood for a showdown with a group that had a vivid track record of kidnapping and assassination. The whole matter was quietly dropped; the Institute continued to benefit from its over-generous funding, allowing it to offer high salaries and better conditions than any of its competitors at other German universities. It was this comfortable financial situation that enabled von Igelfeld to occupy a chair with no reaching responsibilities whatsoever, and with almost limitless funds for conference attendance.

That particular benefit had been ruthlessly exploited by one of von Igelfeld’s close colleagues, Professor Dr Detlev Amadeus Unterholzer, who was the author of what von Igelfeld considered to be a minor work on the subjunctive mood, never lost an opportunity to attend a conference. Not only that, but he was also known for his willingness to chair sessions, in which he had a tendency to speak at great length himself before cutting off other speakers on the grounds of limited time. Unterholzer also insisted on travelling first-class to any conference, usually taking one of the Institute’s assistants (travelling second-class, admittedly) to help him with his luggage. This practice was very much disapproved of by Professor Dr Dr Florianus Prinzel, whose modest and unassuming nature precluded such profligacy. ‘Our dear colleague, Professor Dr Unterholzer, is certainly not prepared to rough it,’ Prinzel commented to von Igelfeld. ‘I see that he is booked in to the Waldorf Astoria for that conference in New York next month.’

Von Igelfeld shook his head in a disapproving manner. ‘There are some who have to make up for what they otherwise lack,’ he observed. ‘Dear Professor Dr Unterholzer is perhaps one such. We must be patient, though, with the weaker brethren, and their little failings.’

But patience can be hard, and now, in the conference hall, with his eyes briefly closed, von Igelfeld listened with mounting irritation to the speaker currently addressing the delegates. This was Professor Marco-Antonio Garelli-Ferrari, the holder of a Chair of Anthropological Linguistics at the Istituto Parmese Carlo Fontanelli and an expert in the linguistic features of very early languages, some of them so early, and so obscure, as to have left behind little or no evidence of their existence. In a previous paper that von Igelfeld had heard him delivering in Budapest, Professor Garelli-Ferrari had explained his theory, first advanced in his A Neanderthal Suppositional Grammar, that Neanderthal populations had developed sophisticated language, the broad details of which could be hypothesized on the basis of what was known about the earliest manifestation of language in homo sapiens. Now he was speculating as to their likely incipient vocabulary. ‘The Neanderthal word for mother,’ he suggested, ‘almost certainly involved the m sound, just as it does in modern languages.’

Von Igelfeld opened his eyes to glance at his neighbour, who made a gesture of despair. This really was too much, he thought. There were more and more attempts to portray Neanderthals as being much more advanced than they probably were. Their few cave handprints were primitive in the extreme, and yet there were those who now talked enthusiastically about Neanderthal art as if it were no more than a step or two behind the art of Renaissance Florence.

‘Ridiculous,’ von Igelfeld whispered to his neighbour, adding, ‘Did you see his recent article on the Sanskrit etymology of moon?’

The neighbour laughed. ‘Some people will believe anything,’ he said, adding, sotto voce, ‘Il Garelli-Ferrari is clearly a very dangerous man. There can be no excuse for such lunacy.’
This subtle joke appealed greatly to von Igelfeld, who chuckled to himself for some time afterwards. Those who said that the world of linguistics was dry and without its comic moments, were, in his view, quite unaware of the strong current of piquant humour present at conferences such as this. Etymological jokes may not be everyone’s cup of tea, though von Igelfeld, but for those with a well-tuned ear, they were small gems on the prosaic shores of life. Only last month, he himself had made a witty observation about the use of intensifiers in early French that had brough the metaphorical house down at morning coffee in the Institute. Herr Huber, the Institute’s rather fussy librarian, had been so amused that he had written von Igelfeld’s words down in his notebook there and then.

‘You must forgive me for transcribing you so immediately, Professor von Igelfeld,’ he had said as he tucked his notebook away. ‘But had Mr Boswell not been ready with his pencil, then many of the remarks made by Dr Johnson would have been lost to posterity. A chronicler must always be ready to chronicle, I believe.’

Von Igelfeld had not minded at all, and was about to reassure Herr Huber of this when the Librarian, frowning slightly, launched into one of his soliloquies.

‘Of course,’ continued Herr Huber, ‘we cannot be sure that it was a pencil that Mr Boswell used to write down Dr Johnson’s bons mots. If he wrote them all down while they were travelling—and they did get about, those two—then I assume that he would have used a pencil because he could hardly have dipped his pen into ink to make entries while travelling in a coach or walking along, or whatever. A pencil, I imagine, would have been far easier. We should not forget, though, that there were those little travelling inkwells—have you seen them?—that were design for use away from one’s regular desk. They made things easier, and it’s quite possible that Mr Boswell had one of those.’

Unterholzer had been present in the coffee room during this exchange, and had sighed audibly as Herr Huber made his observations about pencils. ‘Quite so, Herr Huber,’ he muttered. ‘But does it really matter?’

That was a question that Unterholzer sometimes asked when Herr Huber regaled his colleagues with inconsequential remarks. On this occasion, von Igelfeld sprang to the Librarian’s defence. ‘It can matter a great deal, Professor Dr Unterholzer,’ he said. ‘Pencils lack the permanency of ink. Of course, whether that matters depends on whether what is written down is worth preserving. Not everything is. There are some books, for example, that are allowed to go out of print when the first printing is exhausted. I am not talking about any books in particular, I must point out…’

He was talking about a particular book, of course, and the reference was immediately picked up by all those present. Unterholzer’s two-volume treatise on the subjunctive had been duly reprinted a couple of years after first publication, but the same could not be said of his earlier book on vowel shifts. That had been allowed to go out of print only a year after first publication—a fact that von Igelfeld occasionally referred to—indirectly, of course—and that still rankled with Unterholzer himself.

Unterholzer glowered, but said nothing. Herr Huber, who was careful not to take sides in academic disputes, quickly diverted the conversation. ‘There is a nurse in my aunt’s nursing home who always carries a propelling pencil,’ he began. ‘She is a very highly qualified person from Westphalia, I believe. That always makes me think of the Peace of Westphalia, by the way—you know how we associate one thing with another? Anyway, that’s where she’s from—Münster, I think, although I may be wrong about that. She has a rather beautiful silver propelling pencil that she uses when she is making notes on patients’ charts. It was given to her by an uncle of hers who has a stationary shop. It was for her twenty-first birthday. I can always tell when she has written something on my aunt’s chart because I recognize the pencil entry. And her handwriting is exemplary, I must say.’

Von Igelfeld stifled a yawn. Herr Huber meant well—everybody acknowledged that—but there was an overwhelming inconsequentiality to so much of what he said. ‘Well…’ he began.

He did not get far. ‘She says,’ Herr Huber continued, ‘that the manager of the nursing home sometimes tells her that a pen entry would be preferable, but she tells me that she ignores him. She is the one who arranged for my aunt to be put on a different pill recently for her blood pressure, you see. You don’t want too much pressure, but you don’t want it to be too low either. It’s difficult. It’s rather like coffee, I think: you don’t want it to be too hot, but cold coffee is undrinkable, I find. Of course, it was the manager who arranged the new pill, not the nurse. Although it wasn’t really the manager who made the decision—it was the doctor. He’s not always there, you see…’

‘Very interesting, Herr Huber,’ said von Igelfeld quickly, looking at his watch. ‘But time marches on, doesn’t it?’ Polite applause followed Professor Garelli-Ferrari’s paper, with only a few signs of a more enthusiastic response, all of which came from his colleagues from Parma, who were sitting in the front row. Von Igelfeld was courteous, of course, and applauded dutifully, but with a pained expression that left no doubt as to his real feelings. Poor Garelli-Ferrari, he thought—to be so misguided about so much, and yet to be completely unaware of it. Mind you, he told himself, most, if not all, misguided people remained ignorant of their misunderstandings and errors—Garelli-Ferrari’s attitude was nothing remarkable in that context. And in Garelli-Ferrari’s defence, von Igelfeld reminded himself, was the fact that he was Italian, and most Italians were misguided in some respect or another, except, of course, in those northerly areas of the country, such as Bolzano, where people spoke German rather than Italian. Italians were charming people, he felt, but rather excitable in a tight corner, or in any corner, in fact.

Leaving the conference hall, von Igelfeld made his way to the bar area, where coffee was served during the break between sessions. A cup of coffee, he thought, would help him to remain awake through the afternoon’s remaining papers, of which he saw there were to be two.