On Port
Ardega
In which Cantra goes shopping.
Cantra and Jela are getting comfortable working together in their roles as legitimate traders, and both occasionally having trouble remembering that their association is only a temporary arrangement of convenience (or least practicable inconvenience, perhaps, from Cantra’s point of view).
The rug merchant gives Cantra a hand-signal meaning “I’ll be there soon”, which is described the same way pilot hand-talk has been, but I’m not sure if that means the merchant is also a pilot or maybe merchants have their own hand-talk which Cantra, as a trader, also knows.
I think I have seen hand-talk referred to as Old Trade somewhere in these books.
Possibly? I don’t remember.
That would imply that it was merchants’ hand-talk first, and then the pilots picked it up from them. I’d always had the idea that pilots developed hand-talk to be able to communicate in situations where speech would be impractical, like when everyone’s wearing oxygen masks (“Breath’s Duty” is probably an influence there), but on reflection there are also occasions in a merchant’s life when speech would be impractical – the hand-talk moment in this chapter being one example.
Also: Hey, a new commenter! Hello, and welcome!
I did some text searches on the ebooks. It does not appear in the Crystal books. I found one reference in Carpe Diem; didn’t go through all the books so it may or may not appear elsewhere as well. It thus likely doesn’t speak to its origin.
I was going to subtitle this chapter “In which Cantra and Jela go shopping” (although we don’t see Jela’s shopping directly).
I thought it interesting that Jela thought to buy sculptures. He is certainly a generalist, and must be a puzzle to fellow soldiers.
Rugs (and trading) are a soothing interlude of peace and normality. Cantra appears to find trading in the Light a bit bemusing.
There’s a nice bit of character work related to the sculptures, too. Cantra catches herself wondering if he’ll think to pick a material that will stand up to the rigors of space travel, and tells herself that of course he will – and then when he’s telling her about his selections, the very issue she’d been wondering about is one of the considerations he mentions.
I was going to say that it was a fun coincidence that rugs are the example we get of Cantra’s Light trading, considering that Clan Korval acquires a rug merchant sideline well after her time. (Which results in at least three more rug-evaluating scenes farther down the series. One suspects that one or both of the authors is a rug person.) But then I realised that it’s not entirely a coincidence, because of course Line bel’Tarda would never have been on Korval’s radar in the first place if there hadn’t been a yos’Phelium of that generation who knew a good rug when he saw one.
I want to echo Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho. I think Theo said — or maybe mentally reflected — that she knew Trade, because it was similar to pilot hand talk. In contrast, she struggled to learn the far more complex and nuanced Liaden modes (children’s, comrade, kin, high, low, etc.)?
Maybe in Ghost Ship…
Ps. I found this whole trading section slow and boring.
I think the comparison between hand-talk and Trade (which is a verbal language) is that they’re both simplified (or possibly constructed to be simple) and mainly used in a particular context, not a natural language like Terran or Liaden that evolves by itself and has the complexity and power to be used in any circumstance.
(For some reason, I am now remembering the two Star Trek fans who tried to raise their child to speak Klingon as his first language. If I remember correctly, they had to give up partly because the existing vocabulary just doesn’t have enough words for everyday use. Plenty of words like “starship” and “antimatter”, not enough words like “bottle” or “chair”.)
Seriously? Tried to teach their child Klingon? That’s a kick. 🙂
Yes, I see it that way, too — the limited, simplified Trade and Pilot Hand Talk
On checking my sources, I find that I misremembered it somewhat: the plan was to raise the boy (Alec Speers was his name) bilingual, with one parent speaking Klingon and the other speaking English. It lasted about three years before Alec lost interest in Klingon and stuck to using English. Lack of practical vocabulary was one problem, and being almost entirely surrounded by monolingual English speakers was probably another factor.
Well, a wise enough child, to discard Klingon. After all, language must be used and useful.
Now that I’ve been through the whole series, I have two notes about mentions of “Old Trade hand-talk”. One is in the 56th chapter of Carpe Diem; Miri uses it to communicate with Val Con across a room at the Winterfair. (I believe this is the very first published mention of hand-talk in the series.) The other is in the 20th chapter of I Dare; Natesa uses it to give a status report to Cheever, and later in the chapter Pat Rin uses it to establish communication with the deaf boy Jonni.
Also, I was reading an interview with Steve Miller earlier today, and he mentioned in passing that one of the jobs he had before he took up writing as his primary vocation was selling carpets.
So, Old Trade is a spoken language that has a hand talk version of its own, right?
I always had believed that hand talk derived from some kind of hand talk for deaf mutes – and that Traders and Pilots adapted this language and build on it to suit them. Properly some gestures were also taken from polite Inner World gestures (which later became Liaden hand signals and bows). So all those hand talk and gestures might have evolved from a “mother tong”. They properly still chair some signs. And deaf mutes would of course also speak that language, maybe with their own dialect. And some words will travel from one dialect to another.
Also pilots in the later universe generally speak the same hand talk – independently of Liaden, Yxtrang or Terran origion. It remains unclear if all those groups just keept the hand talk from the old univers independently quite pure, or if one group relearned it from the other.
My first impression was only that certain gestures are universal. On second and subsequent readings, my assumption was only that any shopkeeper who is trying to sell lots to independent traders, many of whom would also be pilots, must have picked up some hand talk.