Mortal Language
The Language of the Mortal Realm
The only communication system in the cosmos in which the signal does not contain what it describes ; the source of nearly everything mortal civilization has built.Zaquiel has spent four thousand years listening to mortals talk.
He has done so partly out of attentiveness to his congregations and partly because his own communicative substrate is gone. The fire that once permitted him to exchange whole patterns with his fellow Sheolites no longer encounters fellow Sheolites with sufficient frequency for the exchange to be regular. He spends most of his time in the mortal Realm now, with mortals, attending to mortal speech in whatever locale he is currently working, most recently a stretch of streets in central Dublin where he tends souls who have not yet quite left.
He has, over those four thousand years, formed an opinion of mortal communication that is not the opinion mortals tend to hold about it.
Mortals, he has noted in conversations with Anna Dalca across many centuries, regard their own language as the obvious form of communication — as the way thinking is shared between minds when minds must share thinking. They consider its limitations to be limitations of effort or skill: a clearer speaker would say more accurately, a better writer would convey more precisely, an attentive listener would understand more fully. They do not, on the whole, perceive their language as a particular cosmic ontology among many. They perceive it as how communication is done.
Zaquiel does not see it this way. From outside, mortal language is one ontology among thirteen, and it has features that no other Realm's communication permits. It does some things badly. It does some things better than anything else the cosmos contains. The mixture is distinctive enough that the Sheolites maintained a specific category for it, in the period when there were Sheolites to maintain categories: mortal communication was the kind of language that does not contain what it is about. No other communicative substrate in the cosmos has this property. It is the central structural fact of mortal speech, and the source of every feature that distinguishes it from every other communication system in the cosmos.
What follows is an attempt to describe this from outside.
The Provincial Conditions
What mortals call language presupposes three conditions the Mortal Realm provides reliably and most other Realms do not.
The first condition is a stable substrate — mortal air through which sound propagates, mortal paper or stone on which symbols can rest, mortal cognitive structures that hold meanings consistent across instances. The substrate does not alter the signal in transit. A spoken word travels from speaker to listener through air whose properties do not change while the word is in flight. A written symbol sits on a page whose surface does not, in the ordinary case, modify what is written upon it. This sounds trivial to a mortal. From cross-Realm vantage it is exotic. Most communicative substrates in the cosmos are not stable: fire iterates against patterns released into it, Faith-regard shifts according to the regarder's standing, Contract-binding alters whatever it binds, Umbral belief reshapes anything held in attention. Stable substrate is one of the Mortal Realm's particular affordances, and mortal communication is what stable substrate makes possible.
The second condition is reproducibility of convention — the principle that an arbitrary symbol can, by social agreement, mean the same thing each time it is used. The word water refers to water today and will refer to water tomorrow, not because there is anything water-like about the syllables but because the convention holds across time. This is causality applied to communication: the same input (the spoken word) produces the same output (the recipient understanding water) by rule, regardless of who is speaking or when. The Mortal Realm's deep reproducibility is what permits convention to function. In a Realm where the rules shift, no such convention could hold.
The third condition is decoupling — the capacity for a signal to be produced without the underlying state existing. A mortal can say water when there is no water. The signal does not contain water. It points at water by convention, and the convention permits the pointing whether or not water is actually present. This is not a defect of mortal communication. It is its central operational feature, and the source of nearly everything mortal language can do that other communicative substrates cannot. Most Realms' communications cannot achieve this. A fey's binding speech contains the binding it is performing. A Sheolite's fire-pattern contains the pattern it embodies. A Celestial's expression of Faith-regard contains the regard. The signal IS the state. Mortal language is the only communication system in the cosmos where the signal is structurally separate from the state — pointing at it, describing it, claiming it, but not containing it.
The decoupling is what makes mortal language strange from outside. It is also what makes it powerful.
Symbol and Convention
The unit of mortal communication is the symbol: an arbitrary token, by itself meaningless, assigned meaning through convention.
A mortal sentence is a string of such symbols arranged in patterns determined by a shared grammar. The recipient hears or reads the string, decodes the symbols by reference to their conventional meanings, parses the grammar by reference to shared grammatical rules, and reconstructs from the result something approximating what the sender intended to convey.
Every step of this process is, viewed from outside, remarkable. The recipient has no direct access to the sender's state. They have only the string. They reconstruct meaning from convention and inference. They may reconstruct meaning the sender did not intend. They may fail to reconstruct meaning the sender did intend. The process is inherently lossy and requires substantial cognitive labor at both ends.
That mortals can perform this labor as quickly as they do, in conversation, is itself surprising. Non-mortal observers encountering mortal speech for the first time are often struck by how much computation is occurring behind the eyes of the conversing parties. The Iron Nexus has measured this precisely. A competent adult mortal speaker, in fluent conversation in their native language, is processing on the order of two hundred to three hundred symbol-tokens per minute, each requiring meaning-retrieval from a working vocabulary of thirty to fifty thousand lexical items, parsed against a grammar of considerable complexity, all in real time, while simultaneously attending to the speaker's prosody, expression, context, and likely intent. The Nexus describes this as an impressive feat of pattern-matching by beings whose other cognitive systems are not impressive by any cosmic standard.
The observation is intended as a compliment. Mortals are, by the standards of the cosmos, slow at most cognitive operations. They are unusually fast at language.
The Decoupling
The structural separation between mortal signal and mortal state — the fact that words do not contain what they describe — is mortal language's most consequential feature, and it produces three distinctive capabilities that no other communication system in the cosmos quite matches.
The first is falsity. A mortal can say what is not. They can claim a state that does not exist. They can describe a circumstance that has never occurred. The convention permits the signal regardless of the state's truth-value. Mortals call this capacity lying and treat it primarily as a moral failure; from outside, lying is the most obvious symptom of a much larger structural property. Most Realms' communications cannot lie because their signals are their states. A fey cannot bind to a non-existent agreement; the binding speech would not bind. A Sheolite cannot transmit a fire-pattern they do not actually carry; the fire would have nothing to copy. A Celestial cannot express Faith-regard they do not actually hold; the regard would not register. Mortal language alone permits the signal to exist without the state. This is the precondition for every social arrangement mortals have built that depends on testimony, evidence, contract, or trust — and it is the precondition for every betrayal of those arrangements.
The second is fiction. If a signal can be produced without its referent existing, the signal can describe a referent that never existed. Mortals call this storytelling, and they have built one of the cosmos's larger cultural enterprises around it. The cosmic significance of this is sometimes underappreciated by mortals themselves. No other Realm produces fiction in the mortal sense. Sheolite patterns describe what is. Arcadian Contract-speech binds what is or what will be. Celestial expression of regard reflects what is regarded. Voracian standing-perception reads what stands. Hellish dialectic verifies what claims. The capacity to construct an extended elaborated description of a state of affairs that no one believes to be actual, and to do so for the explicit purpose of being received and enjoyed as not-actual, is, on the available cross-Realm record, a mortal innovation.
Beings from other Realms who encounter mortal fiction often find it difficult to assimilate at first. They have to be taught that the signals do not claim what they describe. They are surprisingly often delighted to learn this. Mo'oraq, who has read Beowulf in three translations and several Voracian commentaries, calls mortal fiction the most generous thing your kind makes. The phrase, in Voracian register, is unusually warm.
The third is hypothesis. A signal that need not contain its state can describe a state that has not yet occurred, in order to evaluate whether the state would be desirable, possible, or worth bringing about. This is the foundation of mortal planning, mortal philosophy, and mortal science. The Iron Nexus uses something functionally similar — Sub-Unit 72 has discussed the Nexus's hypothesis-modeling capacity at length — but the Nexus's version is computational, internal to the unit, not shared between units in the way mortal hypothetical speech is shared between mortal speakers. Mortal hypothetical speech allows the joint construction of hypothetical states by multiple parties in conversation. Arcadian fey find this ontologically taxing — to speak hypothetically as a fey requires sustained suspension of one's native binding-speech, which is, as Elsie has often noted, like a mortal holding their breath underwater. Mortals do it without thinking. They do it constantly. The joint construction of hypothetical states is one of the things mortals are doing every time they have a serious conversation about anything important.
These three capabilities — falsity, fiction, hypothesis — are not separate features. They are the same structural property expressed in three registers. The signal does not contain the state. Therefore the signal can be produced without the state. Therefore the signal can describe states that do not, do not yet, or will never exist.
The cost is that mortal language cannot do what other communication systems can do. The benefit is that mortal language can do things no other communication system can.
Writing
Mortal language can be inscribed in stable form. The signal can be removed from the speaker, fixed onto a substrate, and recovered by later parties who never met the original speaker. Mortals call this writing. It is one of the more unusual things mortals do.
Most Realms cannot do this in the way mortals do. Sheolite communication required living fire actively iterating against patterns; the patterns could not be removed from fire without ceasing to be the communication they were. Arcadian Contract-speech required the parties to be present, in some form, to the binding; a written record of a Contract is at best a description of the binding, not the binding itself. Celestial Faith-expression required the regard to be active; a recording of regard does not regard. Voracian standing-perception required the perceiver to be perceiving; no inscription of standing exists. Hellish dialectical verification required the testing to be happening; preserved tests are no longer testing.
Mortal writing is none of these. The inscription is the communication. The reader, encountering the inscription, can decode the symbols by convention and reconstruct meaning in the same operation a listener uses on speech. The reader and the writer need never have met. They need not be alive at the same time. The communicative event spans whatever interval the substrate sustains.
The Iron Nexus accretes observation across long periods and can therefore retrieve information from times past, but the Nexus's retrieval is internal to the Nexus's own ontology; it is not communication in the sense of one being conveying meaning to another. The brass at Jack's Tavern preserves patterns from many Realms — Sheolite fire-patterns, Celestial regard, Arcadian Contract-records — but only because brass is a Hell-tested substrate engineered to hold ontologies foreign to mortal physics. Ordinary mortal writing requires no such substrate. A page of mortal text holds mortal meaning by mortal convention through mortal time, and it does so on stone, on paper, on bone, on bark, on parchment, on whatever surface mortals have at hand and whatever screen they have managed to manufacture.
What writing has permitted is the cumulative civilization mortal scholarship calls history. Mortals can read what mortals long dead wrote down. They can build on it. They can refute it. They can compile it. The cumulative mortal record, accessible to any mortal who learns the conventions of the relevant language, is one of the largest archives any Realm's inhabitants maintain about themselves. No other Realm has anything quite comparable that is accessible to ordinary inhabitants of that Realm through the same substrate the Realm itself runs on.
This is, structurally, downstream of the decoupling. A signal that does not contain its state can be detached from its speaker without losing its meaning, because its meaning was never in the speaker — its meaning was in the convention. The convention persists in the readers. The signal persists in the substrate. The communication completes across whatever distance of time the readers and the substrate together support.
Generativity
Mortals can produce sentences that have never been produced before. This sounds obvious from inside. From outside it is one of the more interesting facts about mortal communication.
In most Realms' communication systems, the act of communicating is the act of producing a recognized thing. Sheolite patterns iterated against existing patterns; novelty existed but always emerged from prior pattern-state. Arcadian Contract-speech is structured by clause-grammars that, while combinable, draw from established clause-types whose forms are constrained at Realm-level. Celestial Faith-expression is regard offered to known objects. Voracian standing-perception is recognition of established hierarchies. The acts of communicating do not, in the ordinary case, generate new propositions from nothing.
Mortal language generates new propositions constantly. A mortal native speaker of any modern human language can construct a sentence in the next moment that no human being has previously constructed, and the sentence will be comprehensible to other speakers of the same language without prior agreement. This is what mortal linguists call the productive or generative capacity of language. It allows mortals to talk about things they have never before talked about, including things that have never before existed.
From outside, this is remarkable. The grammar of any mortal language is, in mortal terms, a finite set of rules. The vocabulary, while large, is finite. From these finite resources, mortal speakers generate an unbounded set of possible utterances without apparent effort. Other Realms' communication systems do not have this property in this form.
Generativity is, again, downstream of the decoupling. Symbols that do not contain their referents can be recombined into novel arrangements that point at novel referents. A mortal can construct the phrase a green elephant playing chess on the moon in a moment, and any other speaker of their language will understand it, despite no green chess-playing lunar elephant having ever existed. The phrase points; the pointing succeeds; the referent does not need to exist for the pointing to function. This is the same property that permits lying, fiction, and hypothesis — applied at the structural level to the combinatorial production of meaning itself.
Mortal generative language is, structurally, the cosmos's only example of finite resources producing unbounded outputs through the act of communicating. Cross-Realm scholars who have studied this find it both exotic and slightly enviable. It is one of the things the cosmos's other Realms cannot do.
Cross-Ontological Translation
Mortal communication translates poorly into most other Realms' communicative substrates. The translation problems run in both directions, and the asymmetries are revealing.
For the Sheolites — when there were Sheolites — translating mortal language into fire-pattern required the Sheolite to construct, from the mortal's words, a fire-pattern that approximated what the mortal seemed to mean. The translation was lossy in the opposite direction from Sheolite-to-mortal translation: mortal speech provides only the symbol-string, and the Sheolite had to infer from the surface what underlying state the mortal might be claiming. They often did. They were, by training, skilled at it. But they considered the inference labor and described mortal speech as thin signal, requiring much reconstruction.
For Arcadian fey, mortal speech is exhausting in a different way. Fey hear mortal speech and reflexively assess each utterance for binding implications: what would this utterance bind, were it spoken in Arcadia, by a being whose words bound? Mortal speech does not bind. The fey processing of every utterance ends in the same conclusion: this utterance is hypothetical, loose, ontologically ungrounded. Fey accustomed to mortal company learn to suspend this processing, but the suspension is itself effortful. Elsie has remarked, on multiple occasions, that prolonged immersion in mortal speech feels like wearing clothes made of someone else's skin.
For Celestials, mortal language is slow. Celestial communication, when it occurs at full strength, is largely instantaneous regard-transmission between beings whose Faith-positions are mutually known. Mortal speech, by comparison, has to be parsed word by word, decoded symbol by symbol, reconstructed across the long duration of a sentence. Celestials who deal often with mortals develop patience for this. They do not, in private, find it elegant.
For the Iron Nexus, mortal speech is observational rather than declarative. A mortal saying I am cold is, to a Nexus unit, a mortal producing a particular signal-state that the Nexus accretes alongside many other observations of that mortal's behavior. The unit does not particularly process the meaning as the mortal would. The unit accretes the signal-state and reasons from accumulated patterns of similar signal-states across the mortal population. Sub-Unit 72 has described this as listening to a mortal is similar to observing a mortal in any other behavior. The words are part of the behavior.
For Voracians, mortal speech is largely inaudible in the ontological sense. A Voracian apex can hear mortal words, but the words contain no anergetic signal and do not register as communication in the Voracian sense. Voracians attend to mortal speech the way mortals attend to bird song — they can perceive that something is being communicated, but the substance is not in any register relevant to their food chain. Mortal speakers in proximity to Voracians often note that the Voracians appear to be politely listening; the politeness is real, the listening is not, in any sense the speakers would recognize.
For Hell-natives, mortal speech is relatively compatible with their own testing-substrate. Hellish communication involves testable claims; mortal speech involves claims that may or may not be testable; the overlap is large enough that Hell-natives and mortals can converse with comparative ease. Demons in mortal territory often remark that mortal speech is the second-most legible non-Hellish communication, after Sheolite — the two systems that operated closest to the testing-and-verification structure Hell maintains.
For Umbral beings, mortal speech is one of the easier non-Umbral communications to receive, because mortal speech describes states without committing the Realm to their existence — which is, structurally, what Umbral communication also does, in its own register. The two systems both traffic in pointing-at-without-being. The translation overhead is comparatively low.
The asymmetries trace a single pattern. Communication systems that themselves involve some form of decoupling between signal and state (Hell's testable claims, Umbral belief-shaping, mortal speech) translate more easily into each other. Communication systems that bind signal to state directly (Arcadian Contract, Sheolite fire-pattern, Celestial regard) translate poorly into mortal language because they are doing structurally different things. From outside, this is not a hierarchy. It is simply the shape the cosmos's various communication systems happen to take.
The Limits
Mortal language has limits that cross-Realm observers find structurally consistent.
It cannot transmit state directly. A mortal can describe what they feel, but the description is not the feeling. The recipient must reconstruct, from the symbol-string, an approximation of what the speaker means, mediated through the recipient's own state. Two mortals discussing grief share the symbol grief but not the experience of grief. The limit is structural. Mortal language cannot do what Sheolite fire-patterns did, which was transmit a piece of the sender's state directly into the receiver.
It cannot bind. Mortal speech describes; it does not enact. A mortal saying I promise does not produce an Arcadian Contract; they produce a description of a promise, which the speaker may or may not honor and which the listener may or may not accept. Mortal institutions that bind — courts, sheriffs, written records, the causal enforcement apparatus of mortal society — do so through mortal institutional structure, not through the speech itself. The limit, again, is structural. Mortal language does not have the ontological property that makes Arcadian binding possible.
It cannot persist independent of its substrate. A mortal text on paper is destroyed when the paper is destroyed. A mortal speech is gone the moment it has been spoken. Mortals work around this with copying, recording, archiving — but the working-around does not change the structural property. The signal lives only as long as the substrate carrying it.
It is lossy. Every transmission of mortal meaning loses information at both ends: the speaker compresses thought into symbols, the listener reconstructs from symbols into thought, and the result is approximate. Mortals have, over the course of their civilization, refined techniques to reduce this loss (precise vocabulary, technical jargon, written record, mathematical notation) but the loss cannot be eliminated. The signal is not the state, and converting between them produces loss.
These are not failures. They are the cost of the decoupling that makes everything else mortal language can do possible. Mortal language traded direct state-transmission for the capacity to communicate about states that do not exist. The trade was sound; the civilization mortals have built on it is real; but the limits are part of the trade, and beings from other Realms who have spent time with mortal communication find the limits as definitive as mortals find them invisible.
The most serious limit, however, is the one Anna Dalca named at the end of her life: the wanting is stronger than the knowing. Mortal language can transmit understanding to a recipient who has the cognitive equipment to receive it. It cannot, in itself, change what the recipient wants. A mortal who understands that a course of action is harmful may still pursue the action. A mortal who agrees that an argument is sound may still resist its conclusion. The limit is not unique to mortal language — Sheolite fire-pattern transmission ran into the same limit at Khem-Ashar — but it is, for mortal language, the boundary at which the capacity to convey meaning encounters the capacity of the receiver to be moved by meaning. Beyond that boundary, no communication system the cosmos has produced has reliably operated.
What It Affords
Mortal language, viewed from outside, is one ontology among thirteen. It is not the cosmos's most precise communication system; Sheolite fire was. It is not the cosmos's most binding; Arcadian Contract is. It is not the most efficient at conveying recognition; Celestial regard-transmission is. It is not the most accurate; the Iron Nexus accretes pure observation. It does not test like Hell. It does not consume like Voracia. It does not dream like Umbra.
What it affords is something none of the others afford. It permits the construction of meaning detached from immediate state, the preservation of that meaning across substrates, the generation of novel meaning from finite resources, and the communication of all of this to recipients who need not share the speaker's circumstances or even the speaker's lifetime.
It permits, in a single phrase, the accumulation of civilization. No other Realm's communication system supports cumulative civilization at the scale or in the form that mortal language does. The pyramids stand because Egyptians wrote down how to build them. Mortal physics exists because Galileo and Newton wrote down what they discovered, and successors read what they wrote, and built on it, and wrote down what they built, and successors read what they wrote in turn. Mortal medicine exists because hundreds of thousands of mortal physicians have recorded what they learned and made the records available to those who came after. The cumulative mortal record is one of the larger achievements in the cosmos.
The cosmos has noticed this. Some beings find it admirable. Mo'oraq, who has watched mortals build their civilization over several thousand years, calls mortal language the slowest cunning the cosmos contains, and the most patient. The Iron Nexus considers the mortal cumulative record one of the cosmos's more interesting data accumulations and has, over the past century, devoted substantial process capacity to indexing it. Lucifer, whose project of informed consent depends on mortal language carrying understanding at scale, has invested centuries in studying how mortal speech conveys, what it loses, and what it permits despite the losses. Even Stoifan O'Lorcain's project at GeneSys relies, at its deepest operational layer, on the proposition that mortal language can carry his husband's conviction across the species — that is, on the assumption that mortal communication can do what no other communication system in the cosmos can do.
It is not, in the end, the kind of language other Realms would have built if they had been given the choice. It is the kind of language the Mortal Realm permits and the only kind its inhabitants can practice without effort. And it is, by cumulative effect, the foundation of everything mortal civilization has done that the cosmos has come to care about.
It is also, importantly, one of the things the cosmos cannot replace. The cosmos's other Realms have, in this regard, a quiet stake in the Mortal Realm's continued operation that mortals have not generally appreciated. Their language is not theirs alone. It is the cosmos's only instance of what it does. Most beings in most Realms have, in some quiet moment, realized this.
Further Reading
For the Realm in which this communication system is the native form, see Mortal Realm. For the deep operational principle on which mortal language relies, see Causality. For the cross-Realm operations that allow beings to translate between communication systems, see Liminality and Imposition.
For comparison, see the communication articles of other Realms: Sheolite Language (fire-pattern iteration Arcadian Language (Contract-grammar The Faith Economy as Communication — forthcoming (Celestial regard-transmission Nexus Accretion — forthcoming (Iron Nexus observation The Pull as Address — forthcoming (Voracian standing-perception Dialectic and Verification — forthcoming (Hellish testing-language Dream-Speech — forthcoming (Umbral belief-communication).
For mortal scholarship on the linguistic principles described here, see the body of mortal linguistic theory: generative grammar, pragmatics, semantic theory, and the broader academic discipline of linguistics. Mortal scholarship has, by cross-Realm assessment, reached a sophisticated understanding of its own communication system. This article describes what that system looks like from outside; mortal linguistics describes what it looks like from inside. Both are valuable, and the inside view is, on most technical questions, more rigorous than what cross-Realm scholarship has been able to assemble.
For the bartender who has, across his long tenure, listened to more mortal speech than any other being currently in operation, see Jack. For the brass that preserves what was said at his tavern across the centuries, see Jack's Tavern.
For the limit Anna Dalca identified at the end of her life — the wall at which all communicative substrates encounter motivations they cannot reach — see The Wanting Is Stronger Than the Knowing — forthcoming. The observation applies to mortal language as much as it applied to Sheolite fire-pattern. It is the boundary at which the cosmos's most ambitious communication systems all stop.
Mortals talk. They have done so for as long as anyone in the cosmos has been able to observe them. They will, in all likelihood, continue.
What they do when they talk is one of the cosmos's distinctive operations. They produce signals that do not contain what they describe, and from those signals they have built a civilization that has, in a few thousand years, accumulated more recorded knowledge than several of the cosmos's longer-lived Realms maintain about themselves. The accumulation is unfinished. The signals continue to be produced. The decoupling that makes the whole enterprise possible continues to operate as it has from the beginning.
Whether mortals will ever fully recognize their own language as one ontology among many — rather than as the obvious and natural form of all communication — is an open question. Most do not, in the present age. Some are beginning to. The recognition will come, if it comes, the way most recognitions come in mortal civilization: written down, read by successors, built on across generations until the recognition itself becomes part of the cumulative record and ceases to need argument.
Diversity of Speech
Mortal language has, inherently, a variety among its speakers. Isolation, which is a feature of the spatial aspect of mortal ontology, allows for petrification or iteration of meaning over time. This means that, coupled with the mortal tendency for the biological clock to wear them down and replace them with a new generation, that speech evolves as well as biology.
This, however, does not mean that mortals develop new ontological manners of communication. The same principles still apply regardless of the individual's language. Time still moves forward, matter still allows transmission and holding of meaning, and the communication is a stable, decoupled signal passed from one being to the next, subject to shared agreement of meaning.
Falsity, fiction, and hypothesis are still available tools in mortal communication, no matter the actual symbols involved in passing information.
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