EUROPAN

INTRODUCTION

Non‐linguists may not realise that one of the few attributes all human languages seem to share is a characteristic underlying grammatical structure that can be represented using “tree diagrams”.  When you learn Spanish, or even something more exotic like Japanese, you might have trouble with the vowel sounds or the pronouns or the verb endings, but one of the things you don't need to relearn is the idea that sets of adjacent words go together in phrases and phrases go together in clauses and clauses go together in sentences – an overall phrasal structure that organises strings of words into a hierarchy of syntactic nodes.  You know, this sort of thing:

Different languages then add different amounts of extra complexity on top of this underlying structure, allowing branches of the tree to be lopped off and reshuffled.  For instance, if you say “Grammar lessons I always detested!” then you're throwing the spotlight on the object noun phrase “grammar lessons” by displacing it to a special position at the start of the sentence.  But the structure is still there underneath – for a start, it's what stops you moving the phrase all the way out of the sentence and saying something like “Grammar lessons.  Do you remember your schooldays too?  I always detested!”

But is that tree‐like syntactic hierarchy a necessary feature of languages?  If we ever meet aliens, can we expect this to be something our languages and theirs have in common?

Back in the nineties a language hobbyist named Jeffrey Henning invented a fictional alien language that he called “Fith”.  Instead of a hierarchical tree structure, Fith used a stack‐based grammar (and if you're wondering what that means, well, his original web pages long ago went the way of all good things, but there's still a potted summary here).

Computer science types tend to be unimpressed with stack parsers, since in principle any sentence in such a grammar can always be reanalysed in terms of a tree structure.  I've always thought this was rather missing the point, since the native speakers' mental grammars weren't processing it that way, but okay, let's forget stacks.  It's perfectly possible for a language to have a grammar whose sentences are structurally incompatible with a representation in terms of tree structure, and here's an example to prove it.

• Table of Contents:
•  ○ INTRODUCTION
•  ● PALAEOGRAPHY
• ○○ SYNTAX
• ○● TOPOLOGY
• ●○ LEXICON
• ●● AFTERWORD

Any time‐tourists who've been following along by visiting the settings of my various other chronlangs should note that this one is very much not for casual daytrippers.  See also my pages of SF linguistics and linguistic SF; or if you're bored with my stuff, try this out‐of‐copyright classic.

(Do I need to put another of those “PLEASE NOTE: THIS BIT'S FICTION” disclaimers here?  I'm rather hoping it's obvious that the idea of life on a moon of Jupiter is made up – and that background's just intended as superficially believable quasiscience, not as something I'm interested in defending as likely.  But there's a sense in which the grammar of a made‐up language isn't fictional, any more than Tetris is fictional.  We may only have played it as a simulation on a computer screen, but as long as it has real rules, it's a real game!)

PALAEOGRAPHY

“Europan” is an alien language known from relics found on the moons of Jupiter.  The general assumption is that its vaguely cephalopodlike speakers evolved approximately half a billion years ago on Europa, which still has traces of an extinct biosphere at its Jupiter‐facing pole, but this is conjecture; it is quite conceivable (for instance) that they originated elsewhere and Europa was only a colony.  The impression that their sphere of influence was limited to these satellites may be an artefact of the higher chances of relics being preserved in the outer system.  It is known that there were originally multiple obelisks containing deliberately constructed archives on each of the Galilean moons, but none have been found on Io, and the three magnetic anomalies identified on Europa itself have yet to be excavated.  The available data comes from one partial cache on Ganymede and two pristine obelisks on Callisto, each containing thousands of engraved platinum plaques.

The Europan writing system was purely logographic, with each glyph representing a particular word.  The closest terrestrial equivalent is the Chinese system, but even that takes shortcuts by incorporating phonological hints into most of its characters via a “rebus” principle that incidentally provides modern scholars with clues to the historical pronunciation of Chinese.  In the case of Europan we have no such clues to the level of the language's structure analogous to phonology; more or less all we know is that the physical medium they used for communication was electrical rather than auditory.  Conversations required two individuals to be close enough to one another for their electro­locatory auras to overlap, and for the modulation produced by each separate electrical organ to be distinguished – in effect, “face to face”.

Since each tentacle was associated with one or more electrical organs, a large number of them could be in range at any time, and a similar number of individual words could be transmitted in parallel.  We might have expected it to be natural for their language to treat words expressed via neighbouring organs as syntactically related, but in fact the reverse was true: related words tended to be transmitted on widely separated channels, with associated tags to indicate the relationship.  There may well have been a physiological basis for this – it is possible, for instance, that the mechanism used to tag two words as related may have required the secretion of the same trigger chemical in both electrocytes, and that depleting the secretory capacity of one would also reduce that of its neighbours while leaving more distant organs unaffected.

The physical circumstances of Europan communication are also likely to be the explanation behind the fact that sentence lengths in the known corpus cut off abruptly at a maximum of thirty words.

Written Europan glyphs are in effect hexgrid braille cells made up of 24 dots, each either filled or empty, making them conveniently convertible for cataloguing purposes into six‐digit values in base 16.  Where one word is syntactically dependent on another, the child has a final row of cells below the main glyph body which echoes the top line (and first digit) of the parent glyph.  Then each sentence is written as a line of glyphs, or in special circumstances as a ring (which may represent a survival of an earlier standard practice, rather like the way we start our sentences with a capital letter styled to resemble the lettering of Roman inscriptions).  In cases where the child/parent relationship between words is ambiguous, the parent is the candidate furthest away in the sentence‐ring.

Other than the use of whitespace between words, sentences, and paragraphs, there is no trace of punctuation; subclauses, quotations, questions, parenthetical remarks, and so on are all clearly signposted either by the dependency labelling or by extra marker words.

It is plausible that the glyphs may have originated as pictograms of some sort, but if so then just like their East Asian equivalents they subsequently developed from iconic into arbitrary symbols.  It has also been suggested that the words in the “spoken” language were themselves in some sense iconic represent­ations of sensory data, though given that the Europans' two main sensory modalities were electro­location and sonar it is unlikely that this would make the glyphs' meanings any easier for humans to guess.

SYNTAX

The syntactic analysis implicit in the design of the glyphs recognises just two lexical categories, which turn out to be essentially equivalent to our verbs and nouns; if there are any words that can be either (as in English “talk the talk”), they are disguised by the writing system, which represents only their independent functions.  The standard glosses used in the Europan Epigraphic Catalogue conventionally distinguish verbs from nouns by writing the latter in capital letters.

The fundamental rule of Europan syntax is that each word may have any number of children, but can have no more than one parent (the arrows in structural diagrams radiate outwards from parent to children).  Since words come in two types and each word can have either sort of parent, there are just four different standard types of syntactic relationship in the language.  This apparent simplicity comes at the cost of making individual dictionary entries more idiosyncratic.

N→N (noun child of noun parent): “specifier”

This construction is used to form quantifiers (“a drop of water”, “some people”), determiners (such as THE), and inalienable associatives (thus for instance sore→PROSOMA→OFFSPRING→ME, “My child has a headache”).

Other N→N constructions (such as FOOD→BUG, “litter, rubbish”) may be more like English compound nouns, in that forming a new one is like coining a new vocabulary item rather than applying a grammatical rule.  Proper nouns are a special case of this, commonly made up of two or more noun glyphs strung together in a chain; repeated references to the same name tend to truncate it to the parent glyph.

V→N (noun child of verb parent): “argument”

A verb may have zero, one, or more nouns attached as arguments, but all of them have the same relationship to their parent verb.  In human languages, verbs may have a subject, a direct object, an indirect object, and so on; but Europan fractionates all such constructions into multiple intransitive verbs that are then chained together in V→V constructions:

own	→move→	adjust
↓	↓	↓
YOU	FOOD	ME

“I put the food in your possession”; or in other words, “I give you some food”.

No overt distinction is made between verbs that are argumentless because the subject is being left vague and ones that function as standalone modifiers with no role for an argument.  When a verb has more than one argument, they don't have any inherent order, so where temporal sequence is significant it needs to be specified explicitly (see next).

N→V (verb child of noun parent): “descriptor”

Descriptors are verbs subordinated to nouns, usually translatable in terms of an adjective or relative clause (SIBLING→speak, “a sibling, who is talking”).  Many Europan verbs are glossed in terms of predicate adjectives anyway (clever→SIBLING, “the sibling is clever”), so when these verbs take a noun as parent it makes sense to translate them as attributive adjectives (SIBLING→clever, “a clever sibling”).  The two constructions “a clever sibling”/“the sibling is clever” may seem to say much the same thing, but while a noun can be modified by any number of N→V descriptor constructions, it can take part in only one V→N argument construction, so that one stands out as the primary focus of the clause.

A descriptor verb may have subverbs (usually requiring the relative clause translation: SIBLING→speak→obstruct, “a sibling, who can't speak”).  However, it cannot take an explicit argument, perhaps because the noun to which the descriptor is subordinated is felt to be effectively its subject.

Not all verbs in N→V relationships function as modifiers like this; INSTANCE, for instance, is one of a specialised family of nouns that serve to “nominalise” the attached subclause.

V→V (verb child of verb parent): “subverb”

This construction resembles the strings of verbs that can occur in English sentences (“I can't help wanting to keep trying to…”).  Many terrestrial languages use “serial verb” chains heavily, dividing ideas that English expresses using a specialised word (such as “collect”) into a concatenated sequence of subcomponents (“come/grasp/go”).  Europan can take this much further, since its syntax never needs to be limited to simple linear chains – just as a verb may have any number of arguments, it is also possible for a single parent verb to have multiple modifiers and subclauses attached:

	ME	←believe→	false
		↓
YOU←	equal	←quote→	own	→THE
	↓		↓
	SMITH		stand	→FOOD

“I do not believe that you are Smith or that the food belongs to them” (E#C2576C = SMITH being the commonest Europan personal name element).  In complex sentences, it may not be apparent from the syntax whether a child verb is a modifying subverb (like false above) or a full subordinate clause (like equal), but in practice any ambiguity could be resolved via further modifiers.

All the above sentences are tame by the standards of the Europan language.  Some of its sentence structures are difficult even to fit onto a page as 2D diagrams, but the Europans themselves could parse them on the fly when received as batches of words “spoken” in parallel, with their inter­relationships shown by the accompanying tags:

false SMITH YOU quote stand THE believe equal FOOD ME own

TOPOLOGY

Europan is like terrestrial languages in that its sentences can be diagrammed as directed graphs – that is, sets of nodes linked by arrows running from “parent” to “child”.  In all terrestrial languages, the graphs are simple, connected, acyclic, rooted trees.  They have one and only one node without a parent: the “Sentence” node, which despite being the “root” of the tree is conventionally placed at the top.  Europan doesn't recognise the same sort of syntactic category nodes, only overt verbs and nouns as in a dependency tree, but it does allow verbs (and only verbs) to be parentless.  Indeed, as the two example Europan sentences given so far demonstrate, they often have just one such “source” node as the ultimate ancestor of every other, thus forming a classical “tree structure”.  However, this is not invariably the case; it is also possible for there to be several parentless nodes (where the sentence is incompletely connected) or for there to be none (where a graph forms a cycle).

“Disconnected” sentences made up of adjacent but syntactically independent clauses are common, often serving to present causally unrelated events that are being considered together, as in “I continued eating as the current grew stronger” (or equally “The current grew stronger as I continued eating”).  Various more complex relationships between clauses are also handled by just putting them together within a sentence:

“If you're going then I'm going.”  Although diagrammed as three separate subgraphs, this would be uttered as a single batch of seven words, and written as something along the lines of YOU posit go potential go infer ME, where each instance of go is the parent of the noun and subverb on the other side of the sentence.  Note the presence there of another kind of parentless node: the free‐floating word potential, which marks the sentence as conditional.  Effectively, it works like an English initial adverb (such as “effectively”), which stands on the margins of a sentence and modifies it as a whole.

Such constructions are in theory sufficient on their own to make Europan incompatible with a description limited to conventional tree structures, but this is arguably an illusion caused by our choice of terminology; we might instead have decided to call each connected subgraph a “sentence” and used some other word (such as “utterance”) for a set of subgraphs spoken in parallel.

The more significant topological anomaly permitted in Europan syntax is the cyclic graph (or “loop sentence”).  These are less common, but far from unusual in contexts such as reciprocal interactions:

This sentence could be translated relatively literally as “I give food to you who give money to me” or more idiomatically as “I sell you food”.  Pop‐science accounts of the decipherment of Europan that insist on seeing every facet of their culture as deriving neatly from their biology invariably attribute this interest in symmetrical social relationships to the fact they were hermaphrodites.  Be that as it may, the claim often seen in such accounts that loop sentences were used to express reflexive verbs is a mis­understanding – on the contrary, the whole category of potential loops passing through a single noun was avoided.  Even in the layer‐two sentence “So does it [the set of all sets] contain itself?”, the grammar of the reflexive construction is straight­forward, by Europan standards:

Europan syntax makes it impossible for multiple loops to occur within a single connected subgraph, but a sentence containing several separate loops is possible in principle.  There are no cases in the available corpus, but this may not be significant; the clearest evidence we have that Europans found some types of loop sentences entirely natural is that cycles were used in contexts that show no obvious need for them.  For instance, they occur as a way of “fine‐tuning” sequential or positional relationships:

That is, “I am southward of you, who are upstream of me”, or equally, “You are upstream and to the north of me”.  Tighter loops are possible, but the only known example of a three‐verb loop is still undeciphered:

The N→N construction E#5AB561→E#5D8CA8 may be a name, and the verb e#f76600 is also used elsewhere in the same text, which may be discussing either a game or a legislative process.  There is also one clear case in a philosophical treatise of the tightest possible kind of loop, though it is presented more as an obtrusively clever epigram than as a piece of normal conversational Europan:

The apparent meaning is along the lines of “The less reliable the data, the less reliable the worldview; the less reliable the worldview, the less reliable the data”.  It is especially notable because it casually breaks another of the rules obeyed by all human languages: the structural diagram requires two arrows between the same pair of nodes, which means it isn't a “simple” graph.

?OVERVIEW increase bad bad increase FACT

LEXICON

The full Europan Epigraphic Catalogue has over ten thousand entries, which for the size of the corpus is a notably small vocabulary, but still big enough that a large number of them will almost certainly never be deciphered.  The following selection of important vocabulary items should be enough to give a general impression of the language.  Each entry gives:

1. The glyph itself.  Noun glyphs (uppercase) are composed of asymmetric “strands”, while verb glyphs are symmetrical patterns.
2. The EEC glyph‐code, which is simply the hexadecimal equivalent of the glyph's binary series of full and empty dots.  The catalogue uses this as a natural “alphabetical order”.
3. The gloss, which is a single word conventionally used as the human‐readable equivalent of the E‐number (but to be understood more as a mnemonic than an accurate translation).  All of the examples given have glosses accepted by both cadmus and esa schools of decipherment.
4. Notes on the word's usage.

Verbs predominate over nouns in this selection not because there are more of them but because they tend to be both more linguistically interesting and easier to assign a definite meaning.  Many nouns are like E#B6CB38: we know it refers to some basic means of transport, but we can't be sure whether it was the equivalent of a pony, rickshaw, or jetpack.

• 

  E#00E4E0 = THE.  Commonly (though much less commonly than in English) used as a specifier, implying that the parent noun is a particular one identifiable to all.  A descriptor attached below this word is interpreted as a restrictive relative clause: SIBLING→THE→dance, “the sibling who is dancing”.  Also used as the argument of a verb, where it can function as a third‐person pronoun (“he/she/it/they”) or perhaps “the one(s) in question”.

• 

  E#06CDA5 = CONTENT (that is, the meaning of a message).  An important technical term in the computational semantics of the layer‐one texts, but common in layer three as well thanks to idioms such as:

  speak	→become→	perceive	→obstruct
  ↓	↓	↓
  YOU	CONTENT	ME

  “I don't understand what you mean”, and ME←equal→CONTENT→SMITH, “My name is Smith/What Smith means is me”.  The word can also nominalise a clause (compare INSTANCE): good→CONTENT→speak→YOU is “You speak the truth”.

• 

  e#072440 = good.  On its own this means “(is) correct, ethical, honest, robust, reliable”.  Senses like “nice, pleasurable” require an identified point of view or an evidential tag (see infer): FOOD←good→feel→ME is translatable as either “I find the food tasty” or “I like the food”.

• 

  e#0c5b80 = function.  This is occasionally seen as a descriptor meaning something like “useful, in working order”, but most of the time it fits into a serial verb chain to carry an instrumental argument such as function→BEAK, “with/using one's mouth”.  When used with no argument it tends to add an implication of artificial assistance: go→function is “travel, go in a vehicle”.

• 

  e#0de7df = suffer.  A disbenefactive, often used in serial verb chains to carry the argument that we would make the object: BUG←attack→suffer→ME, “An insect is biting/stinging me”.  Like its antonym benefit it may introduce an argument that is little more than a bystander: ME←suffer→open→FACE→OFFSPRING→YOU, “Your child is happy, to my inconvenience/Your child is too happy”.

• 

  e#0fa5f0 = own, used for extrinsic possessives such as “my food” (whereas intrinsic associatives like “my child”, “my tentacles” use a specifier construction).  It functions as a positional verb (compare contain, underlie) – “I have food” is ME←own→stand→FOOD.  In English “have” can mean simply “hold” with no claim of ownership; that sense is covered by other positionals or simply handy→FOOD.

• 

  E#18A564 = PEBBLE.  More accurately a “smooth, rounded, nonconductive solid object”, whether that's a bead, button, or pearl; one of a family of words that are used rather like pronouns (or at least, like the pronouns in languages like Swahili that have a large number of noun classes).

  flow	←move→	deflect
  	↓	↓
  	PEBBLE	PROSOMA	→ME

  “Washed by the current, it (the pebble‐like thing) bounced off my head”.  There are some two dozen similar generic words for “elongated object”, “conductive object”, “hollow object”, and so on, all distinguished as casually as English distinguishes between “people”, “things”, and “stuff”.

• 

  E#1D1688 = FOOD.  The word is an extremely general term for nutrition or fuel, and different verbal constructions are used to distinguish the kind of FOOD you actively catch and swallow, the kind you suck through your gills, and even (in one layer‐two text) the kind that powers a mechanical device.  The standard translation for “I am eating” would be ME←BEAK←accept→move→FOOD.

• 

  e#1d42b8 = great (not to be confused with massive), which can occur as a plain verb or descriptor meaning physically/socially imposing.  It also functions as a general intensifier (go→great means something like “charge”), though verbs are more frequently intensified simply by doubling them up (go→go, “rush”).

• 

  e#1de1b1 = quote.  This often effectively tags a subclause as an informational complement, but what it's actually doing is marking a (potential) change in viewpoint.  The default is for reported speech to be “direct”, with the pronouns and evidential markers retained verbatim:

  speak	→quote	→own→	stand	→infer
  ↓		↓	↓
  THE		ME	FOOD

  “They said: so the food must be mine [= their own]”.  Adding an argument clarifies that it's being rephrased from another point of view – so for instance making it quote→ME above would have made it “They said that the food must be mine [= the speaker's]”.  As an unattributed subverb quote also allows for tagging particular modifiers as indirect, so that for instance YOU←go→finish→quote within a narrative is “you had (already) gone” – the completive marking is relative to the time being discussed.

• 

  e#213c84 = warn.  A modifier indicating that an utterance is cautionary – usually free‐floating, occasionally attached directly to a particular part of the sentence.

  contain	→stand→	BUG
  ↓	↓
  FOOD	BUG		warn

  “Watch out for insects in the food!” (note that there's no claim that there are insects in the food).  English has syntactically distinct statements, questions, commands, and exclamations, but Europan has a considerably larger and fuzzier set of sentence types (requests, invitations, instructions, conditionals…) distinguished only by modifiers of this kind.

• 

  E#26A313 = FACE.  This is more of an analogy than a translation; it really means “tentacle configuration, as used to signal emotions, recognise individuals, and so on” (with various associated metaphorical senses: for instance nearby→FACE→YOU means “in your company”).  Non‐verbal communication must have been relied on heavily in situations where direct one‐to‐one interaction was impractical – see also announce.

• 

  e#2aab52 = query.  A question marker, which can float freely as a sentence‐type modifier (query   perceive→nearby→FOOD, “Is there food here?/Any idea if there's food here?”), or attach to a verb as an evidential tag (query←nearby→FOOD, “I wonder whether there's food here?”), or even be a descriptor on a noun (perceive→nearby→FOOD→query, “What food is there here?”).  Rhetorical questions, which don't want a reply, or instructional questions, where the speaker already knows the answer, may use additional sentence‐type markers (such as a floating please).

• 

  E#2E20E1 = THAT.  A sort of resumptive pronoun.  When used as a specifier, it tags its parent noun as the topic, which can be referred back to by another (parallel or subsequent) use of the word as an argument.  Thus for instance:

  own	→	move	→	adjust		good	→	feel
  ↓		↓				↓		↓
  ME		FOOD	→	THAT		THAT		ME

  “I was given food, which was tasty” (or “I liked the food I was given”).  This is the nearest Europan gets to allowing an argument to be the subject of more than one verb (“They did A and B and C”).  Some layer‐three texts allow callbacks to candidates in previous sentences that weren't tagged in the first place.

• 

  e#2e4fc2 = before.  Human languages tend to use spatial analogies to describe time: we “look back to years gone by”.  In Europan, temporal expressions are completely independent of the enormous family of positional constructions – instead it's:

  ME	←go→	finish
  	↓
  	before
  	↓
  YOU	←go→	speak

  “I went before you (allegedly) did.”  (See also finish.)  This is just like the way Europan handles abstract comparatives: replacing before with more gives “I went more than you (allegedly) did.”

• 

  E#32AED1 = THIS.  Europan doesn't divide up its demonstrative pronouns the way we tend to, with a “this” for pointing at nearby items and a “that” for more remote ones (THAT means something different).  Instead there's one generic pointer, THIS, and two common variants: THIS→ME (“my this”) means “the one in front of me” and THIS→YOU (“your this”) means “the one in front of you (so behind me)”.  More rarely, THIS can also be used to refer back anaphorically to something within the conversation, in which case the attached pronoun is used to distinguish “the one I mentioned” from “the one you mentioned”.

• 

  e#32bd4c = contain, used with another verb such as stand to form positional expressions equivalent to the English prepositions “in/into/at”: ME←BEAK←contain→stand→FOOD, “There is food in my mouth”.  The emphatic contain→great is used for “is full of”; lose→contain covers “out of/from”.

• 

  e#38d513 = infer.  An evidential marker, commonly used to tag a statement as based on circumstantial data: infer←nearby→FOOD, for instance, means “(Then) there must be food here”.  While they are never mandatory, and tend to be seen as redundant alongside a personal pronoun (see ME), a variety of evidential markers are available to help distinguish eyewitness testimony, hearsay, admissions of ignorance, and so on.

• 

  e#441c5c = underlie.  On its own, “be beneath (a surface)”.  When it's seen from a different argument's point of view in a positional chain, the effective meaning is “on (top of)”: ME←NEST←underlie→stand→ME is “I am on my nest” (i.e. “at home”).  With different verbs it can be “onto” or, as in the following, “off (from on)”:

  NEST	←lose→	go
  ↓	↓	↓
  ME	underlie	ME

• 

  e#4ba174 = become.  This can be used to introduce processes where something changes state of its own accord (elderly→become).  It may also appear in a serial verb chain carrying an argument that in English would be the object of a verb of creation – “speak a word”, “carve a statue”, “tie a knot”.

• 

  e#4dc3b2 = go.  As a verb of motion this may translate as “come” (among other things) rather than “go”: ME←NEST←send→go→ME is “I come here from my home”.  It is also one of the commonest verbs used to construct positional phrases, covering more or less any voluntary change in location.

• 

  E#5CC3D3 = TENDRIL.  The short tentacles close to the mouth.  It's clear enough that having something in one's tendrils equates to being directly occupied with it, but there are a great many other contextually determined or metaphorical uses that are not yet fully understood.  The expression function→TENDRIL, when used as a modifier, may mean “carefully”, “personally”, “hungrily”, perhaps even “sensually”!

• 

  e#6024e9 = next.  Used to divide things into subsets which act in a specified order.  Where ME←go→YOU (“I and you go”) suggests that we moved more or less at the same time, or at least that the order doesn't matter, ME←go→next→YOU clarifies that we moved successively (“I and then you go”).  After this context has been established it can be used for things like next→ANOTHER, “And then somebody else did too”.  Compare GROUP.

• 

  e#65184f = perceive, which refers to detection via passive senses (compare witness):

  bright←	perceive	→quote→	great
  	↓		↓
  	ME		YOU

  “I can see that you are imposing” (bright can just mean “is luminous”, but here might be translated “Something illuminates…” or “Visibly”).  As an evidential (see infer), perceive marks testimony as direct knowledge, or can introduce the “addressee” in a sentence like “I have told them”:

  finish	←speak→	perceive
  	↓	↓
  	ME	THE

• 

  E#65294B = ANOTHER.  A specifier, as in PERSON→ANOTHER, “a different person/someone else”, or a fourth person pronoun explicitly not referring back to the established topic (cf. THAT).  Repeated uses of ANOTHER denote a different entity each time; narratives where the topic switches back and forth between two entities (“she said… then he said…”) use THAT and OTHER instead.

• 

  E#6541C3 = INSTANCE.  Bundles up a descriptor clause into a nominalised form referring to a particular event, as in ME←witness←finish→INSTANCE→dance→YOU “I watched your dance/(the complete event of) you dancing”.  More abstract nominal­isations can be formed with PHENOMENON; see also CONTENT.

• 

  E#69C8C6 = JUPITER, the first proper noun clearly identified in the astrophysics texts.  The full form is E#69C8C6→E#0B6BB4, with a secondary element (also unique to this compound) which is usually dropped.  Specifiers and descriptors attach only to the primary part:

  rotate	→E#69C8C6→	massive
  ↓	↓
  speak	E#0B6BB4

  “Jupiter, which is massive, is said to rotate” (rotate is not the same as spin).  Even proper names can be doubled to convey a vague plural sense: JUPITER←massive→JUPITER, “Jupiter and so on (i.e. the gas giants) are massive”.

• 

  e#6ddbb6 = pulsate.  This is used for things that physically fluctuate in overall size or shape, expanding and contracting on the spot (like, say, a jellyfish), or in one case apparently applied to electrical phenomena.  The Europan vocabulary for types of motion is comparable to our vocabulary for colours, and where we can only concatenate colour terms in series (“blue‐green”), Europan has extra options like tacking motion terms on in parallel: PEBBLE→go→pulsate is an object that's propelling itself by pulsating while pulsate←PEBBLE→go is an object that's propelling itself while also pulsating.

• 

  e#74a52e = finish.  It's common in sentences where we'd use past tense, but strictly speaking it tags an event as completive/retrospective (and there's an equivalent inceptive/prospective start, a continue, and various others).  Actual temporal marking often uses before/after and become: ME←go→after→become is “I will (eventually) go”, three←SEASON←become→after→go→ME is “it's three seasons since I went”.

• 

  e#79669e = notable.  Seen only as a descriptor or argumentless subverbal modifier, indicating that the part of the sentence it's attached to is a focus of attention and/or (like English “but”) pointing up a contrast: go→ME   YOU←go→false→notable is “I go but you don't”.  One layer‐three text appears to be using it to mark emotive emphasis (so that ME←go→notable might translate as “I do go”).

• 

  e#818838 = speak, the word for normal one‐to‐one communicative behaviour (“say”, “talk together”, etc.; compare announce).  As an unattributed subverb, it is also a very common evidential marker (see infer) for hearsay: FOOD←nearby→speak, “There is (reportedly) food here”.

• 

  E#868F5A = GROUP, used to collect nouns into a set which functions as a single argument and can take shared modifiers:

  dance	→GROUP→	YOU
  ↓	↓
  finish	ME

  “We danced together” (whereas attaching the pronouns as direct children of the verb might mean “I danced and you danced”).  It can also attach as a pluralising specifier (go→PERSON→GROUP, “The people are going”), though the more normal way of forming a plural is simply to double the argument (PERSON←go→PERSON).

• 

  e#8c1188 = announce.  For Europans, communicating over a distance wasn't just a matter of shouting louder; it required the message to be drastically simplified.  The closest terrestrial analogy may be the way “talking drums” can be used to convey messages over extended distances, leaving out the particular consonant and vowel sounds and just transmitting the tone contours.  However, announce was also conventionally used to mean any form of linguistic expression other than speech, so “I have written a word” is:

  finish←	announce	→function→	become
  	↓	↓	↓
  	ME	STYLUS	GLYPH

• 

  e#9000a0 = stimulate.  On its own this means “be interesting, draw one's attention”, but it is also the standard verb used to express emotional reactions: YOU←stimulate→soft→FACE→ME is “You stimulate me to adopt a posture with limp tentacles”, or in other words “You depress me”.

• 

  e#9898e9 = obstruct, which can be used in positional constructions to mean something like “be in the way”, but is mainly used as a modal verb: ME←go→obstruct is “Something prevents me from (fully) going/I can't go”, while ME←go→obstruct→false is equivalent to “I can go”.  Attaching things differently, ME←go→false→obstruct is “I can't not go”, while

  obstruct	←go→	false
  	↓
  	ME

  translates roughly as “I can't go, and I'm not going”.

• 

  E#99473E = ALL, used as a specifier meaning “all of/every” or as an independent argument meaning “everyone/everything, the whole lot”.  Used in combination with a number, usually one, it can have a distributive sense: go→ALL→one “They each go”.  With negation on the noun, nearby→ALL→false means “Only some of them (not all) are here”, while false→nearby→ALL with a negated verb (more literally “Everything is not nearby”) means “There is nothing here”.

• 

  e#a510aa = witness, used for intentional, active observation by means of sonar or electro­location.  It occurs most often as the highest rank of evidential marker (compare infer, perceive) – thus for instance witness←nearby→FOOD, “(I can vouch for the fact that) there is food here”.  Many Europan idiomatic expressions apparently refer to echolocatory jamming, subtly differentiated kinds of “chirps” and “sweeps”, and so on, but the details are little understood.

• 

  e#a524a5 = schedule.  An evidential marker (see infer) used where we would expect a tense marker: it flags a situation as being reliably predictable but not yet established fact.  For instance, ME←go→schedule is something like “I am to go”.  Future reference can also be implied by modal verbs (want, responsible), or stated more directly (see finish), and there's a sentence‐type marker declare that can announce a newly made policy or resolution and often substitutes for “will” as in “I'll do it!”

• 

  e#baa55d = stand.  Of course, it doesn't literally mean “balance on one's legs”, though it can have the equivalent sense of “adopt a neutral stationary posture”.  In serial verb chains, it is one of the several Europan words that might stake a claim to the meaning “be” (compare equal): it carries the argument whose state is described by the other verbs in the construction.  See move, go for the verbs used in less static cases.

• 

  E#BCB2DD = ME, which along with (singular) YOU makes up the complete set of true personal pronouns available in the language, though they can also be put together in combinations:

  ME	←go→	ME
  	↓
  	YOU

  “We are going”, or to be more accurate “I and mine plus just you, not necessarily together” (see GROUP).  In informational complements (see quote), ME tends confusingly to mean “the speaker”.  As a specifier, ME functions as an inalienable‐associative marker, “my”, used of body parts, interpersonal relationships, and the like.

• 

  e#cae75c = equal.  Where we use the one verb “be” in multiple senses (“exist”, “have a property”, and so on), Europan factors them out.  The verb equal can express the idea that its subject nouns are one and the same, or (by way of a quasi‐positional chain) that they form a set that other things might be members of: PERSON←equal→stand→ME, “I am a person”.  A related construction can be used to derive a verbal/adjectival sense from a noun: PARENT←equal→behave→ME, “I habitually act as a parent, I am parental”.

• 

  E#CB5168 = BUG.  Any member of a Europan phylum analogous to terrestrial arthropods.  The gloss reflects the apparently casual way words like BUG, WORM, or SLUG were used, each one covering a diverse range of creatures.  Terms like this in human cultures tend to group creatures by their superficial features, traditionally classing dolphins as fish, bats as birds, and all manner of creepy‐crawlies as bugs.  The Europan system on the other hand is a suspiciously neat fit for the tree of life described in their zoology texts.

• 

  e#d6006b = three.  Like all Europan number words this is an adjectivelike verb rather than a noun: three→YEAR→ME, “My years are three in number” (i.e. “I am three jovian orbits old”).  All nouns seem to have been regarded as countable; FOOD→three is “three lots of food” in whatever sense is relevant in a given context.  Numbers attached as subverbs indicate repetition, so go→three is “go three times”.  Compound numbers involve a word glossed as tally:

  go	→PERSON	→tally→	sixteen
  ↓		↓	↓
  finish		three	four

  “43₁₆ (=67) people went”.  However, low multiples are often expressed by repetition – sixteen←tally→sixteen, “20₁₆ (=32)”.  Ordinal numbers are confusingly off by one: finish←go→PERSON→after→three is “The fourth person (someone preceded by three) went”.  It is unclear how ideas such as “three is prime” were handled; the only texts referencing mathematics are the layer‐one plaques, which rely on special notation rather than using Europan words.

• 

  E#DACB3C = PERSON; usually in the sense of “a (specific) sapient being”, but occasionally taken to exclude children.  Many expressions formed from this word with a descriptor verb are fixed idioms equivalent to agentive nouns: so for instance a PERSON→announce is a “signaller” (a traditional specialist in ranged communication).

• 

  e#db416d = false.  As a modifying subverb indicating that its complement/parent is “not true”, this is effectively a negative marker: ME←speak→false is “I don't speak”.  (There's also a true which is used where we might say “indeed”.)  However, this negative construction is often avoided in favour of one applying the numeric subverb zero (compare three) to convey “a total of no times”: ME←speak→zero, “I never say anything”.

• 

  E#E92AD3 = SEASON.  A unit of time of unclear length (50 < x < 250 Earth days), based on a biological rather than astronomical cycle.  Often used along with become in the sense of “occur, pass”: ME←go→three→become→SEASON is “I take a season to go three times”.

• 

  e#f0251f = believe, often used where we might expect “know”; but in Europan the question of whether the speaker vouches for a statement as true is usually split out into evidential markers:

  infer	←believe→	quote→	nearby
  	↓		↓
  	BUG		FOOD

  “The insect must know that there is food there.”

• 

  e#f50040 = spin.  A movement modifier indicating that something is rotating around its axis of displacement, like a spinning arrow.  The system used to specify direction of rotation depends on the convention that I default to turning left/anticlockwise, and my addressee is facing the other way, so “your” directions are reversed (compare THIS):

  witness	←move→	spin	→query
  	↓	↓
  	STICK	YOU

  “Can you tell whether it (that long thin thing) is spinning clockwise (‘your way’) as it goes?”

• 

  e#f8c31f = move is an element in a great many serial verb compounds equivalent to single words in English, indicating involuntary motion (compare go) or very often just a change of state (ME←own→move→FOOD, “I get food”).  In contexts where English would actually talk about something moving, Europan tends to be far more specific, distinguishing many different kinds of motion: “approach, decelerating”, “progress jerkily, but without obvious moving parts”, “thrash, with one point held still”, and so on – see spin, pulsate.

• 

  e#fe667f = massive.  While this verb can function as a descriptor to describe objects as enormously heavy, its normal role is to introduce a gravitational field as a cause for movement: ME←move→massive, “I am falling”.  It's rarely necessary to specify what you're falling toward, so the verb rarely has an argument, but the astrophysics outlines do contain sentences such as EUROPA←circle→massive→JUPITER, “Europa orbits Jupiter”.

AFTERWORD

Many things remain unclear about the Europans.

• What happened to them after they created the obelisks?
• Who were they writing for?  The distribution of the obelisks gives the impression that their target audience was “any species that happens to evolve to sapience around Jupiter over the next billion years”, but it should already have been apparent that on that timescale the Europan biosphere was doomed (while Earth's was booming).
• How does an aquatic race develop a technological civilisation, anyway?  It's all very well to say they could jump straight to bioelectricity, but what's the good of that without metals?  There's one text that might imaginably be a description of smelting in a caisson; but while the process may have been familiar to the writers, to us it's a mess of unknown nouns and verbs.
• Why do the texts deciphered so far contain no references to any of the technologies that the writers must necessarily have mastered in order to be able to create the obelisks?  The culture represented as current in the layer‐three corpus seems far less sophisticated even than ours, and the only settings described in any detail are clearly preindustrial.
• Given the cultural divisions chronicled in those texts, why is there no sign of linguistic diversity?  Europan has many features that hint at an origin as an artificial “logical language” developed by a scientifically advanced civilisation, but nobody is ever represented as speaking anything else.
• Why would artefacts so plainly intended to be easy to interpret nonetheless contain mysteries like the above?

The normal assumption is that the Europans felt the answers to be somehow sensitive information.  It has been widely suggested that they were in fact postbiological entities who only represented themselves as still being cephalopodlike organisms because they were censoring the part of the story where their species developed the technologies that eventually led to their tragic fall (or glorious transcendence).

A newer and more subversive variant of this theory is that the Europans were not the creators of the message but its intended recipients.  The obelisk builders passed through this system just as the locals seemed sure to develop the means to emerge from their home ocean at some point within the next million years, so they left a message in a format designed (with superhuman skill and attention to detail) to be easy for them to learn, and incorporating a corpus of texts translated from the various tongues of the Europan Iron Age.  Of course, if this theory is correct, the existence of unopened obelisks is evidence that the locals failed to live up to the expectations of their patrons.  It also suggests that we have been misguided in our own expectation that the message would ultimately prove to have a valuable payload of technological arcana.  Perhaps the real gift was the part we've mistaken for wrapping paper: the Europan language itself.