The Suihan Language

by Eduard Tubin

I do not believe everyone speaks Chinese in the Avatar Realm so I invented my own language based on Indo - European roots. Suihan is a language that descended from the same roots and English but is similar to Old Irish and Old Latin.

The Suihan Haters Handbook

Introduction

By: Azula Kai of The fire Nation

'Every time I write this, I contradict myself. This is the final time I revise this and set things at least crooked. What is wrong here is wrong for good.'

Drear Brother Zuko:

I do agree with you that a fire bending handbook has a small but ready market in Suihan. The Dominion has only a small number of fire benders and they do not compare in power to those of The Fire Nation, but there exists a curiosity about this ancient craft. In our city, we have two schools for training fire bending as a martial art and each one has about fifty students. Fire benders, like those with any athletic interest, have a desire to enjoy their craft, extend their abilities and learn about the long and glorious history of fire bending. We have to pay a higher rate to insure our place against fire because Karo and I can fire bend so there is a widespread interest.

During the War, fire benders gained a reputation as oppressors of the worst kind and war mongers. The Dominion has largely been spared this humiliation. As they say, when it hits the fan: it gets spread around – but not always evenly.

Karo can fire bend and yet all my attempts to train him and help him gain in power have failed. When I watch Karo fire bend, he can use fire but he just doesn't 'get it'. I don't mean to pick on Karo. All Suihanese fire benders reach a certain level of basic skill and simply never improve. The Fire Nation need not fear an army of gifted fire benders massing on the beaches of the Homeland. They lack the numbers and don't have the pool of talent.

I have met Suihanese fire benders and they all lack talent. I sometimes feel like I'm a concert singer in a land of the tone deaf. They do want to learn more about the one bending talent they have and have countless questions. The Suihanese wish to have a place at the League of Nations but in the past only nations with bending counted. The Suihanese want to master what bending they have to give themselves a sense of status and feel as equals in the world. Only in The Dominion, would it occur to the benders that their skills could have constructive purposes such as self improvement, sport and as a means of maintaining health. The Fire Nation can do much to repair its reputation by teaching their neighbors.

A guide or authoritative manual written in Suihan for The Dominion would go a long way to accomplish this goal but so far the guides translated into Suihan have not proven very useful. While the sages of yore have written good books on fire bending; The Fire Nation translators writing for a Suihan audience have not done these works any justice. Translators have not paid attention to the delicate nature of the Suihan language and have blithely used Chinese terms, ignored Suihan's prodigious vocabulary and made errors in idiom and expression. The translators have assumed (wrongly) that Chinese can be translated word for word into Suihan, and Chinese fire bending terms inserted into Suihan texts and be understood.

The Suihanese People

'or'

Who We Are and Why We Aren't Chinese

The Suihanese live on The Islands of The Dominion which include The Islands of Henwa (The Basarias) and The Islands of The Western Air Temple (The Aurancias). They live on the Northern and Southern Air Temple Islands in cities founded in a turbulent period of history between 1,500 and 2,000 years ago. A sizable minority live in the Southern Provinces of the Fire Nation Islands and in the Eastern Earth Kingdom and Ba Sing Se. Suihanese live in every major city in The Realm in a spread out community called the Suihanese Diaspora.

You have traveled widely enough to know the idea of a single spoken version of Chinese is a falsehood. I heard any number of Chinese variants spoken in the Earth Kingdom that I was powerless to understand. Linguists define 'language' as being a spoken language mutually understood by an entire community and they view Chinese as many related languages with similar grammars sharing a single written language. Even the Fire Nation has three dialects of Chinese: those in the nobility living in the capitol often find it difficult to make sense of the spoken language as spoken in the North though they can make some sense of it. The two thirds of the Fire Nation using Chinese only communicate easily using the written language. The other third uses Suihan (bet this comes as a shock).

The Earth Kingdom has at least a dozen major variants of the Chinese language – perhaps upwards of sixty minor ones. I found out about this linguistic diversity when I had overthrown the Earth King and had to organize the City of Ba Sing Se. Most of the civil servants, members of the Dai Lee and most everyone else gave me a bland stare of confused bemusement when I spoke. I had to have Lady Mai write out orders for my injunctions to be carried out. With a huge refugee community and an already rich assortment of dialects, walking a block sometimes placed me in the middle of a community of semi literate peasants with no hope of understanding me or my orders.

Suihan has a hundred million native speakers and twice that number using it as the modern language of technology and has become a very important language. Only the two major dialects of Earth Kingdom Chinese (North and South) have more native speakers. Unlike Chinese, Suihan hasn't fragmented into vastly different dialects although minor variations occur in Modern High Suihan: Karo can understand someone from the Suihanese community in Ba Sing Se as easily as the surf shop owner down the street. This makes Suihan the most widely dispersed language in the Realm: in any large city, Karo stands a chance of finding a native speaker. While you can write a letter and expect any literate speaker in the Realm from Avatar Aang to King Kue to read it, only a third of the Realm can read and write at your level. By virtue of its history, Suihan has achieved a nearly total literacy rate.

Two and a half centuries ago, The Fire Nation colonized The Dominion. At the time, The Dominion wasn't a Dominion but rather a group of city states. Some welcomed Fire Nation rule. Others accepted this without too much trouble. A few went to war and lost. The Modern Suihan period of history began here and most people in The Fire Nation know little of the history before then. The Fire Nation had hoped to extend its influence by letting the colonial states have some freedoms and yet also hoped to enjoy the benefit of having the industrious, hard working Suihanese as allies. Since The Royal Family of the Fire Nation, The House of Zhao and Avatar Roku have Suihan roots; the plan backfired. The man you know as Karo Zhao is Karl Iban Giusseppe and is about as Chinese as the planet Mars. Through historical events, some bad judgment on behalf of my mother and Suihan conniving and pillow talk: you and I are part Suihan.

If the Fire Nation had only known how invasive Suihanese culture would become; they would have been put off and left them alone.

The Suihanese shaped history. The Fire Nation had long enjoyed peace as dynasties of rulers came and went. The Suihanese way of thinking crept into the Fire Nation as rich Suihanese landowners, merchants and industrialists bought, married or bribed their way into the Fire Nation nobility. The Suihanese may have anemic fire bending, but I credit my Suihan background for my ability to scheme and make political moves of great skill (anyone who thought I conquered Ba Sing Se should look up the 86 arrest records for the terrorist attempts on my life during the two weeks I ruled: the actual count of assassination attempts go many times higher but no one got caught). The new hybrid nobility didn't share the idea that nations lived in balance and harmony but that the world was a ready market full of demand for new goods. Sozin had this view and his grievance against the existing order began as a grievance against the tariffs and isolationism of other nations that blocked trade. We know the rest of that story.

Who are these pale faced people with freckles and red hair? Where did they come from? Why did they end up so different from others? Anthropologists classify the Suihanese as a Caucasoid people along with the Kyoshi Islanders and many groups living in the southern half of the Earth Kingdom. No one can trace their history further back than two thousand years with any reliability. In the last two centuries, linguists have discovered that the liturgical language of the Air Nomads – Sanskrit and Suihan are distant cousins though not directly related. Sanskrit vastly predates Suihan by at least two thousand years and Sanskrit was spoken by Air Nomads – an ethnically diverse group containing members of all the other ethnic groups who had a talent for air bending. Suihan and Sanskrit are the two remaining members of a vast family of prehistoric languages dating back many thousands of years. Some linguists have pointed to similarities between Sanskrit and Suihan to languages spoken in the Seewong desert among the sand benders but this is hotly debated. Languages and cultures travel vast distances and linguists, anthropologists and historians have little evidence to draw upon.

History does suggest strongly that the wars that lead to the founding of the Fort of Omashu as a city forced the Suihanese to flee to the Islands of Henwa and other outlying islands between 2,000 and 1,500 years ago. The Kyoshi Islanders, the Water Tribes are animists. The Southern Earth Kingdom have a number of polytheistic religions. The Suihanese had a monotheistic religion and a strongly missionary one at that. Two thousand years ago, they had vast parts of the Southern Earth Kingdom including the Kyoshi lands subjugated. If you ask Karo, their rule failed because they betrayed God by adapting to local religions to keep the peace. Since they had a fragile kingdom and the dynasty lasted three generations; the rise of Omashu and the alliances between Omashu and the other lands broke their homelands into fragments. Omashu and its allies used religious oppression to subjugate some of the Suihanese and the others fled over the next few centuries.

The Kyoshinese refer to a people they called the 'Keruto' and describe as avid traders of metals and gold in two documents from two thousand years ago. The Keruto had power and wealth, and influence. The Southern Water Tribe referred to The 'Kel Toi' or fire benders from the Earth Kingdom in many records from between 2,000 and 1,000 years ago. Earth Kingdom Chinese called them 'Copper Makers' . The term Suihan as the name of the nation and people came from the word 'Symhiru' or 'Chosen People'.The modern nation refer to themselves as Suihanese, and the language and land as Suihan. Modesty may be a virtue but it isn't a Suihanese one.

The Suihanese have a different world view from the vast majority of other cultures due to their religion, materialistic view of the World and isolation. While the philosophers of other nations spoke of harmony and peace, the Suihanese developed a decidedly polarizing view of the world called 'logic'. They think in terms of opposing arguments and probing the truth by reason. Compared to the gentle Air Nomads or bucolic Water Tribe; the Suihanese had a decidedly invasive means of probing the world as they made their living by trade, acting as mercenaries and running banks. As they had a book with all the answers, they never developed a tradition of contemplation, harmony or introspection. Cultured peoples of other nation may deride this, but the Suihanese developed a philosophy of reconciling opposites with logic or as their history reveals; through open conflict, war and murder. The nation fled their ancient homeland and settled on islands and formed a number of city states. They never had any powerful central authority to control them so war became the rule. As the city states were small, wars were small and usually were settled with bribery, assassination, baby selling or wife swapping. The City States had a class of mercenaries who hired themselves out to the highest bidder based on skill and success. Even Fire Nation nobles hired Suihanese soldiers, bounty hunters and skilled men of science if the price were right.

The line of Avatar Roku came out of Suihanese land owners who ran wineries and industries had money. The Zhao family began as a family of landowners who became involved in weapons and the odd act of piracy. Even before The Fire Nation annexed The Dominion; the Suihanese had become our bankers. In time, they would actually take over and as you will see, their ideas would lead to the War.

I made a mistake when I said they had no central authority. A tourist in Suihan will see a church steeple and the circle with the four pointed star. The church acted as the authority. City states could fight, rape and pillage each other but everyone had the same institution in their lives – the church. In a typical Suihanese way, the church was also corrupt and money grabbing at the height of its power. Actually, The Church placed hard work and profit as equal to piety. They needed money and had their hands in many profit making businesses (wine, rum and beer to begin with) so the very values of hard work and profit served them well.

The Age of the City States ended when Avatar Kyoshi visited the Suihanese twice and then allowed the Fire Nation to colonize them. Avatar Kyoshi wanted a stop to the conflicts because some city states had begun to 'knock off' cities in the Eastern Earth Kingdom they had claimed belonged to them. They ignored her and sacked the southern Fire Nation of Lushen (which was populated by Suihanese fleeing the constant wars). After this, she gave the Fire Nation her blessing to go in and put an end to this sort of thing.

On my last mission for my father; I flew over the Aurencian city of Pinketerra on the mission to kill you. The Suihan scientists had designed a kind of rocket artillery and fitted it on my airship when we stopped at the air base in Pinketerra. Aurencia is a huge island and had many mining camps. It took us two days to reach our final positions prior to the attack. On the evening prior to the attack, We set down in a field next to a small Suihanese farming village whose name I have long forgotten. When we took off at sunrise the next day, we flew low over the corn fields around the village. The corn had grown quite high and in one huge field someone had carved the words 'Go stick your head in a sheep' in bold Chinese characters in the field. Someone in that village didn't like our presence. In Chinese, an alternate reading could have recommended a pig for head placing but I digress.

The Suihanese are not Chinese. The very act of taking a scythe and carving a deeply held opinion in a corn field knowing the Princess of The Fire Nation would fly over and see it strikes me as typically Suihanese. Karo's blundering politeness and unease with having to censor his ideas in polite circles is typically Suihanese. The devoted act of rebuilding a church and devoting an entire division of one of the worlds largest electric companies (EMI) to design the control system is very typically Suihanese. Convincing everyone else that they can use the same kind of machine to 'run' programs and that they would want one is also typically Suihanese. Suihan sells ideas and technology in the modern world and are very good at it.

Sozin wasn't evil. His family had come from Suihan to the Fire Nation not soon after the Union. His grandfather built ships. His father married into War Minister Ching's family who had been Fire Lords for three hundred years. When Sozin looked out at his domain, he didn't see a world kept in balance by Avatar Roku. He saw untapped supply and demand country. He wanted to supply the world with goods and fill their demand for food and metals. He had a missionary zeal to bring the truth to the masses by conquering them. The Suihanese had long harbored a resentment of The Avatar for allowing The Fire Nation to take over the 'chosen people' and Sozin simply used his skills to rid himself of those who would stop 'the chosen people'. Suihanese support for his destruction of the Air Nomads actually aided his cause and only a few questioned his wisdom. They admired his fire bending power – no Suihanese could match it. As many rich Suihanese discovered before and during the War, marrying into a powerful fire bending family cost a good deal but amplified fire bending power many fold. Some of the most powerful fire benders were from lines of Suihanese who became part of power Fire Nation families. No one fully understands this to this day. Sozin didn't care: he had found a tool he could use along with Sozin's Comet to obliterate the competition.

A hundred years later, Avatar Aang split the two nations apart trying his best to be fair to Suihanese history before the Fire Nation colonized their lands. He undid Avatar Kyoshi's careful but futile plan to stop the lawless Suihanese. They agreed to democracy and constitutional limits on their military power. Avatar Aang had to accept Suihan as the Fifth Nation (although this was kept quiet and many still believe Suihan is a second Fire Nation state). Avatar Aang had to agree to stay out of Suihanese internal affairs and leave their trade and foreign investment along for the reason that The Suihanese still resist the power of the Avatar. As they say; this brings you up to current events.

The Suihan Written Language

'or'

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Character

Anthropologists agree that the Kyoshi Islanders, Southern Nations of the Earth Kingdom and Suihanese are from similar ethnic groups. The future Kyoshi Islander deserve some of the blame for the nature of the Suihan written language. The ancestors of the Kyoshi Islanders spoke a language different in many ways from Chinese and in order to enjoy the full benefits of writing; they invented a system of characters for each of the possible syllables in their language. Had they fully developed this system, the future of writing would have improved a great deal.

The Kyoshi Islanders still use substantially the same system which uses syllable signs in a 'syllabary' to write out words but they held onto the Chinese characters in order to give their language the cache of appearing civilized. The Suihanese 'stole' this system and adapted it to their own language for reasons that are lost to history. The two cultures had very little in common and the two languages are not related to each other. They spent most of their time at war but the need arose among the Suihanese for a written language and the Kyoshinese one solved their problems.

The Suihanese became refugees and felt the need to write down their history. As refugees go, these people had a written language, epic poetry largely about wandering about in the wilderness, and a religion based on belief in one almighty God: they were fairly well off. They settled on sparsely populated islands of the Realm and began to engage in trade. They bequeathed to the Fire Nation things like corn, barley and wheat as well as sheep. The Fire Nation didn't want their God (but that's a topic for another letter). In the exchange, the Suihanese received paper and then the printing press.

The printing press caused all the problems in Suihan spelling. The printing press deserves an award for extreme cleverness and it did its part to shape the modern written Suihan language. The printing press allowed Yan Shin Xui to print thousands of copies of 'Epic Tales of the Knights Lost' in Fire Nation Chinese. Of course when it came along 1,500 years ago, the written Chinese language had largely become a massive tangle of confusing glyphs, rebus puzzles, metaphor and koans. The Suihan people had stolen the hirigana from the Kyoshinese and shaped it to fit their own language thus inventing the first alphabet.

Too bad they worried about the copyist making errors in transcribing their Bible.

Before the printing press and paper, the Suihanese wrote their Bible on sheepskin (vellum) using a combination of our Chinese symbols and the stolen hirigana. Each copy had to be made exactly like the previous one or the church wouldn't accept it. Because sheepskin costs a fortune; screwing up could cost you dearly, the Suihanese had no incentive to change their written language lest they waste time and sheep. Paper kills trees but trees are abundant and don't kick and squeal when you take an ax to them. Sheep have a tendency to do this.

When they obtained the printing press and paper; they could copy as many Bibles as they wanted or could sell. Instead of one Bible for each church, each church parishioner could have one sitting in front of him in his pew. He could pay a few silver and have a copy at home for the wife and kids. Did this lead to reform in the written language? At the time, no one wanted to change the written language for fear of losing Bible buyers and as the Bible was the gold standard; the printers pretty much left things alone. Suihan printers began to add spaces between words and periods at the end of sentences to make reading easier or at least to claim to have made it easier as a marketing ploy. The Chinese never adopted these conventions. Once the great printing houses of Suihan had saturated the market for Bibles, they looked for other things to sell. Yan Shin Xui gained his audience through their efforts. They published books about traveling through the Earth Kingdom on a Bronze Piece a Day and for those lacking bronze pieces, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Fire Nation and a whole bunch of pornographic woodcuts.

After a few generations, the Suihanese became a literate people because printing companies lobbied their cities for decrees to make attending school for four years and learning to read became the law. The printers wanted a broad market and knew a good many people wished to read the clever story that lay behind the pornographic woodcuts. The excuse 'I just read it for the articles' was invented at this time.

The Suihan language became a victim of an established base of literate readers. As more people learned to read, it became impossible to make any radical reforms to the written language. With almost total literacy in The Dominion, reform would cost a huge amount of money and leave behind a thousand years of literature. Even in The Dominion, the icon of modernity, the very idea of changing the language of the Bible still makes people 'uneasy'.

My defense of the written language won't be completely sincere. In the entire history of civilization; no one has managed to ever invent an easy to learn, intuitive written language. The easy to use and intuitive spoken language doesn't exist but that's another debate. Speech comes to us all as a a natural act learned in early childhood by instinct. Children have much more time to waste, don't yet know how to voice their complaints and so put up with the absurdities of any language and speech comes as an instinct: they accept it as the natural order of things. We had to invent writing and unlike modern engineers, our ancestors did it with no full understanding of the problem. The ancients didn't have linguists to analyze the sounds or phonemes or other patterns of their language and we should expect any written language to be a massive kludge. The Chinese writing system was not so much designed as evolved.

It occurred to some Neolithic ape of a man that he could reduce the picture of a tree or cow to a few strokes that represented the idea of a cow. This saved time as the character for 'cow' had four – I think – strokes and it standardized symbols. A symbol now stood for a concept. The problem with our neolithic inventor was that he didn't follow this idea to the logical conclusion. Had he had an ear for language he would have noticed that while a language could express many hundreds of thousands of concepts; it used a fairly fixed set of sounds in order to do this. Chinese has at most fifty distinct sounds; Suihan has about twenty five. Our caveman didn't think this far ahead and so I wasted many years of my childhood learning four thousand odd symbols. That I had a weird glitch in my brain that made me dyslexic just added to the bitterness.

I attended the class for girls who couldn't read. I remain a bitter and twisted person to this day and I blame our education system and Chinese writing. My special education teacher told me that I would one day come to appreciate the grand tradition of Chinese literature. She told my mother I was a retard. I remain unconvinced. The Art of War would remain the same ripping good read in a well organized alphabet while making it easier to read sitting at a traffic light in a palanquin.

On my travels through the Earth Kingdom; the horror of the problem presented itself. I had countless places to conquer and no road signs. If Ba Sing Se had not had a large wall to distinguish itself; I would have passed it by. The symbols for Ba Sing Se could be interpreted any number of flattering or unflattering ways. The Earth Kingdom has an extremely large number of places with Earth in the name or that could have Earth in the name or that could refer to rocks or things in the Earth or plate tectonics, clumsy volcanoes, dirt or Thursday and June (which have the symbol for Earth in it – goodness only knows why).

Suihan writing is no more of a kludge than Chinese itself. The Suihanese Bible writers scraping on their sheepskins did have the common sense to make use of only about a thousand of the possible thousands of characters in written Chinese. The modern language makes use of 808 in standard texts with a few additional ones used for names and places. Most people have ample time in a ten or twelve year school career to learn them. This contrivance reduces the cognitive burden of reading from a stupendously distracting one to a merely distracting one.

I wish the Suihanese would have come to use their alphabet exclusively. They have taken the Kyoshinese syllable signs in the hirigana and evolved it into a very graceful looking written language. The Suihan alphabet actually fits the language fairly well. The Suihanese call the Chinese characters The Hana and their alphabet 'The Abuga'. The Kyoshi Islanders still make use of a similar combination of characters and syllable symbols. The modern Kyoshi Islanders use these syllable characters but they represent a vowel or a consonant and a vowel. Suihan can't get away with this as it has the ability to string consonants together so scribes picked the most beautiful symbols and paired them with a sound. After hearing a Kyoshi tourist try to twist their tongue to pronounce 'stravi, mna or tre; they realize Suihan takes a very different approach to the hirigana. The use of digraphs or the double letters 'ci', gi' and 'si' for the 'ch', 'j' and 'sh' consonants seems strange but at the time the Suihanese stole the Kyoshinese syllabary, the Kyoshinese didn't have these sounds. The other oddities such as the use of the long vowel accent and the 'ui' digraph to represent the round front high vowel also came about this way.

Modern High Suihan

'or'

Hold Still, this Won't Hurt a Bit

Chinese cannot be translated word for word into Suihan. Suihan can't be translated word for word either but different languages work like cars made by competing manufacturers. Similar parts and pieces are not interchangeable although in the different models of car, they serve the same function. Chinese often makes use of several words that the Suihan speaker gathers up and makes into one (often quite long) word. Suihan has a delicate grammar and one word like the verb does as much work as a dozen Chinese words. Suihan has borrowed words from other languages but Suihan shapes them to fit into their systems of classification – gender or class for nouns and class of verb. Some Chinese words have come into Suihan but have not survived in recognizable form. The word 'chi' has become 'tí' in Suihan – tea. Most Chinese words end up becoming translated into Suihan using Suihan words. The 'Agni Kai' has become 'i pírikusta', 'Ba Sing Se' has morphed into 'Oren' and the term 'Avatar' is 'i deciella' or if living as 'i pantiffa (i)' and so 'Avatar Aang' is referred to as" I Pantiffa Ánuis'. Both terms refer to 'bridges' as a metaphor for the job of The Avatar. Chinese words thus either become grossly mangled and shaped to fit Suihan, they are badly translated (this works both ways) or become mystic metaphors.

Chinese has many homonyms and words distinguished only by tone. Suihan may have homonyms (this is a subject for debate and the Suihan linguists and the purists making crossword puzzles will argue that homonyms are not possible) but it lacks tone. Any new word entering the Suihan language must sound different from any other word in that language – what Suihan grammar calls 'word spaces'. In Suihan, each word must fit into its own 'word space'. They call these sorts of rules 'deep structure rules' because they operate largely beyond the awareness of the speakers and linguists have no theory to explain them. 'Word space' and lack of tone Chinese words harder to adapt into the language.

Suihan places words into their parts of speech and by which a word 'fits' into the sound system of Suihan. Chinese has no concept of marking words in terms of whether or not they are nouns or verbs, but Suihan has a complex system of word typing. Karo can tell at first hearing whether a new word is a noun or a verb, what kind of noun or verb it is, what endings it takes and so on. I still make mistakes on first hearing even though I can speak Suihan. The writer must first 'shape to fit' his Chinese word to fit Suihan as a native so it looks stylistically correct and even then; it may not work well. A skilled translator is better off finding a Suihan word with similar meaning. I speak from personal experience when I tell you this is by no means a trivial task.

A second problem lies in that Chinese has fixed word order. This solves a number of problems by having a place for a word and so the speaker only has to remember one particular 'model sentence' and have the basics of Chinese grammar at hand. Chinese speakers naturally vary the order of words but written Chinese pretty much has fixed places for nouns, verbs and other parts of speech. Suihan has 'a promiscuous tendency to order words freely'. The native language of the Kyoshi Islanders – Kyoshinese – has some wiggle room for word order but nothing prepares the novice learner for the 'never twice the same place' word order of Suihan. Free word order is partly what makes Suihan 'Suihan' and the native writers have made an art of ordering words for best effect. A translator that ignores this also makes his text sound stiff, amateurish and badly written.

Karo and I had a conversation one afternoon that translates as follows:

Karo: Tea, do you some want?"

Azula: Me tea want not, have headache.

Karo: Us of tea run out have. Am going me to the store. You anything want?

This comes close to a literal court stenographer recording of the conversation and wrongly gives the impression that we're jabbering idiots (or some bizarre set of twins who invented their own language). In Chinese this becomes little more than gibberish but I can assure you that this kind of conversation takes place between normal people every day. They build bridges and play cricket and communicate like this. I can record the freedom of word order in all its glory, but this doesn't actually reveal what's linguistically taking place. Suihan isn't a word salad. A few patterns can be noticed. Suihan likes to have the verb at the end – it is nominally verb final. Linguists class it as an SOV language or Subject, Object, Verb. The problem arises naturally for a Chinese speaker when they discover this word order is by no means at all consistent.

Chinese puts words in a meaningful relationship with each other by relying on word order. Suihan relies on markers that modify the form of the word itself to communicate their relationship. If I imagine the words as jars and a sentence as a shelf, then I can explain the differences between Chinese and Suihan. In Chinese the shelf has a label for where the jars or words go. The shelf has a place labeled 'subject: what I'm doing' and I place the word for who or what does the action in that place. I have a place on the shelf labeled 'verb' so I put the word for the action there. The shelf has a place labeled 'object' and the person or thing receiving the action gets placed there. Our 'Chinese' shelf has slots for every element we care to place in the sentence and that kind of word gets placed in that slot. The listener looks a the shelf and uses the placement of the words (our jars) to sort out our intended meaning.

Imagine the jars and the shelves but in the hands of Karo – the native Suihan speaker. His shelf has no labels. Instead he has a set of sticky labels and a pen. When he makes a sentence, he takes a jar, slaps a label on it, writes down how it works and places it on the shelf. The label tells you that the jar is the subject, that it is more than one thing or person and a few other trivial bits. He picks out another jar and slaps a label on it which tells you that it is the object, a feminine noun, again more than one and that it is tied to a definite article (I'll explain later). Karo then plucks out the verb he wants to use and writes on the label that it is past, plural and a wish. Karo may order the jars in order to emphasize something: 'The mean dogs, the cats should have scratched!' He may place the verb first to make the action more important. With the label on the jars and not the shelf, the point is that he need not place the jars in one fixed order but has freedom to select the order that best suits his needs. In Suihan, the labels on the jars tell you whats going on, what's in the jar and all of the information needed to sort things out. In Suihan, the information about this comes in the form of endings. The advantage comes in that the speaker has word order as one more resource to express intentions or moods.

Oh Dear Brother! I can hear you objecting. Suihan has too much 'extra' information. The nouns have gender, role and number. The verb has even more horrible grammatical forms. Whole books have tackled the topic of verb conjugation in Suihan. Much of this comes as the kind of hyperbole marketers use to sell books, some comes out of a tradition of making reference books as thick as possible so a person will believe they have paid a fair sum for the two million forms listed in the Consummate edition of The Dictionary of Suihan Irregular Verbs. Ask your wife to see her copy of Suihan Nouns for Chinese Students. When her screams have died off, she will give you a paperback book of some two hundred pages that has various declensions and lists of irregular forms. Verbs conjugate, nouns decline in Suihan and I have no idea why.

Karo knows this kind of marketing is a scam. I won't credit my fiance or any male for knowing two things let alone keeping two million things straight. Suihan has a few well calculated regions of insanity carefully mapped out in patterns. Karo knows the patterns, not the two million, four hundred thousand or whatever hyper-inflated numerical figure you're prepared to accept of possible forms. He knows what nouns have regular forms, that feminine nouns seldom have a true plural form and so on. He grew up with a doting mother and learned the language from her as any child does – by ignoring what is said and hunting for the patterns or grammar that makes it make sense. Was he a genius of some sort? He learned the language without knowing how to read a verb or noun dictionary but I learned to speak Chinese exactly the same way. Karo has clever explanation why Suihan works and I have no idea why Chinese does what it does.

I could never find out why arbitrary gender persists in Suihan. The Suihan language has a distant cousin in the Old Sanskrit used as the liturgical language of the Air Nomads and mystics. Sanskrit has gender. Arbitrary gender may have arisen in the depths of prehistory and reflected something perceived in the real world and now has become hopelessly scrambled and meaningless. Sanskrit noun gender has no real meaning. Unlike Sanskrit, Suihan nouns reveal what class or gender they belong to by the vowel then end with: 'a' endings denote masculine nouns, 'i' are feminine, 'o' or 'u' are neuter and a noun ending in any other way is a mass or Class 4 noun – which is grammar teacher nomenclature for – follows no rules but we will grade your errors anyway. Suihan does use it as a means of marking a noun as a noun and in a free word order language; this could act as a labor saving contraption as it reveals the kind of word in use.

Imagine our shelf of jars but you have the challenge of figuring out what is in the jars (the meaning of each word) as the jars go on the shelf. In Chinese, you have fixed word order to guide you as to what to expect and what kind of jar (what type of word or part of speech) will be put on the shelf next. Suihan speakers have less of an ability to anticipate things but gimmicks like gender for nouns and making words take certain endings according to their type makes sorting things out easier. Our native Suihan speaker: Karo, has no idea why gender exists but he has some kind of mental contraption that tracks it. Oddly enough when a Suihan native old timer suffers a stroke, they often lose track of this kind of thing in their language. When a Chinese codger suffers the same brain damage, their careful ordering of words flies south. Go figure.

Suihan has a singular and plural form for many nouns. Chinese lacks plural forms for nouns although pronouns have them. Suihan has a drive for precision and has a mechanism for telling you whether they are speaking of one or more than one thing. Plural forms are one of the more idiosyncratic parts of Suihan grammar. Most plurals are made by adding the ending 'i' to the stem of a noun. A few nouns like 'plen – child' have plural forms that make no sense 'plentuin – children'. Feminine nouns typically take no plural form and an entire class of nouns – Mass Nouns or Class 4 nouns lack plurals, take a helper noun to make a plural or have two entirely different forms. A few famous examples include 'afe – air, 'lufe – airs, mist – water, vust – waters, miri - eyes, iegen – eye.

At The Royal Fire Academy for Girls, Lady Mai and I took a course in Suihan. She had to take it because her father stood a good chance of receiving a posting in The Dominion. Our mother made me take the course as our family is part Suihan (through the line of Roku). As you may have begun to see, your banishment had some good aspects to it. Our teacher was an old codger of a man from Aurencia (The Island of the Western Air Nomads). He spoke Suihan as the language had spread there many centuries before we took over The Dominion. He had begun his military career as a rebel against the Fire Nation and made bombs, got caught, served prison time and then was 'reverse banished' to teach Suihan to royal princesses in the capitol. He gave us a gentle introduction to the language then one day after the time to withdraw from classes had passed; dropped the bad news and introduced us to The Declension. He made us memorize a number of these lists of noun forms (a declension is a fancy name for the list of all forms a noun takes).

Our teacher wished to make our lives hell by making us memorize rules by rote rather than actually talking to people. He came into the room, picked some random noun and explained some rather obscure bit of grammar to us. Lady Mai found this course hell; I have long suppressed most of it. Our teacher died before the War ended. He was buried in a pauper's grave at a cemetery near The Fire Nation capitol. Later The Dominion had him exhumed and he wound up in a soldier's grave the Fort of Ravesa on Aurencia. Our mom spent her time in banishment at the very same fort and spent much of her time sweating in the dry heat and blowing away crocodiles that came out of the swamp in search of the coolness of the fort.

Our teacher and the writers of those badly written Fire Bending guides utterly missed the point. I should say they miss the language in the rules and lists. Your wife can probably tell you the plural ergative form of 'árfa – tree' which is 'árfin'. Karo gives a much more homey explanation: that second form 'árfin' means someone is doing something to two or more trees such as cutting or molesting them. Karo can tell you that this is the plural ergative if you make him go to the dictionary and look it up in the appendices at the back. Karo learned to speak Suihan from childhood from his mother and has all of this complexity built into his brain. He has a kind of mental shelf, a set of labels and a bunch of jars and like us, he places the words in the jars according to patterns (labels) to make a sentence in his language. Suihan has labels for singular and plural (which are endings on the noun) and it has endings or labels for the role a noun plays in the sentence.

He just puts the labels on the jars (endings on the word) while we Chinese speaker arrange the jars in accordance with the labels on our mental shelf. If you can keep this idea clear, you have some of the essence of Suihan. Both Karo and you make sentences to express your ideas. When I talk about a 'role' I mean it in the Ember Island Players sense of the word. A sentence has actors and actions and relationships to each other. While using acting and Ember Island Players in the same sentence stretches the meaning of the word 'acting'; a sentence is like a play in that it has actors (nouns) and actions (verbs) and a script that defines how they relate to each other. Imagine two short plays:

1: The dog bites the man.

2: The man bites the dog.

We would agree the second short play is more interesting in terms of what is going on.

In the first play, the dog is the actor so in Suihan we call him 'suba' and the action is 'biting' or 'masta' and the man is 'ansa but we add an 'n' because he received the biting. Our first play in Suihan now looks like:

1: I suba masta i ansan.

Our second player now has the dog receiving the action and so we add the 'n'. Our new play will look like:

2: I ansa masta i suban.

Linguists call the role a noun plays its 'subject case' and a list of all the forms of a noun, its declension. Chinese has 'subject case' but since it only has one unchanging form for the noun, we never have any reason to talk about a declension. In Chinese, subject case or the role of the noun is marked by its position in the sentence. Suihan doesn't use word order so makes use of word endings to track the subject case and avoid confusion. The 'n' a the end of nouns marks the noun for the ergative case or 'role'. The receiver of the action takes this ending in this case.

Now you must be asking what that little 'i' word before 'ansa' or 'suba' does. Suihan calls it the definite article – it denotes that the speaker refers to a specific thing. Some dialects of Chinese have this bit of grammar, Fire Nation Chinese does not. In some dialects, it functions like their word for 'the'. It is always the same word regardless of whether the noun is singular or plural or what its doing. As a perfect example of how languages follow patterns but not logical rules, Suihan has only the definite article 'i'. Some might expect an indefinite article but Suihan has no such thing. Logic need not apply here: languages have patterns not rules.

The definite article 'i' reveals another characteristic that makes Suihan – Suihan. Chinese students may rag on it for having 'splittable infinitives' free word order and fiddly bits but Suihan has a tendency to strive toward precision. Chinese fortune cookies (as they call fortune cookies here) sometimes contain koans or little unsolvable riddles. These translate badly in Suihan when translated word for word: Suihan has a special verb aspect called the subjunctive to express statements with no possible answer. When I use Suihan, I notice these things are written as if they are statements of fact which comes off as odd.

Chinese relies a fair amount about context and expects speakers to know much that is unspoken about the situation. Suihan takes the approach that most people are morons so you have to make use of detail. This makes sense for a language spoken by people who enjoy a good argument (shouting match). I found this a bit troubling at first even hairsplitting. Karo and Lady Zhao spoke Suihan and had a whole class of 'not' words. Nouns and verbs for weird actions like 'not happening' or 'reverse doing' or nouns for not being a certain thing.

The word 'bending' doesn't exist in Suihan. The word 'to bend' has many senses in Suihan. Suihan uses the verb 'vogu' to bend if the bending distorts an object through physical force – to warp. If things bend by themselves or by an unknown agent then 'ioku' comes into use. Suihan speakers call the second verb 'an ergative verb' and it refers to something like a beam or truss that fails in service and bends or when something like a tree bends but the reason is not important or unknown. The name comes from the rule that the subject 'tree' in 'the tree bends' has to take the 'n' for the ergative case. The reason behind this will require explanation later but requires that some things be explained first. Another sense exists in the verb 'stortu' which refers to when someone changes or bends the course of fluids or electrical fields. In this language what best captures 'bending'?

Suihan fire benders call fire bending 'kanáluti i pírinast' or 'summoning with the fire'. This preserves the idea of 'action at a distance' and captures the intentions of fire benders in The Dominion. Katara often calls water bending 'isiéputi i vustast' or 'shaping of water'. Earth bending is called 'isiéhuti i dónast' which literally means 'molding with earth' in deference to the craft of potters. The most poetic phrase is air bending which is 'sioputi i lufenast'. An air bender sculpts with air.

We have now come face to face with the Suihan verb. Suihan scholars often refer to Suihan as a 'verb heavy' language. I sometimes have to translate Suihan into Chinese for scientific papers and in some cases, half of the words in the Chinese sentence are there to elaborate on the full meaning of the Suihan verb. The Suihan verb rules the language, shapes its grammar and intimidates students and linguists.

Suihan verbs fall into two basic types: regular and irregular or weak and strong. The vast majority of verbs use the same endings and understanding how one verb predicts well how the rest are put together. These are 'weak' verbs. A few verbs are strong or irregular. The total number varies from as few as 18 to as many as 36 depending on dialect or how much nit picking the linguists writing the grammars are prepared to do. In most cases, the irregularity is just a deviation from the rules governing one or a few forms. In a half dozen cases, the verb is completely unpredictable. The verb 'dao – to do', 'naru – to become, grow, will', ávo – to have', póvo – to possess or be a part of, 'iku – to go, 'itu to use, to make' are simply irregular.

A list of verb forms is called a conjugation. Irregular verbs have truly memorable and brain bursting ones. Asking 'why' doesn't answer the question: some things are just random crusty bits that have grown and metastasized over time. The verb 'dao' has a conjugation that spans a small book. Using it can be tricky and yet it is the most common verb. I have noticed only Chinese written Suihan grammars and dictionaries have these awful charts that list forms. Karo uses an editorial style guide and a dictionary but none of these lists. You might be right to ask, how does he do to cope with such complexity? He doesn't see it.

Karo, Avatar Roku and the millions of Suihanese don't have to deal with the problem. Most verbs in Suihan are of the run of the mill regular type. The verb 'agrees' with the subject and takes on endings for person and number. As in Chinese, Suihan has first, second and third person singular and plural pronouns. Suihan merely adds an ending to match this. The verb has three tenses: present, past and future and an ending for them. If you do the math, you will note that the verb already has 6 times 3 or 18 possible forms. Regular verbs in Suihan have a slot for tense and then person and number. Our native speakers simply stack the endings beginning with the tense and then adding the person and number ending. One rule does the trick. For any regular verb first add the tense ending and then the appropriate ending for the person and number.

What about irregular verbs? These verbs are the most common verbs in most languages and in Suihan; they have unpredictable forms. Actually Suihan has come up with a very clever mechanism for confining complexity to a small subset of the verbs that do the most work within the language. The verb dao means to do but also functions to indicate on going action. Every other verb has a similar use as what Suihan grammars call 'auxiliaries'. These six verbs are the core of the verb system in Suihan and allow the speaker to express the nature of the action, his opinion, perspective, feelings and scope or the aspect, level of intensity and many other aspects of action through a simple set of easily recognized words. Chinese requires a vocabulary of many hundreds of words to express this level of subtlety. Suihan uses an 'abstraction layer' for the same purpose. An abstraction layer refers to the use of a few well defined mechanisms to allow the use of complex systems like verbs.

Nouns refer to people, places, feelings, concepts and ideas among other things. They are words for things we can sense, experience, make use of, explore or are part of our mental lives. Verbs often refer to much less tangible or universal things. I can see the act of kicking a ball but can you witness the act of believing, thinking, wishing, feeling? Verbs have a temporal aspect – they take place in the past, present or future (perhaps). Verbs have a span of time and a range or duration of their effect. Some actions such as exploding are momentary but others like evolving take millions of years. Some actions have a degree of uncertainty or rely on belief, are parts of stories or eye witness accounts from less than well trained observers. Katara and Sokka believe Yue ascended to become the Moon Spirit but I have my doubts as they were under considerable stress. I have now just expressed an opinion about the events in the past. I have some doubts. Polite Karo speaks of the story of Ascent of Yue as a tale told by people who are honest but he sets about retelling it in the voice of someone who can't quite bring himself to believe. He uses the verb differently in the same discussion. In Suihan, we have access to a simple kind of mechanism called the irregular verb or auxiliary to do all this hard, abstract and tenuous work.

The Way Language Works

'or'

They All Must Work the Same Way

All torque wrenches work in about the same way. They obey the same torque wrench rules and tighten bolts to the same tightness or torque. When someone applies this statement to torque wrenches or gumball machines or cats; no one objects but extend this same idea to human minds and people get upset. They want to reject the very idea as wrong. Humans look different, act different and have different mental strengths and weaknesses so it must follow they have different 'minds' The artist has an artistic mind, the math professor has a logical mind. Psychologists have claimed that speaking a different language means you can think only along the prescribed vocabulary of that language an so Suihan and Chinese speakers must have different minds and think differently.

Does this follow?

Do we often think in words but is this to the exclusion of any other form of thinking? The idea that the stuff of thought consists solely of words greatly simplifies the theory of the mind but it most certainly is wrong. A swordsman trying to work out his sword technique verbally would almost certainly lose his head. Language is facile and easily manipulated and gives rise to the illusion that it describes our complete universe but reality forces us to face a problem. When I watch Karo draw, I might want to describe the events in his head in terms of language but Karo doesn't use language. He acts as though he has a mental image and that he's taking that mental image and manipulating it visually. I would bet when we begin to unravel the brain; we will find a region that Karo uses to rotate, manipulate, calculate sight lines and color in his images. Ask Karo what takes place in his head and he describes this sort of thinking in images.

As for any illusion language forms a complete mental map; try rounding up all the names for colors. Go ahead – ordering a complete set of paint chips isn't cheating. The thousands of paint chips will give you thousands of words for color but memory will not rescue you if you pick exactly the wrong shade of heliotrope to paint the kitchen cupboards. You can't win this game. The moment you succeed in memorizing all the color chips, the paint companies decide 'Moldy Avocado' is a color.

Mitsumi our lemur has come to grips with color. He knows ripe apples are red and sweet, caterpillars make a filling breakfast except for the brightly colored ones which make him vomit. He can eat all the ripe olives or cherries from a tree. Flying lemurs have cute faces and charming personalities but problem solving is decidedly not their thing. I think a properly trained chicken could outsmart him (and out-fly him). He doesn't have language although he has color and depth perception as part of his primate based cognitive apparatus. He simply lacks symbolic communication.

A Brief Guide to Suihan Writing for Chinese Translators

'or'

Appendix A

Modern High Suihan printers make use of a number of conventions quite different from Chinese. The base serif font used in Suihan is Dominion Times Standard while the standard sans – serif font is Segoi. They have base, bold, and italic variants. Suihan fonts differ from Chinese as they must also use The Abuga which typically matches in style.

In some printed documents, Chinese characters are often used in initial position as a kind of 'upper case' form. Many documents adjust the font size, increasing it for characters or letters at the beginning of a sentence. The symbol for one – the dash – placed after the character is the standard means of showing that it is capitalized. The Abuga uses bold forms for capitols forms but all characters are of equal height and width.

All Suihan documents are rendered left to right and justified at least on the left. Unlike Chinese, Suihan places spaces between words. Suihan makes use of the period – not the open dot, the comma, the exclamation mark '|' and the question mark '?'. Direct quotations are placed between single quotations and all punctuations use spaces after they appear.

All Suihan books save a few translated graphic novels, open to the left as do newspapers and pamphlets. Printers call this 'Bible Binding' and it arose because the human eye has a much wider horizontal field of view so text could be made smaller and printing used sheepskins and they needed to save space.

I have to explain the term 'ergative'. I used that term and forgot to explain the implications. In most languages, 'the subject' doesn't change form but ergative languages have an odd perspective. Suihan is a 'quirky subject' language that pays attention to what changes in the sentence and tends to mark it as if it were an object. In the sentence 'The dog bit the man.' The man experiences change because he has to get a shot for rabies (an object receives the action). The dog remains unchanged until the animal control people shoot him. Ergative languages pay attention to change. In some sentences in Chinese like 'I go to the store' the store doesn't do much except for accept my cash. I change my location, bank balance and level of willingness to listen to Katara lecture me after I bought the wrong kind of Kumquats so Suihan gives me the same marking as 'the bitten man'. Karo will use 'me' in place of 'I' in such cases. Chinese dialects have nothing akin to this in their grammar so consult a credible linguistic text to gain a fuller explanation.