Part 7: The dictation test

One scene, everything at once, and this time the scene is also an experiment. The claim of this pamphlet is that nothing falls off a Phi sentence in transit, because nothing in it is silent. The test: build a message containing a question, a quotation, a name, a wish, and an address, and pass it through several mouths. If the punctuation were typographic, the mouths would strip it. Watch.

The question arrives

siora comes across from the neighbor's house, carrying sulae's exact words:

ne siora kau womu shua. siora haolu.
NAME siora ALL home come. siora speak.
(siora comes to the house. siora speaks.)

ne sulae shola wa lo thia wei lo mia so shua sholo to haolu.
NAME sulae QUOT.COMP Q PL 2SG DAT PL 1SG FUT come QUOT.COMP.CLOSE PST speak.
(sulae said: "Will you all come to us?")

Count what the English translation had to draw in silence: a colon, an opening quotation mark, a capital, a closing quotation mark, a question mark. Now count what siora had to carry: to haolu, shola, sholo, wa, words, every one, no easier to drop than any other syllable of the message. The quotation's pronouns are sulae's own, preserved inside the brackets, so lo mia (us) still means sulae's household in siora's mouth. And one register note in passing: siora haolu stands bare, because she is in the room; ne sulae is announced, because she is not. The punctuation and the register machinery are the same machinery (the naming pamphlet), running at once, all of it audible.

The reply goes back

The parent answers by handing siora one sentence to carry home, and the sentence is this pamphlet's whole inventory in one breath:

no wei ne sulae shola lia. lo mia so shua. su theula towe nai sholo haolu.
IMP DAT NAME sulae QUOT.COMP yes. PL 1SG FUT come. OPT UNIV well be QUOT.COMP.CLOSE speak.
(Say to sulae: "Yes. We will come. May all be well.")

Read it slowly, naming the parts: the request announced (no), the recipient announced (wei ne sulae, dative, name particle, name), the exact words opened (shola), three complete sentences inside (an interjection with its period, a plain future, a wish announced as a wish) the words closed (sholo), and the verb of saying. English needs a comma, a colon, two quotation marks, three capitals, and arguably an exclamation mark to write what that sentence is; siora needs only to say it.

The count

The full round trip (sulae to siora to the household to siora to sulae) passed through three speakers and four tellings. Marks a written English version would have needed: two pairs of quotation marks, two colons, a question mark, half a dozen capitals, and the vocative comma, every one of them silent, every one of them gone the moment the message entered a mouth. Marks the Phi version needed: none it could lose. The message that arrives is the message that left: not the gist, the words, brackets and blessing and all.

This is what the ruling means in practice. Phi's written form has no secrets from its spoken form: the page holds one dot, and the dot only marks where the voice already stopped. Everything else survives dictation because everything else is dictation: the language never stored meaning anywhere the voice can't go.

Drill: run the test

With a partner: read this part's two framed sentences aloud, at recitation pace, while they transcribe, then compare against the page. The pass condition is exact: letter for letter, period for period. Then trade roles with a message of your own containing at least wa, one shola … sholo, one ne, and one su.

Alone: transcribe the reply sentence from memory tomorrow morning, then check. And for the control condition, try dictating the English translation to anyone without once saying the words "quote," "comma," or "question mark" aloud. The difference you feel is the pamphlet.