My human character wasn’t going to take that kind of crap without comment. He responds with a phrase taught to him in military training: "Kiz da yuomeen, Shizumaat!", which means Shizumaat, the father—er—parent of Drac philosophy, eats kiz. And what is a kiz?
The kiz turns out to be a repulsive little critter whose name is also the name of its droppings. Did this have something to do with taking care of a friend’s cat for two weeks? The truth of this is lost to the ages.
In any event, that one sentence, "Kiz da yuomeen, Shizumaat!" saw the birth of both the philosopher Shizumaat and the beginning of the fauna on the alien planet. The first led to the necessity of coming up with a philosophy for the philosopher to philosophize about, and the second had children from three or four continents calling their teachers "kiz," leaving said teachers knowing they had been called something nasty, but not knowing exactly what.
And what did the Drac say in response? "Irkmaan, yaa stupid Mickey Mouse is!"
Was this the result of a misspent youth watching old WWII war movies on the Late Late Show? Jarheads and sons of Nippon hurling insults through an endless series of hostile Hollywood nights? Could be.
A huge wave wipes out my human, and when he regains consciousness, he is tied up and the alien is hovering over him saying, "Kiz da yuomeen, Irkmaan, ne?"
In other words, "Who eats it now, pal?"
Soon we find out that "ess" means "what," "lode" means "head," and "ne" means "no." Then the Drac asks the human, "Kos son va?"
The human doesn’t know how to respond, so the alien tries again. It points at itself and says, "Kos va son Jeriba Shigan." The Drac points to the human and repeats, "Kos son va?"
Kos va son—kos son va. I am called—you are called. Hell, now we’re talking not only vocabulary, but grammar! Grammar, That was that stuff that kept getting me into trouble back in high school, I began telling myself that I really ought to start keeping some notes on this alien language that was lurching into being before my eyes, but I had no time for notes. The story is all.
The human understands the alien and says, "Davidge. My name is Willis E. Davidge."
First, where did the character names come from? There seemed to be no time to plan out anything. When possessed by the story bug, you just do it! and let the syllables fall where they may. I had to come up with the alien’s name first. I reached into the air and found Jeriba Shigan. And so where did the name Jeriba Shigan come from?
There is an actor whom I very much admire named James Shigeta. Need I say more? Okay, I also think James Shigeta is very much underrated and would have done a great job playing the alien in my story. I very much admire the job Lou Gossett, Jr. did playing Jeriba Shigan in the motion picture Enemy Mine, but James Shigeta was the one I had playing the alien in my head when I wrote the story. That’s how I do it, and I don’t apologize for it.
Then it came time to name the human.
I knew before I put down a word on paper that I would be playing the part of the human, Although the character was me, it wasn’t really me, so I couldn’t cook up a sloppy anagram of my own name. The name Davidge popped into my head for some reason, and I liked the sound of it. The only Davidge I knew was a fellow student at Staunton Military Academy back in 1960. He was a good kid, and I liked the name. Actually, the character in the story liked the name, and my story characters tend to get pushy with me about what they want. If I want to go one way and the story characters want to go another way, and if I point out to my children that I am god because I own the word processor, the characters will invariably sit down, go on strike, and turn into pine. So if the character wants to be called Davidge, he gets what he wants.
The first name, Willis, came from a late half-brother of mine. His name was Willis, and for quite a number of years his siblings addressed him as Wibby, which he hated to the point of eventually threatening bodily mayhem and dismemberment if we did not drop the name Wibby and start calling him Bill. I liked Bill, I needed a name that the character would just as soon not insist on using (because the alien keeps referring to him by his last name), so I used it.
The Drac orders the human, "Dasu!"
After some pushing and shoving, Davidge figures out that word’s meaning, and some others. In a matter of mere paragraphs, the human and the alien are both speaking pidgin versions of the other’s language, in addition to trying to survive.
What is going on here?
A couple of things, actually. First, it always bothers me when, in an sf film or story, beings who evolved on worlds thousands of light years away from Earth all speak English like Lawrence Olivier. I need to at least see a video of the 1944 version of Hamlet in the alien’s hip pocket before I’ll buy it
It all began, though, as it did for many of us, with that moment in the motion picture The Day the Earth Stood Still when the alien knows the crap is piling up and he’ll need some help. Klatu tells Patricia Neal that if anything happens to him to go to the supercop robot Gort and tell it "Klatu barada nicto. "See, if Gort isn’t told that, the robot will trash the planet. My entire generation memorized that line, "Klatu barada nicto," just in case.
Curiously enough, in the movie we are never told what this phrase means. Is it Klatu needs help? Klatu says cool it? Klatu is in deep caca? It seems a little short to be Klatu is in the Washington DC city slams and wants you to bust out his corpse and reanimate it. Nevertheless, we memorized the phrase, and at special moments we would recite it.
"Hey, where are you going?"
"I’m going out, Dad."
"Out where?"
"Klatu barada nicto."
"Well, make sure you’re back by eleven."
A hint of another meaning to that enigmatic phrase came to me while writing two Alien Nation tie-in novels for Pocket. The Newcomers, of course, have a language of their own, and authors who contract to write in this universe are issued a "bible" which outlines the major characters in the series, contains synopses of the various TV episodes, and a "Tenctonese for Travelers" type of vocabulary.
A word now about credibility and the suspension of disbelief. I can’t speak for every author and reader, but for myself there is this unwritten contract between the reader and the writer. On the writer’s part, the author agrees to approach the tale by believing in it himself. This involves a pact I make with my imagination: whatever setting and characters I dream up actually exist somewhere in the universe. My job? To be faithful to that setting and those characters and to report to the reader as accurately as possible.
Now, to the Tenctonese language. When I first looked over the Alien Nation bible, I felt that the authors just might not be taking their task seriously. The Tenctonese word for booze, you see, is tanka. The word for brutality is poppy Cattle is moocow, ceremony is oscar, deep is peed, doctor is mare, filth is slum, good-bye is toucus, gun is shoota, investigate is snoop, level is strata, and network, believe it or not, is teeceefox. I have no first-hand knowledge of this, but in my mind I have a picture of a couple of scriptwriters full of themselves, pot, coke, and tanka brainstorming the Tenctonese language.