Longer Views (59 page)

, but that is another subject.) Obvious here, and borne out by dictionaries, Glotolog grammar assigns two distinct meanings to
(but not, however, to
,
or
): both “I see” and “There is . . .” (i.e., “It might be seen by me . . .”). Although this double meaning is the source of many traditional children's jokes (heard often during the winter when the clouds blot the sun), in practice it presents little confusion. If I were to come into a Glotolog monastery, with the oil lamps in the windowless foreroom gleaming on “. . . my traditional okapi jerkin where the raindrops still stand high” (my translation from a traditional Glotolog poem; alas, it doesn't really work in English) and say, stamping my Italian imported boots (the Glotologs are mad for foreign imports and often put them to bizarre uses; I have seen red plastic
garbage pails used as hanging flower planters in even the strictest religious retreats—though the Glotolog's own painted ceramic ones seem, to my foreign tastes, so much prettier) “
,” it would be obvious to all (even to those frequent, aging, Glotologian religious mystics who have forgotten all their formal grammar—if, indeed, they ever studied it; formal language training is an old discipline among the Glotolog, but it is a widespread one only in recent years, well after the formal education of these venerable ancients was long since past) that I am speaking in what is called, by the grammars,
the assumptive voice
. The logic here is that the words, when used in the assumptive voice, are to be taken in the sense: “It is assumed that if
[i.e., that if there
were
a light source and if I
were
there, seeing by it], then it
would
reflect off
and I
would
see it. . . even though I am now inside the monastery and, since my entrance, the world may have fallen into total and unexpected night. In other worlds, the use of
as “there is . . .” is not quite the same as in English. You use
for “I see . . .” only when
what
there is is within sight. Otherwise, though you actually say the same word, i.e.,