Speech and Language of the Janos people

When the Janos people in the spaceship spoke to each other, the visitors were aware that they were speaking a foreign language; they said it was like hearing a foreign station on the radio, or listening to Spanish, which they do not understand, when they were on holiday in Spain. But it did sound like a European language.

When the spaceship people spoke English, it was a standard unaccented speech as spoken by English people of good education; John said, modestly: "They spoke better English than I do". There was no trace of local or regional accent, and no foreign intonation; it was definitely the English of England and not of Scotland, America, Canada or Australia; nor was it English as spoken well by a German, Dutchman or Scandinavian, for example. It was only in the use of idiom that their English speech occasionally betrayed itself as a learned language, rather than a mother tongue.

Of the Janos language, we know very little, but just enough to be interesting. We have, so far, thirteen proper nouns with their pronunciation: JANOS SATON SARNIA ANOUXIA UXIAULIA VURNA AKILIAS SERKILIAS COSENTIA SAUNUS VONASON FAUN and PHUSANTHEAS. The spelling in English letters was provided by the spaceship people for the first five of these; the remainder are our spelling of a spoken word, though Natasha knew that Phusantheas began with a P, and the spelling of the last four may have been given to her by Akilias.

I was at once struck by the affinity of the words, taken as a sample of a language, with archaic Greek; Phusantheas has a very Greek ring, and Saton is actually an old Greek word meaning a corn measure; here it is applied to the inner moon of Janos, the one that broke up. All of the words are possible, considered as words in a language akin to old Greek. Moreover, the thirteen words all hang together linguistically: they all belong to the same kind of language; this is a strong argument against any suggestion that they were invented by the witnesses, who would need the imagination and linguistic knowledge of a Tolkien to have thought them up for themselves.

Excerpt from the eBook “The Janos People” by Frank Johnson now out of print.