Chapter Text
Suki: Dinner?
Zuko: Sure
Katara: Give me 10, I’ll meet you there
Toph: Sure
Sokka: We’ll grab a table
“Is Aang not coming?” Sokka asks halfway through dinner first week junior year, which makes Zuko notice that Aang isn’t there.
“He didn’t say anything in the group chat,” says Katara, frowning as she checks it, and then sends a message. Aang doesn’t respond. That’s the odd part—it’s entirely in character for Aang to text that he’s on his way, and then get distracted. This is different.
“I’m sure he’s fine,” says Sokka.
When they all finish, and Aang still hasn’t so much as texted back, they all traipse over to his dorm and knock on the door.
“Hey guys,” says Aang, opening the door. “Dinner? Wow, I’m starving.”
“It’s past dinner,” says Zuko. “We texted you.” Aang frowns and goes back to his bed, where his phone is sitting in plain sight. He picks it up and presses the home button, and his eyebrows shoot up.
“I straight up did not notice any of these. Fuck, it’s way later than I thought it was.”
“What were you doing?” asks Katara curiously.
“Homework! I know, I know, but it’s really interesting!” He holds up his Linguistics textbook, which is about two inches thick. “We’re doing morphology, and I guess I got sucked in. Dining hall’s closed now, huh?” He taps at his phone.
“How long have you been working on it?”
“No idea. Since I got out of my religious studies class?” He counts on his fingers. “Jesus. That makes four hours.”
“If you’re going to hyperfixate so hard you don’t hear your phone, maybe you need to keep the sound on?” says Zuko.
“I’ll never remember to turn it off again when I go into class,” says Aang, frowning. “What if we switched to Facebook Messenger? I can keep that open in a tab and my laptop sound on.”
“You wouldn’t have this problem if you had a Mac,” puts in Suki. Sokka shoulder-checks her.
“That’s all very well and good,” interjects Toph, “but did you figure out what you’re doing for dinner?”
“Oh!” Aang returns to his phone. “Right. Contacts list. Campus Corner. Call.” He taps his fingers on his leg as he waits for the local delivery place to pick up. “Hi, I’d like to make an order of mac ‘n’ cheese. …No drink, but I’ll have a slice of apple pie! …Oh, hold on.” He fishes his wallet out and reads off his debit card number. After he hangs up, he turns to them excitedly and says, “Speaking of apple pie, have you ever thought about what the word unlockable means?”
“How the fuck is that ‘speaking of apple pie,’” says Toph.
“Cause the pie’s expensive, but not unaffordable, and unaffordable’s the same kind of word as unlockable, but it’s not as interesting. It breaks down into three parts, right? Un-, lock, and -able. The -able suffix turns it from a verb into an adjective, and the un- prefix is negation.”
“Right,” says Katara.
“But what order do you add them in?” His eyes are huge. “You could add the un- first, and then you go from ‘lock’ to ‘unlock’ and then when you tack on the suffix you get ‘thing which can be unlocked.’ But you could also start with ‘lock’ to ‘lockable,’ a thing which can be locked, and then tack on the prefix, and now you have ‘a thing which can’t be locked.’ Isn’t that cool?”
“That is cool,” says Katara, thinking about it. “I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone use ‘unlockable’ in real life.”
“Unaffordable isn’t as interesting because ‘unafford’ isn’t a word so it’s pretty obvious what order the morphemes go on in. Anyway, I’ve done all the homework plus all the rest of the problems in the chapter and now I’m in the middle of next class’s reading.”
“Are you done with what’s due tomorrow?” asks Zuko. Aang slumps.
“No,” he says dejectedly. “This is so much more interesting.”
It’s…something, watching Aang learn linguistics. Zuko and Suki take turns with intro polisci, and Sokka and Katara lose rock-paper-scissors to Toph for history and religious studies, which none of them have any particular aptitude for—but Aang doesn’t need help focusing on linguistics. Not the same kind of help, anyway.
He drops into a chair at dinner one day, and instead of saying hello, opens with an excited, “Did you know the Inuit don’t really have a million words for snow?”
“Yes?” say Sokka and Katara together, looking confused. Aang looks baffled for a second, and then flushes and drops his head into his hands.
“I forgot who I was talking to,” he mumbles, and the rest of them collapse in laughter. “Anyway, this dude wrote an essay about it that we had to read for class, and it’s the funniest thing I have ever read in my life, listen.” He rustles around in his backpack. “This is about how at some point, someone will tell you the Inuit have a dozen or twenty or hundreds of words for snow and you have to stand up and contradict them and say…blah blah blah…” He retrieves the printout from his backpack and flips to the back page. “Just two possibly relevant roots: qanik, meaning ‘snow in the air’ or ‘snowflake’, and aput, meaning ‘snow on the ground.’”
“Sounds right,” says Katara. Aang ignores her.
“Then add that you would be interested to know if the speaker can cite any more. This will not make you the most popular person in the room. It will have an effect roughly comparable to pouring fifty gallons of thick oatmeal into a harpsichord during a baroque recital.”
They all lose it a second time, for a completely different reason.
“Fifty gallons of oatmeal? Into a harpsichord?” chokes Katara.
“That’s so specific!” says Sokka. “’Roughly comparable’?”
“But,” finishes Aang, “it will strike a blow for truth, responsibility, and standards of evidence in linguistics.”
Aang’s midterm paper requires him to interview a bilingual person, and, inspired by that conversation, he chooses Sokka and Katara after getting permission to use both of them from his teacher.
“Help,” he says a week later, flinging himself down next to Zuko. “I literally already know all the information that needs to go into this and I need to turn in a draft tomorrow and I haven’t started it.”
It’s trickier, breaking it down into steps from there—‘research’ is usually the first step, and this time it turns out to be ‘figure out what story you want to tell.’ But the paper gets written in the end, and Zuko chastises himself for getting lax. Just because Aang’s hyperfixated on the subject doesn’t mean he doesn’t still have ADHD.
After break, it’s the sounds of language, and Aang spends every spare minute writing down random words phonetically in an incomprehensible script.
“Did you know that the double t in kitten is actually a glottal stop, but the one in butter is a flap, and it’s the same sound as single R in Spanish?” he says.
“Have you done the homework, though,” says Toph, not really as a question.
“…no, but I’m a week ahead in the textbook!”
Zuko quizzes him on sounds in the weird script.
“You know I have absolutely no idea if you’re getting these right,” he says.
“Yeah, but I know if I don’t know it.”
“…If you say so.”
“Oh, neat! Es and esh are in complementary distribution in Korean. They’re part of the same sound unit.”
“Wait, what?”
Aang looks up from his homework, eyes bright. “So, people’s brains have, like, slots! And sounds that are technically different will sometimes fit into the same slot. Like in English, T with a little puff of air and T without a little puff of air are in the same slot. We consider them both part of T and we don’t really notice when we have one or the other. But in lots of languages, those are as different as B and P to an English speaker!”
“Really?” says Katara.
“Oh, yeah, that,” says Zuko. “Mandarin does that.”
“I think I read that all the Chinese languages do that. Or maybe just a lot of them? So does Tibetan. And Thai, and Korean.”
“Japanese doesn’t, though. Weird. I never noticed that.” Zuko pauses to reevaluate all his languages.
“Right?” Aang looks overjoyed. “And in some languages it matters how long the vowel is! Japanese does do that! And Mandarin doesn’t!”
“Oh, Inuktitut does that!” says Sokka, looking interested.
Before they know it, they’re knee deep in Wikipedia looking up sound systems, and all of them would have forgotten to finish the next day’s homework if it weren’t for Toph.
“Aang, we should really look at your finals schedule,” says Katara.
“Papers in all of them,” he says, with an absolutely devastated expression. “Except linguistics. We only had the midterm paper, the final’s a test. Professor Ng’s giving us a review sheet.”
Zuko doesn’t get through life expecting things to be easy. But Aang’s review is…easy. He’s almost afraid to think it too hard.
“How do we know form and meaning are processed distinctly in the brain?” he reads from the review sheet.
“Broca’s aphasia and Wernicke’s aphasia occur due to damage in different parts of the brain. Broca’s aphasia involves breakdown of form, and Wernicke’s involves breakdown of meaning.”
“How do we know people aren’t genetically predisposed to learn their language?”
“Babies show sensitivity to all sorts of differences, and slowly stop reacting to the ones that aren’t contrastive in the languages spoken around them.”
“How do we know sign languages are real languages?”
“They have literally all the same properties and do the same things in the brain.” Zuko decides that’s good enough and moves on.
“What’s an infix?”
“It’s like a prefix or a suffix, but it goes in the middle. There are only two in English, and they’re basically the same word.”
“What is it?” That’s not part of the question, but Zuko’s curious.
“Fucking!” Aang grins hugely.
Zuko makes a confused noise.
“Abso-fucking-lutely. Massa-freaking-chusetts. It falls in the middle of the root—not just between two affixes, like un-fucking-believable—and there are actual rules about where you can put it. It has to have a certain number of syllables, and it has to be right before the stressed syllable!”
“Damn.”
Aang: Got my grades back and you won’t believe this
Aang: I have a 3.8 in ling
Aang: I’ve never gotten a grade that good in my life
Aang: I think I’m gonna major in it
*Everyone is typing*