The New Prakrit — Summary

Standard phraseology for air traffic control is specified internationally, word by word, because two people who have never met and may not share a first language have to coordinate objects moving at four hundred knots using nothing but voice.

Ellis has worked the same approach control for eleven years and speaks it correctly. There is also a second vocabulary, maybe forty items, that everyone in that facility uses and nobody outside it would understand. Names for local geography on no chart. A verb for the maneuver you use on one carrier’s crews because they read back the same instruction the same wrong way. None of it is written anywhere; it transmits by sitting next to somebody for months. Ninety miles away the words are different and exactly as correct for that airspace, which is dialect behaviour.

The formal register does the coordination. The other one does the work.

Prakrit was what people spoke where Sanskrit conducted no business, and how such a register thickens in the dark is argued elsewhere in this project. The forward question is what can still form beneath a standard that hears everything. The obvious answer, a new slang not yet indexed, is wrong for a more interesting reason than thoroughness.

Every previous vernacular was a language because every previous standard was one, and the official register supplies the terms of the contest. The current standard is not a language. What the apparatus requires is a shape: parseable, indexable, enterable in a field, resolvable to a code. English is doing well out of the arrangement and English is not the requirement. So the new Prakrit is unformatted practice, held by the people doing it, transmitted the way Ellis got his forty words, invisible to every system that could in principle be looking straight at it.

The obvious objection is that this is tacit knowledge, which has had a literature for sixty years. Right about the substance, wrong about the claim. Tacit knowledge is epistemological, a relation between what a person knows and what they can say, and Polanyi was not making a political point. The vernacular position is political and always was, a claim about where a thing sits relative to what the offices conduct business in. The two ran side by side for sixty years with nothing to do with each other. They coincide now because the standard’s medium became a format, and the format excludes what articulation excluded.

It has the properties. The population is enormous, the unformatted layer inside every profession. There are internal rules, because Ellis can hear a new controller use a local term slightly wrong and that is a grammar. And it survives contact more easily than Prakrit did, because it never enters the argument at all, and a thing that cannot be entered into the system cannot be ruled against by it.

What is closed is promotion. Every historical vernacular that mattered rose as itself, without converting into anything. Now promotion requires a conversion, and the moment Ellis’s knowledge is enterable it is no longer the thing that was valuable, because what was valuable was the part that resisted the form.

The correction to how the historical case is usually told is that Prakrit did not win by being promoted. The institutions conducting business in Sanskrit lost their grip, administrative space opened, and what filled it was whatever the people still there were already speaking. The mechanism was the standard’s failure, and that is available now: every workaround is a small collapse of the standard into the vernacular, and nothing accumulates because each is treated as an exception rather than as evidence.

We wonder what it would take for those to be counted, and whether a system counting its own workarounds would be measuring its failures or discovering its actual operating language.

Ellis retires in about fourteen years. The words are not important, and half of them are unnecessary and two are probably wrong. What is worth noticing is that in a fully instrumented facility, on a recorded frequency, with a regulator that reads everything, forty words are used every day that nobody has written down and nothing is going to.