Free The Lost Language of Cranes by David Leavitt

half-gallon of orange juice from the refrigerator and was drinking from it.
    "Today?" Jerene said. "Today I've been writing my chapter on these famous twins who invented their own language. Little girls. I don't know if you've heard of the case, but after they were discovered there was a big debate over whether they should be separated and forced to learn English, or kept together so the language could be studied. As you can probably guess, the social workers won out, for the good of the children. I suppose it was the right thing. Still, when I think of what could have been learned... There are tapes of them talking, you know. The sounds are like nothing you've ever heard before, nothing you could even imitate. It makes me sad. It seems to me the world has enough lost languages."
    "Is that what your dissertation is about?" Philip asked. "Lost languages?"
    Jerene smiled at him. "More or less," she said. "More or less." She really did not want to explain about the seven years right now, or the dozens of topic and tide changes. She had friends who encouraged her not to finish, urging process as more important than product—a kind of Marxist-feminist, anti-capitalist, non-goal-oriented academics, they said. She knew only that as long as the Philosophy Department gave her money to fill her life with work, she was going to do just that. Library work was the kind she liked most, the kind that best calmed her, kept her grounded. She could spend hours examining sociological abstracts, or browsing through back issues of arcane periodicals, or sitting in a brightly lit cubicle taking notes from old monographs. She needed work that would completely occupy her, that would leave no space for rumination on her own life or condition.
    "Anyway," she continued to Philip and Eliot, "I've decided to focus this chapter not on the language itself but on the response, which is in a sense more central to my thesis: what it means that a private, invented language must be sacrificed 'for the good of the child.'"
    "So I presume the little girls were successfully taught English?" Eliot asked. He was breaking eggs into a pan, cooking breakfast.
    "Oh yes. They were separated, and kept apart by the social workers. For days and days afterwards, of course, they probably cried, probably spoke the language to themselves and wondered wh y no one responded. After a while they lapsed into silence. And then they began to adjust. Bit by bit they started to pick up the new language. Now they're nearly twenty; they're probably in college. I wonder if they remember the secret language, if they still speak it in private, or dream in it. Probably not. Probably their early childhood is like a dream to them, the way it's supposed to be for children who are kidnapped and raised by different parents. Something they're not even sure happened, something they can hardly believe is real when people tell them about it."
    "It must have had something to do with what they heard," Philip said. "The language, I mean. It couldn't have just popped out of thin air."
    "No one knows," Jerene said. "But language can begin as a very arbitrary thing. A woman was committed to a mental hospital for something like forty-eight years because the doctors said she 'babbled.' And then it turned out she was a Ukrainian immigrant. No one at the hospital recognized that she was speaking Ukrainian."
    "It seems like a shame that the twins' language couldn't have been somehow recorded or preserved."
    "Yes," Jerene said, "it is a shame." The smell of eggs frying was making her queasy. She steadied her gaze on the window. "I would love to compare the twins' language with some others," she said. "With Basque, perhaps, or the dialects of Hunza, to see if people invent languages the same way, if in a different kind of world the twins' language could have flourished, could have become the language of a culture. But I've realized that's something I can never do. What's relevant really is that the only possible