Speaker 1: The drawer of old maps stuck as I slid it
Speaker 1: back into its groove. My hand paused, fingers still pressed
Speaker 1: to the burnished brass pull, and for a moment the
Speaker 1: museum's map room seemed to hush around me, a hush
Speaker 1: not of reverence, but something closer to the soft density
Speaker 1: found in deep woods or between thick library stacks. After
Speaker 1: closing time, on my battered notepad, I just jotted Inepley,
Speaker 1: the latest of the unplaceable place names, zuel It. I
Speaker 1: tried saying it aloud, whispering so as not to be overheard,
Speaker 1: perhaps Juliet or Zwelier, but none of the sounds fit together.
Speaker 1: My tongue snagged on the vowels, tripped over the two
Speaker 1: l s. The word lingered unfinished in the air. Julie,
Speaker 1: the young museum guide, breezed into check if I'd found
Speaker 1: the el azure map. Her sneakers muffled by the thick,
Speaker 1: faded carpet. She caught sight of me mid mumble and
Speaker 1: grinned blue eyes crinkling it. S zulid, she said, the
Speaker 1: syllables rolling from her without hesitation, neither French nor any
Speaker 1: language I'd studied yet fluid and warm from her mouth.
Speaker 1: She sounded as casual, as if pointing out the difference
Speaker 1: between Monet and Manit. For her, the word wasn't strange
Speaker 1: at all. Matthew, waiting in the hallway, called to Julie
Speaker 1: about some museum posters, and she dashed off, leaving me
Speaker 1: with a strange sense of embarrassment, as though I'd failed
Speaker 1: a secret test. I looked down the word Zulit was
Speaker 1: written in my own hand, nearly illegible from being crossed
Speaker 1: out and restarted so many times. A class of school
Speaker 1: children shuffling in for an afternoon tour, followed their teacher
Speaker 1: past the open door. They were chattering, but I caught
Speaker 1: a snippet. The older boy recited a poem, the others
Speaker 1: chiming in with place names Brulon, Seaney, Pluvernot. Their pronunciation
Speaker 1: was effortless, unthinking, as natural as if reciting days of
Speaker 1: the week. One child repeated saney with a cadence difficult
Speaker 1: for me to even mimic in my mind. Later, when
Speaker 1: the new gendarme came to return some found keys, we
Speaker 1: chatted about jogging roots. Before leaving. He pointed out a
Speaker 1: short cut by the river it's marked as brulon curve. Careful,
Speaker 1: it's slippery when it rains. He pronounced both words perfectly,
Speaker 1: as if the letters lined up obediently every time. I
Speaker 1: tried echoing him, but the sound felt crooked inside my mouth.
Speaker 1: You say that so easily, I remarked. He laughed, puzzled.
Speaker 1: It's just the name. Every one here says it right,
Speaker 1: he shrugged, pocketing the keys. The archivist, Matthew, older than
Speaker 1: any artifact in the cabinets, and much sharper than his
Speaker 1: limp suggested. Drifted in. Need help with pronunciation, he asked,
Speaker 1: but the question was rhetorical. Before I could answer, he'd
Speaker 1: recited a half dozen of the names in a sing
Speaker 1: song pattern. Smiling a little at my confusion, I returned
Speaker 1: to my notes as they all moved on the noise
Speaker 1: of the children's tore rippling down the stairs. The odd
Speaker 1: thing wasn't just that I couldn't shape the names. It
Speaker 1: was how nobody here seemed to find that fact unusual.
Speaker 1: Not the children, not the lifelong residence, not even the
Speaker 1: gendarme who'd only moved to town that autumn, Not Julie,
Speaker 1: not Matthew. The odd spell seemed to catch only me,
Speaker 1: leaving every one else untouched by the contradiction. I circled
Speaker 1: zulid and underlined it twice, the pen pressing so hard
Speaker 1: the paper pucket. What language could this possibly be? Boluservine
Speaker 1: is lesser town than a cluster of gentle slumps and angles,
Speaker 1: cobbles veering into river meadows, small blue roofed houses on
Speaker 1: old foundations, orchards nuzzling the edge of the thick veresse forest.
Speaker 1: If you drive through, you might think you missed it.
Speaker 1: The old part of town is knotted around the museum,
Speaker 1: which once served as the guilt build house for the
Speaker 1: map makers, who for five centuries turn their craft into
Speaker 1: something closer to a badge of citizenship. When my wife
Speaker 1: and I retired here last year, I brought a pack
Speaker 1: rat's box of regional maps. She brought patients for Misty
Speaker 1: Mornings and the slow Drama of Swans. After teaching geography
Speaker 1: for more than thirty years, alpine passes and river delta's
Speaker 1: the way Land and story meet, retirement felt like waking
Speaker 1: late into a day that's already decided not to hurry.
Speaker 1: I volunteer at the Heritage Museum, where most afternoons find
Speaker 1: me shrouded in the odd serenity that comes from good
Speaker 1: work and gentle disarray. The archive is a maze of cabinets.
Speaker 1: There's always a smell old glue, yellowing oak, a hint
Speaker 1: of oil paint from the frame room, always at odds,
Speaker 1: with the white light of led desk lamps. Matthew is
Speaker 1: my guide through these labyrinths. Bespectacled, slow of gait, mind
Speaker 1: quick as a kicked hornet's nest, he could and summoned
Speaker 1: from memory not just the year any document was pennied,
Speaker 1: but whether the scribe eight with his left or right hand.
Speaker 1: He swears in old French, never at people, only at
Speaker 1: stubborn draws and spilled ink. Julie, younger than some of
Speaker 1: the dust jackets on our largest atlases, acts as a
Speaker 1: bridge to the towns present. She studied archaeology, but returned
Speaker 1: home to catalog legends, half remembered recipes, and the nicknames
Speaker 1: for every misaligned gutter in Bolu. She jokes that her
Speaker 1: job is group memory, her favorite stories orbiting around the
Speaker 1: town's peculiar relationship with maps. Her laugh is unedited. She'll
Speaker 1: sometimes mime the gestures of old teachers. Matthew's resigned Si
Speaker 1: my own tongue, twisted names, spoofing us with love. Mm
Speaker 1: E Lavin, my neighbour, is the other keeper of Bolus past.
Speaker 1: She invites me for tea, her kitchen warm with the
Speaker 1: scent of apples and strong black tea, and piles old
Speaker 1: letters and gossip over madelines Ah the map makers. They
Speaker 1: were another kind of priesthood here. She sighs. My father
Speaker 1: never trusted a map. He hadn't spilled soup on. She's
Speaker 1: lived here since nineteen forty four and knows which walls
Speaker 1: were rebuilt after each war and which have never been repaired.
Speaker 1: M Durrard, the new gendarme, hails from Angers, but you
Speaker 1: wouldn't know it from his diction. He carries himself with
Speaker 1: gentle amusement, always happy to explain by laws, quick to
Speaker 1: join morning coffee at the square. If you ask for directions,
Speaker 1: you'll get them in both the French formal and the
Speaker 1: local casual, with those same unfathomable place names pronounced as
Speaker 1: if he'd always spoken them. The museum still hosts map
Speaker 1: focused events, drawing children and curious travelers. Some weeks, Matthew
Speaker 1: and I spend hours sorting parchment. Rolls and vellum bound ledgers.
Speaker 1: Other days I walk past the museum porch, pausing at
Speaker 1: the sign Musier do cartograph and the stone marker below
Speaker 1: is say La Gilder dec maters. The sign posts in
Speaker 1: the square, some in fading French, some painted with the
Speaker 1: mysterious names, are so much a part of the scenery
Speaker 1: that only now, in my second spring do I really
Speaker 1: see their strangeness. I remembered faintly that as a child
Speaker 1: visiting my aunt, I'd heard grown ups toss these odd
Speaker 1: names around at picnics or church fairs, never bothering to translate.
Speaker 1: Back then, I'd let the sounds drift past, thinking they
Speaker 1: were silly, fanciful, perhaps quickly invented on a whim. But now,
Speaker 1: with leisure and curiosity, with the towns swirling quietly around
Speaker 1: its history, I found myself returning to the question, what
Speaker 1: are these names? Where did they come from? Why does
Speaker 1: every one seem to know how to say them perfectly,
Speaker 1: except apparently for me. A week later, while waiting for
Speaker 1: the kettle in the break room, I tried an experiment. Antoine,
Speaker 1: a visiting university student volunteering for the summer, was left
Speaker 1: handed and good with languages in in that easy polyglot way.
Speaker 1: He was amusing himself translating bits of Latin graffiti from
Speaker 1: the backside of an eighteenth century map. When I showed
Speaker 1: him my list, Try this one, I suggested, nudging over
Speaker 1: the page. Zu al it. I watched as he struggled
Speaker 1: zeu yet zu Yet each attempt landed slightly wrong, as
Speaker 1: if knocking at the wrong door. Julie, passing with her mug,
Speaker 1: grinned and provided the name with her usual assurance. Her
Speaker 1: pronunciation seemed to shift with each attempt she heard from us,
Speaker 1: subtly correcting not just copying what we'd said, but somehow
Speaker 1: restoring an original. How do you do that, Antoine asked,
Speaker 1: grinning sheepishly. Is it a regional thing? I'm hopeless, Julie shrugged,
Speaker 1: her smile, slipping for a moment into something more thoughtful.
Speaker 1: I dunno, It's just part of growing up here, I suppose,
Speaker 1: she tapped her head, like knowing how to cut a
Speaker 1: baguette properly. You just remember it, but even the gendarmes
Speaker 1: says it perfectly. I pressed, he's just moved here. Maybe
Speaker 1: you catch it fast, she suggested, as if she never
Speaker 1: wondered about it before. Can't really teach it. You hear
Speaker 1: it enough, you just pick it up. That didn't fit
Speaker 1: what I knew of languages, or accents, or even dialects.
Speaker 1: I decided to formalize my curiosity that evening. I returned
Speaker 1: armed with a notepad, ten local names from old maps,
Speaker 1: ten left blank for transcriptions and pronunciation. I asked Julie, Jirrard,
Speaker 1: and Baptiste, a teenage friend of julie S, to pronounce each.
Speaker 1: All delivered the words with no hesitation, little intonation, Each
Speaker 1: syllable a lining like beads on a string. When I
Speaker 1: tried to slow them down, to break apart the components
Speaker 1: to piece together the phonetic skeleton. They could provide the
Speaker 1: word whole, but not in segments. Baptiste, who delighted in
Speaker 1: making fun of my Parisian r tried to spell out
Speaker 1: saney for me. It's just saney, he repeated, unable to
Speaker 1: isolate a first syllable, as though the word appeared fully
Speaker 1: formed from nowhere. Durrard blinked at my confusion. When I
Speaker 1: first got here, i'd have had trouble, but now well,
Speaker 1: I never think about it. It's like my tongue just
Speaker 1: nos odd, isn't it? But he quickly shrugged off the peculiarity.
Speaker 1: I asked if they remembered learning the names. Not really,
Speaker 1: Julie replied, I suppose my grandmother just said them and
Speaker 1: that was it. Somehow, the deeper every one's familiarity, the
Speaker 1: more invisible the strangeness became. I asked Baptiste if his
Speaker 1: friends from outside town could pronounce them. He shook his head. Na,
Speaker 1: they always mess it up, he laughed. But it's not
Speaker 1: that important. We just get used to it. By evening's end,
Speaker 1: my notebook was filling with lists and the beginnings of
Speaker 1: a project. I wrote one title at the top, in
Speaker 1: block capitals, unlearnable n A M. E. S. In the
Speaker 1: quiet after the others went home, I copied every unfamiliar
Speaker 1: name I found on the day's maps, and, newly alert,
Speaker 1: I started noting the ones that turned up on the
Speaker 1: bakery's paper bags, on church bulletins, and even chalked onto
Speaker 1: the board outside the tabac. Patterns itched at me. Not
Speaker 1: quite linguistic, not quite cultural, something slipperier. My first formal
Speaker 1: investigation began clumsily at the kitchen table, surrounded by a
Speaker 1: motley collection antique maps, sketch books from my teaching years,
Speaker 1: recent print outs of digital street maps, and a handful
Speaker 1: of blurry photos I'd snapped that morning on my phone.
Speaker 1: Comparing columns of names was like comparing streams to clouds.
Speaker 1: Familiar traces, but the details always retreating from the pin
Speaker 1: of definition. Some names Pluvernot, Brulon, Seaney, zueliit moret cropped
Speaker 1: up again and again, preserved over centuries. Others shape shifted.
Speaker 1: I'd see Tropennell on a seventeen sixty four parchment, Tropennel
Speaker 1: on a faded sign, and troo panels scrawled by a
Speaker 1: child in the visitor's log. The names all looked, as
Speaker 1: best I could say, unrooted. They fit no pattern of
Speaker 1: French Basque or Oxyden, nor even any local patwar preserved
Speaker 1: in the dusty grammar books on my shelf. Some segments
Speaker 1: bral seemed to echo French bruler for to burn, but
Speaker 1: the endings swerved away from any recognizable derivation. These were
Speaker 1: not simple dialect words misspelled by generations of lazy scribes.
Speaker 1: I reached out to Matthew in the map room. He
Speaker 1: pulled from the shelf a fragile, soft edged map dated
Speaker 1: seventeen thirty two, thick paper half moons at the corners
Speaker 1: where a long dead hand had guided a compass here,
Speaker 1: he said, pointing to Zueli, it written precisely as on
Speaker 1: the modern signposts. Other names Seaney, Brulon were likewise unchanged.
Speaker 1: The map's borders had shifted more in three centuries than
Speaker 1: the place names ever had. We always say them as
Speaker 1: they are, he mused. The languages of the guild no
Speaker 1: ones bothered to change them. Why would we? The words
Speaker 1: rang with implicit certainty for him. The names were as
Speaker 1: fixed as the river bed, unchallenged and perhaps unchallengeable. Later,
Speaker 1: I visited Ememi Lavin for Tea, hoping maybe the oldest
Speaker 1: stories would shed some light. She recited, as though picking berries,
Speaker 1: tales of border disputes and vanished roads, always referencing places
Speaker 1: I knew in legend, but not on any modern map.
Speaker 1: At Seyne, your great uncle saw the bishop ride a
Speaker 1: donkey backward during lent. No idea why. My grandmother claimed
Speaker 1: it was the only place the crows nested together. Seyney
Speaker 1: and Pluvernot neither labeled on any recent map, yet as
Speaker 1: living in her stories as the kitchen table beneath my hands.
Speaker 1: I pressed her, but she never seemed to notice that
Speaker 1: the names didn't appear Outside these handed down tales. I
Speaker 1: proposed an experiment for the next museum opened a name challenge,
Speaker 1: part scavenger hunt, part impromptu talent show. I created cards,
Speaker 1: each marked with five mystery names from my growing list,
Speaker 1: and gathered participants, both townsfolk and travelers from near by.
Speaker 1: The instruction was simple, pronounced the names as written time
Speaker 1: after time. The locals, young and old, life long residents,
Speaker 1: and new arrivals pronounced every name effortlessly. Outsiders from university
Speaker 1: students to tourists on cycling holidays, stumbled, hesitated, tripped. One
Speaker 1: English visitor tried to break the names phonetically exulette, only
Speaker 1: for Dulie to gently supply the correct word. The contrast
Speaker 1: became almost comical. Not content to leave it at human perception,
Speaker 1: I turned to the digital I typed zul It into
Speaker 1: my smartphone's GPS application, holding my breath in an odd
Speaker 1: mixture of hope and impatience. At first, nothing happened. Then,
Speaker 1: as I watched, the app stumbled one second, displaying the
Speaker 1: name as I'd typed it the next, replacing the letters
Speaker 1: with a string of squashed, half formed symbols, as if
Speaker 1: my phone had suddenly lost the ability to render French characters.
Speaker 1: When Julie tried the same with my phone, the correct spelling,
Speaker 1: her spelling snapped into place. I tried a different device.
Speaker 1: The error repeated the same with Pluvernot on my note
Speaker 1: book MESSI cross hatched script on locals devices the expected
Speaker 1: name every time. When M. Girrard entered it on his
Speaker 1: Gendarmerie work phone, the map aligned instantly, no errors, just
Speaker 1: a neat pin dropped in the forest path by the river.
Speaker 1: Over coffee at the square. I raised these oddities to Girrard.
Speaker 1: He chuckled, maybe the town's just stubborn, or my accent
Speaker 1: is catching Julie sipping her lemonade near by. Added, children
Speaker 1: learn them in counting songs. My niece can sing them
Speaker 1: backward forward, three at a time. She hummed a snippet Pluvernot, Saney, Morret,
Speaker 1: each name carried along an innocent melody that made my
Speaker 1: own attempts seem uniquely clumsy. That evening, a Parisian linguist
Speaker 1: visiting the region, doctor Clara Perez, stopped by to see
Speaker 1: the map archive and indulge her own curiosity. I explained
Speaker 1: my findings, and she offered to record local pronunciations. We
Speaker 1: huddled in the map room, the muffled tick of the
Speaker 1: museum clock cocooning us. Perez recorded five townspeople, then myself
Speaker 1: and two visitors, each reading the same list of names.
Speaker 1: On playback, the local pronunciations were clear, untroubled, Yet as
Speaker 1: she replayed them, each version seemed subtly but inexplicably different,
Speaker 1: as if the audio resisted precise capture. When she played
Speaker 1: my own attempts, they sounded somehow more degraded wine poured
Speaker 1: through a thin cloth, muddied and hollow. I'm not sure
Speaker 1: what's going on, she mused, eyes bright. There's some kind
Speaker 1: of phonetic drift. No, not drift, more like the word
Speaker 1: pulls itself together differently each time, but only for locals.
Speaker 1: Your attempts and antoine s always stay off center, and
Speaker 1: never in the same way. It's she shook her head,
Speaker 1: smiling in disbelief, not like anything I have heard before.
Speaker 1: As I left the museum that day, my mind felt
Speaker 1: a light, not from fear, but deepening wonder. I watched
Speaker 1: a group of children dancing by the river, singing the
Speaker 1: names with easy joy. Not a single person found the
Speaker 1: puzzle strange. Only I, and now, perhaps doctor Perez seemed
Speaker 1: unsettled by the contradiction. Each layer I uncovered seemed to
Speaker 1: widen the mystery, not contain it. The linguist's involvement offered
Speaker 1: new tools. Doctor Perez returned with a portable phonetics kit,
Speaker 1: sensitive microphones, a laptop strung with wave form software, enough
Speaker 1: wires to trip a goat. We set up in the
Speaker 1: museum's educational lounge, turning the whiteboard into a test schedule.
Speaker 1: Matthew Baptiste, Julie M. M. E. Lavin, and even the
Speaker 1: baker whose hands smelled forever of yeast agreed to be recorded.
Speaker 1: Round robin. We went through the names Zuliit, Brulon, Morret Seaney.
Speaker 1: Each time the locals pronounced them with unwavering confidence. Yet
Speaker 1: when Perez compared the resulting waveforms, none matched perfectly, not
Speaker 1: just in accent, but in the fundamental shape of the
Speaker 1: sound itself. My attempts in Perez's own were even more divergent,
Speaker 1: each flailing effort unique yet categorically unmistakably not correct. This
Speaker 1: isn't just an accent. Perez concluded after the third batch
Speaker 1: of tests, the differences aren't explainable by normal variation. Whatever
Speaker 1: es going on here is deeper. She compared it to
Speaker 1: code switching, the unconscious movement between language systems. But we
Speaker 1: both felt that analogy failed. It was more as if
Speaker 1: the names existed only in the space between the mouths
Speaker 1: of the people who had always heard them, and refused
Speaker 1: to manifest for any one else. I shared my frustration
Speaker 1: with Matthew, who shrugged, languages rise and twist like rivers.
Speaker 1: Perhaps some currents are just closed to navigation for those
Speaker 1: who haven't swum them since birth. He seemed untroubled by
Speaker 1: what I saw as an epistemological breach. Julie offered a
Speaker 1: more homespun metaphor learning to swim. She rephrased, you can
Speaker 1: show the strokes and the technique, but the actual moment,
Speaker 1: the first float. You can't teach that, can you. That
Speaker 1: gnawed at me. It wasn't as I had thought about
Speaker 1: learning an accent or cracking a code. It felt as
Speaker 1: if some knowledge was kept just out of reach, not
Speaker 1: through secrecy, but as a byproduct of collective habit or presence.
Speaker 1: I reconsidered, was this truly a language? Is there a
Speaker 1: boundary I hadn't noticed, not between inside and outside knowledge,
Speaker 1: but between modes of community. If these names aren't taught
Speaker 1: or even consciously practiced, what then are they for? Why
Speaker 1: do they exist? Late that night, restless and unsatisfied, I
Speaker 1: returned to my notes and maps. What I asked myself?
Speaker 1: Was I missing? I d followed language as far as
Speaker 1: it could go. The names resisted, Recording resisted, teaching, resisted
Speaker 1: even careful listening. Perhaps nothing more could be learned from
Speaker 1: written lists or sound charts. Instead, a new possibility crept
Speaker 1: in around the edges. Perhaps these names weren't meant to
Speaker 1: carry meaning in the way ordinary words do, not mere
Speaker 1: descriptions but keys to something else. Perhaps only in the
Speaker 1: context of the place, in use, in action could their
Speaker 1: meaning be clear. It was time to visit the places themselves.
Speaker 1: Julie agreed to join me. She was as curious as
Speaker 1: I was, now, though she hid it behind jokes. We
Speaker 1: decided our first destination would be Zulip Path in the
Speaker 1: Veresse Forest, where, according to legend, a wandering eighteenth century
Speaker 1: map maker had vanished only to reappear in a completely
Speaker 1: different part of town. The path was easy to find
Speaker 1: if you were a local on my maps, its marking
Speaker 1: was faint, a curving claw inked across a green washed parchment.
Speaker 1: We left town mid morning, taking the old bike path
Speaker 1: before spiraling off onto a foot trail carpeted with bluebells
Speaker 1: and last year's leathery leaves. The forest hummed with unseen bees,
Speaker 1: and the light gold and green at once made my
Speaker 1: own city shoes feel clumsy. Julie led the way, stopping
Speaker 1: now and then to consult no map at all, she
Speaker 1: walked as if following a remembered smell. After half an
Speaker 1: hour of twists and detours, we emerged at a small clearing.
Speaker 1: There was no marker beyond a battered wooden sign zuel It,
Speaker 1: the word painted in flaking yellow. I photographed the sign,
Speaker 1: making a careful record of the letter shapes. We tried
Speaker 1: the next sight, the Seaney Stone, a n ee high
Speaker 1: boulder not a hundred steps in from the orchard. There,
Speaker 1: an old woman in rubber boots explained here old fermin
Speaker 1: hid apples from the tax men three centuries aga. My
Speaker 1: father said the stone always felt welcoming in autumn. Again,
Speaker 1: the legend was specific, the location was not. There was
Speaker 1: a story, yes, but no unusual geological feature or significant
Speaker 1: visible sign. In each place. Julie gathered small groups, men
Speaker 1: walking dogs, children with sticks, in the hope more stories
Speaker 1: would emerge. The tales did not appear in church records,
Speaker 1: not in the annals left by town priests, or in
Speaker 1: any regional text book. Each person recited the names with
Speaker 1: the same invisible precision. If there was any disagreement, it
Speaker 1: was over whether the Saney stone was luckier for sheep
Speaker 1: or for marriages. Curiously, my GPS app, which faithfully mapped
Speaker 1: every Parisian lane, blanked at the very edge of Zulip path.
Speaker 1: The digital markers flickered, sometimes misspelling the name, sometimes erasing
Speaker 1: it entirely. Julie, in charge of directions, never paused, never
Speaker 1: second guessed the route noted another oddity. My own note book,
Speaker 1: otherwise precise, seemed to betray me. The sketch I had
Speaker 1: made of the Zulid sign, when compared to my photo,
Speaker 1: was subtly altered, an extra loop here, a shortened stroke there,
Speaker 1: the X becoming more of a s H. I accused
Speaker 1: myself of fatigue or poor penmanship. But each time I
Speaker 1: wrote the names, their forms lightly shifted. Julie asked to
Speaker 1: spell them for me, always provided the original, as though
Speaker 1: no change had occurred. We visited five sites in total,
Speaker 1: whether field or wood or stone, none stood out as
Speaker 1: objectively remarkable. All the differentiation existed in the stories, the
Speaker 1: web of names. They're impossible to teach, pronunciation, the certainty
Speaker 1: with which locals guided us from one to the next.
Speaker 1: On our way back, arms loaded with wild flowers. I
Speaker 1: shared my observation these names, I said, they aren't markers
Speaker 1: of the land. They's something more ephemeral, like a compass,
Speaker 1: only you know how to read. Julie nodded, face shaded
Speaker 1: by her cap. Maybe, but we never have trouble. It
Speaker 1: just works, you know. I wondered, then, were these names
Speaker 1: a kind of communal navigation, a method by which the
Speaker 1: community located itself, not in latitude and longitude, but in
Speaker 1: the act of naming and remembering together, Not literally geographic
Speaker 1: but psychogeographic cartography as a living shared practice. That night,
Speaker 1: as the bell in the church tower counted ten, I
Speaker 1: realized the direction my investigation had taken. The maps of
Speaker 1: Bowleu weren't just records of ground crossed. They were live
Speaker 1: documents of memory, untranslatable, not because of some secret, but
Speaker 1: because the meaning was carried in the ongoing act, not
Speaker 1: in the labels themselves. The invisible landscape of the town
Speaker 1: was being mapped every day, in every story, in every
Speaker 1: child's song, and only those who lived inside this web
Speaker 1: could ever really say then ames as they were meant
Speaker 1: to be said. The story I was following was not
Speaker 1: one of place hidden in the land, but of meaning,
Speaker 1: woven moment by moment through a language whose most important
Speaker 1: feature was its invisibility. Julie and I lingered at the
Speaker 1: edge of the orchard as dusk pressed orange and then
Speaker 1: violet into the fields. On the walk home, clouds swept
Speaker 1: over the steeple, blurring all edges, trees losing clarity, river
Speaker 1: muddled with sky, and it seemed to me that Bolue
Speaker 1: itself floated in a haze, not unlike the confusion I
Speaker 1: now carried. We parted by the Boulangerie, each promising to
Speaker 1: rejoin the search another day. I had a head full
Speaker 1: of shifting place names and a notebook that, even under
Speaker 1: the lamplight, refused to stabilize. There hadn't been answers. But
Speaker 1: there was something else, a current pulling me beyond the
Speaker 1: lure of odd pronunciation or the trickery of vanished vowels.
Speaker 1: That night, I left my phone outside the bedroom, foregoing
Speaker 1: the temptation of maps and screens. Instead, I let my
Speaker 1: mind return to the murmured tales of Saney and Zuli, It,
Speaker 1: to the cadence of Julie's voice, and to the intangible
Speaker 1: certainty the townspeople carried, untroubled by the strangeness I found
Speaker 1: so glaring. It was not lost on me that as
Speaker 1: I grew closer to whatever mystery the names concealed, my
Speaker 1: experience was beginning to shift, not from the outside in,
Speaker 1: but as if I had begun to circle an invisible
Speaker 1: center that had always existed, simply unnoticed. By week's end,
Speaker 1: word of our quest, my quest, as every one still insisted,
Speaker 1: had drawn more curiosity than I expected. Matthew, at first dismissive,
Speaker 1: why dig at old roots if the tree still bears fruit,
Speaker 1: conceded that the magnitude of what we were noticing at
Speaker 1: least warranted and experiment. We agreed to formalize things to
Speaker 1: bring together not just locals and me, but a handful
Speaker 1: of outsiders with unique skills, all puzzling over the same riddle.
Speaker 1: Julie called doctor Perez, who in turn reached out to
Speaker 1: two colleagues, one a digital cartographer named Sophie, the other Lucas,
Speaker 1: a folklorist whose work on social navigation was the subject
Speaker 1: of radio documentaries. By Thursday, the museum hummed with the
Speaker 1: energy of a small research summit. The first meeting played
Speaker 1: out in the map room, a glorious chaos of cables,
Speaker 1: maps and fresh quassus. Sophie unpacked a drone for aerial surveys.
Speaker 1: Lucas produced tape recorders from his battered messenger bag. Old
Speaker 1: fashioned but reliable, he claimed. Doctor Perez monitored a forest
Speaker 1: of microphones, laptops and microphones again, as if hoping by
Speaker 1: abundance to trick the names into giving up their secret.
Speaker 1: We all introduced ourselves. Lucas began boyish and bearded, I'm
Speaker 1: here because Clara. Doctor Perez claims Bowlu isn't just an outlier,
Speaker 1: it's an impossibility. That's catnip to a folklorist. Sophie, sharply dressed,
Speaker 1: gave a brisk nod. If something's off with mapping data,
Speaker 1: I want to see it for myself. Place names generally
Speaker 1: stabilize quickly online. If they don't, well, we'll find out why.
Speaker 1: Matthew and Julie conspired to set up interviews, and within
Speaker 1: hours the project took flight. The town was a buzz
Speaker 1: with the notion of the research group. Townsfolk were alternately bemused, amused,
Speaker 1: or approving. Some, like M. M. E. Lavin, took the
Speaker 1: attention as a point of pride. Others claimed with generous ribbing,
Speaker 1: that they had always known there was something peculiar about
Speaker 1: the museum, though never exactly what. We began our first
Speaker 1: field work the next morning, a process meant to untangle
Speaker 1: the precise dimensions of the puzzle. Julie took the lead,
Speaker 1: guiding us to sights now inscribed only on the town's
Speaker 1: oldest maps, Morett Lane, tropenel Pond, the bend in the
Speaker 1: river dubbed Brulon, and of course Zulip Path, and the
Speaker 1: Saney Stone Lucas Ever, looking for the story inside the
Speaker 1: story coaxed anecdotes from even the shyest passers by. Sophie
Speaker 1: piloted her drone overhead while the rest of us collected
Speaker 1: GPS points photographs and dictophone recordings. It soon became apparent
Speaker 1: that the phenomenon persisted regardless of approach. Whenever locals, regardless
Speaker 1: of age or time in Bolu, pronounced the names, they
Speaker 1: did so in a way that was uniform to themselves. Yet,
Speaker 1: per doctor Perez's devices, not quite identical from person to person.
Speaker 1: My attempts and those of Sophie and Lucas failed in
Speaker 1: unique idiosyncratic ways. The consonants doubled over themselves, the vowels
Speaker 1: either too thin or too broad, as though the words
Speaker 1: recoiled from any imitation, not steeped in a lifetime of use.
Speaker 1: But it wasn't just language escaping us. The GPS logs,
Speaker 1: composed carefully by Sophie on one tablet and by me
Speaker 1: on another, diverged in the oddest ways. Sophie's device would
Speaker 1: sometimes lock onto our current location, but the display of
Speaker 1: place names refused consistency, sometimes surface French, sometimes a tangle
Speaker 1: of symbols, occasionally just a blank where a label ought
Speaker 1: to be. Yet when Julie or Matthew borrowed her tablet,
Speaker 1: the names would appear correct spelling, flawless diacritics. I'm not
Speaker 1: touching anything, differently. Sophie protested, even stopping to video record
Speaker 1: her hand over. The playback caught the glitch but failed
Speaker 1: to catch any explainable trigger. It became a running joke
Speaker 1: until the joke dulled into silence. Lucas, for his part,
Speaker 1: interviewed local teens skateboarding near the bakery. When he asked
Speaker 1: if there were special places important to their group, they
Speaker 1: rattled off three names, each distinct, each pronounced with the
Speaker 1: same fluid certainty, and each when prompted, just the name,
Speaker 1: that's all. He pressed them for meaning. Were these just
Speaker 1: gathering points? Were their rival spots known by other names.
Speaker 1: The teens, rugged, baffled by the question, then insisted that
Speaker 1: you have to be around here, you'll get it. Nobody,
Speaker 1: it seemed, remembered learning the names. New arrivals weren't inducted, coached,
Speaker 1: or formally initiated. They simply started pronouncing the names correctly.
Speaker 1: After a few days, as if by infection or osmosis
Speaker 1: one pattern did emerge. Outsiders could visit, even purchase houses,
Speaker 1: but not until living nights and days in Bolu did
Speaker 1: the names begin to settle on their tongues. M Jurrard,
Speaker 1: the gendarme reflected, I didn't notice when it happened. At first,
Speaker 1: I think I copied people, But now it's like I
Speaker 1: was always able to say them. There was no memory
Speaker 1: of struggle, no conscious learning, just a subtle, unnoticed shift.
Speaker 1: After two weeks, the map room had become a thicket
Speaker 1: of cables and charts, an impromptu war room for noncommittal detectives. Sophie, frustrated,
Speaker 1: produced a print out showing the inconsistency in digital mapping.
Speaker 1: Look from outside bowl you google maps renders for example
Speaker 1: Zulit as Exulia, or even as zayat inside town. For
Speaker 1: you folks, it's Zuelit always. Some devices reset clocks when
Speaker 1: entering town. Some translations simply jam up. Is there something
Speaker 1: in the air? Lucas joked, but none of us laughed.
Speaker 1: Scheduled a public session at the square. Lucas and doctor
Speaker 1: Perez gathered a half dozen elderly residents and began to
Speaker 1: take oral histories. The group recited stories, stories set at
Speaker 1: Zulid Seaney Brulon, full of disputes, love affairs, misfortunes, fortuitous
Speaker 1: sheep rescues. Each tale was more lived memory than a legend,
Speaker 1: and crucially, each person held the same pronunciation of place names,
Speaker 1: even as they disagreed over who was present or which
Speaker 1: decade the event occurred. In Lucas grew animated. You all say,
Speaker 1: the name's the same, but your stories, details of people,
Speaker 1: whether timing, differ completely. Matthew, listening in from the steps
Speaker 1: of the boulangerie, smiled. But the names they do not change,
Speaker 1: he said. You see, the land is always the same,
Speaker 1: only the people passing through it are not. This was
Speaker 1: a difference. I hadn't appreciated. The map, the living map,
Speaker 1: as Lucas began to call it, was held not by
Speaker 1: consensus story, but by consensus name, much like coordinates that
Speaker 1: stabilize even as the scenery shifts. Our interviews reinforced the pattern.
Speaker 1: Stories varied wildly, but the name never Doctor Perez never
Speaker 1: satisfied Without testing a new angle, gathered more data. Let's
Speaker 1: record individual pronunciations and look for phonemic overlap, she proposed,
Speaker 1: But the patterns only grew more irregular. Each speaker's version
Speaker 1: remained unique in resonant detail, yet always counted as correct
Speaker 1: by other locals. To machine, the differences were measurable to
Speaker 1: ears inside the community, they were invisible. Meanwhile, Sophie's drove
Speaker 1: surveys added a new contradiction on aerial images. Her software
Speaker 1: repeatedly failed to save geotags for the marked places. When
Speaker 1: residents annotated printed copies pointing to where Zulid or Saney
Speaker 1: ought to be, the annotated names returned to digital space
Speaker 1: only as unreadable characters or glitched code. Yet reproducing the
Speaker 1: printed maps by hand, for instance, tracing them atop a window,
Speaker 1: ping with the morning sun behind, resulted in the correct names,
Speaker 1: provided a local performed the action. I tried, Lucas tried
Speaker 1: a hand. Copied names always drifted from the target, subtly,
Speaker 1: almost innocently flawed. One Friday, after a storm rattled the
Speaker 1: shutters and forced most indoor work, Matthew shuffled into the
Speaker 1: reading room with a stack of powder blue folders. It's time,
Speaker 1: he declared, to see what the old records say. The
Speaker 1: group watched as he unlocked a low cabinet. Contents reserved,
Speaker 1: he said, for occasions deserving an eyebrow. Within were ledgers, contracts,
Speaker 1: and town gild records predating the Revolution. Each bore the
Speaker 1: place names informs astoundingly familiar, and yet parchment by parchment,
Speaker 1: always minutely distinct spelling, wobbled, letter forms looped, but every
Speaker 1: scribe's version was accepted by the next. No corrections, no annotations,
Speaker 1: no sea rata, as though the expectation of unchanging form
Speaker 1: never applied. Lucas finger tips dusted with centuries old powder,
Speaker 1: pointed out other towns. When you read these sorts of documents,
Speaker 1: you see Latin, then French, and then as identity forms.
Speaker 1: Maybe you see local dialect pushing in, always with footnotes
Speaker 1: or corrections. Here look nothing. The names stand untouched, as
Speaker 1: though every one always already knew them. Julie, her nose
Speaker 1: inches from a sprawling parchment, shrugged. I suppose we do.
Speaker 1: As our research mounted, so too did our sense of
Speaker 1: the uniqueness. Doctor Perez arranged for us to attend a
Speaker 1: regional conference in the neighboring town of Coulanges, where folk
Speaker 1: historians demonstrated their own mapping traditions. Speakers described poetic naming,
Speaker 1: secret trails, lost villages, revived in song, intricate yes, but
Speaker 1: not one even when flourished for effect. Showed the blend
Speaker 1: of unfathomable pronunciation, technological resistance, and community wide fluency peculiar
Speaker 1: to Bolu in Coulanges, a visiting Parisian could learn the
Speaker 1: names of goat paths in Bolu. The phenomenon remained opaque
Speaker 1: to all outsiders. Another anomaly caught our attention. GPS translation
Speaker 1: programs even text to speech assistance disabled on phones inside
Speaker 1: Boleu's limits, regardless of brand or language setting. Sophie tested
Speaker 1: her phone by toggling between cellular towers as she rode
Speaker 1: along the edge of the Veresse forest. Each time she
Speaker 1: crossed into Bolu, the place names scrambled or vanished from
Speaker 1: the app. Julie, borrowing the same phone, found the names
Speaker 1: instantly restored. No software updates, no change of sim card,
Speaker 1: nothing altered the outcome. This was national news. We half joked,
Speaker 1: a tiny town in the heart of France, short circuit
Speaker 1: in global mapping software, refusing to fit into convenient digital grids.
Speaker 1: It was tempting to keep circling the riddle, layering on
Speaker 1: new examples of the names, slipperiness, collecting more ways the
Speaker 1: puzzle refused solution. But I realized an urgency beneath the curiosity.
Speaker 1: Was this only a matter of strange language or a
Speaker 1: glimpse into something more fundamental? Was the phenomenon a relic?
Speaker 1: A tradition, a neurological side effect, or a living artifact
Speaker 1: of memory itself. I pressed Jurrard, our friendly gendarme, to
Speaker 1: push the boundaries. Did you ever try to teach the
Speaker 1: names to anyone after moving in? He thought a moment,
Speaker 1: stirring his coffee. I can't recall my wife. She moved
Speaker 1: after me, and after a few days she was saying
Speaker 1: them as I did. He stopped, a sliver of unease
Speaker 1: flickering in his eyes. I suppose no one thinks to
Speaker 1: teach them. You come, you stay, and before long you
Speaker 1: just know. Lucas chimed in. But never before you live here,
Speaker 1: Durrard shook his head. Never I tried when I first
Speaker 1: arrived to memorize them. Nothing stuck. I'd see the signs
Speaker 1: every day, and suddenly one morning my tongue did what
Speaker 1: it was told. The more we pressed, the firmer the
Speaker 1: boundary seemed. The names could not be learned before residence.
Speaker 1: There were no tutoring sessions, no secret guides, no codices
Speaker 1: to be memorized. Children absorbed them in lullabies and playground games,
Speaker 1: but only after breathing the air, walking the lanes, living
Speaker 1: the rhythm of the town. A multi pronged approach interview, transcription,
Speaker 1: digital mapping, folklore had woven itself into a comunal investigation.
Speaker 1: I grew more certain, paradoxically, that neither expertise, nor technology,
Speaker 1: nor exhaustive documentation would crack the enigma. The nearer I
Speaker 1: drew to each clue, the more the clues seemed to
Speaker 1: dissolve into the fabric of everyday life. It was on
Speaker 1: a rain lashed afternoon at the museum, during a session
Speaker 1: meant to correlate all the findings that the central realization
Speaker 1: began to crystallize. Doctor Perez, hunched over her laptop, had
Speaker 1: assembled every recording and compared waveforms from dozens of speakers.
Speaker 1: There is no structural underpinning here, she declared, not as
Speaker 1: we understand it. The sounds made by each local differ measurably,
Speaker 1: yet all are recognized by each other as correct Normally,
Speaker 1: even the loosest dialect preserves grammar, shared phonemes, regular sound shifts. This,
Speaker 1: she gestured, broadly, defies that I don't think the names
Speaker 1: are actually words at all. Lucas had by then constructed
Speaker 1: a wall side mind map, names pinned to stories, stories
Speaker 1: strung with colored twine, digital anomalies annotated with orange banners.
Speaker 1: He muttered, I keep coming back to this. The name
Speaker 1: seem to function like mnemonic anchors, not as lexical descriptors.
Speaker 1: Imagine if you like coordinates, but the coordinates aren't fixed
Speaker 1: to the ground, They're embedded in the network of people
Speaker 1: using them. Sophie raised an eyebrow, like map pins that
Speaker 1: only appear on the software of shared experience. That's poetic,
Speaker 1: But how would that even work? Lucas shrugged, drawing circles
Speaker 1: in the air. Maybe these aren't even names in the
Speaker 1: regular sense. They're not signs for the places. They're keys
Speaker 1: to the relationship the community has with the land, with
Speaker 1: each other, verbal locations living inside the collective memory, rather
Speaker 1: than pinned to soil or stone. I found myself thinking
Speaker 1: back to Mme Lavine's proverb, if you know the name,
Speaker 1: you're already there. Taken it as a joke, yet sitting
Speaker 1: among the machinery and charts, it rang not as a riddle,
Speaker 1: but as an emergent truth For locals. Tales and directions
Speaker 1: weren't their own forms of navigation. They were direct access
Speaker 1: to a place's reality. That evening, I walked to m. M. E.
Speaker 1: Lavin's house in a light rain. The kitchen window burned gold.
Speaker 1: She welcomed me in, poured tea without asking, and settled
Speaker 1: in across the table, reading glasses perched on her nose.
Speaker 1: I wanted to ask more about the proverb, I said,
Speaker 1: about the names. Why is it you say, if you
Speaker 1: know the name, you're already there, She smiled, Because it's true. No,
Speaker 1: you never feel lost, not really, once the name is familiar.
Speaker 1: She set her cup down thoughtfully. When my brother married,
Speaker 1: he moved away to tour. When he came back to visit,
Speaker 1: he couldn't remember half the places, and he stumbled over
Speaker 1: the names. But after a few days it all returned.
Speaker 1: You can't lose it, not really, not while you're here,
Speaker 1: is it taught? She shook her head. I suppose not.
Speaker 1: We don't teach breathing or sleeping or loving either. She
Speaker 1: told me stories, old proposals at Brulong Curve, thunder storms
Speaker 1: at Mouret Lane, the time Baptiste's cousin tried to sled
Speaker 1: down Zulip Path in summer time. Each tale charged the
Speaker 1: name with specificity, even if the facts blurred by the telling,
Speaker 1: The truth of the place lived in the speaking not
Speaker 1: the stone. I brought up the technological strangeness, the GPS,
Speaker 1: the phones, the digital maps. She shrugged, finding the idea
Speaker 1: only dimly unsettling. The land knows us, she said, or
Speaker 1: maybe it's just habit I cannot say. Back at the museum,
Speaker 1: the research team grew less interested in discovering a scientific
Speaker 1: pedigree for the names and more fascinated by their effect.
Speaker 1: Doctor Perez summarized, we can't trace the names to any
Speaker 1: remote origin, and there's no objective structure for their use.
Speaker 1: The phenomenon is uncapturable everywhere, resisted by analysis, and yet
Speaker 1: in the town it's as dependable as rain in November,
Speaker 1: and the names change ever so slightly from document to document,
Speaker 1: Sophie observed, flipping through yet another archive. Everyone insists on consistency,
Speaker 1: but the reality is a living morphing thread, always just
Speaker 1: beyond the limits of careful measurement. Lucas offered an analogy.
Speaker 1: It's like listening to a secret melody which cannot be
Speaker 1: written down, but can only be sung by those who
Speaker 1: have always sung together. Not an old tongue, not a dialect,
Speaker 1: an experience in itself. Is there any record of how
Speaker 1: it started, Sophie pressed. Matthew entered the room at that moment,
Speaker 1: quietly closing the door behind him. No written record, he said,
Speaker 1: nothing survives before the first maps were drawn. Even then,
Speaker 1: the guild records say only names of our own for
Speaker 1: our own, no ritual, no announcement. The central question crystallized
Speaker 1: for all of us. The phenomenon ran deeper than pronunciation,
Speaker 1: further than dialect, and wider than history. It resided wholly
Speaker 1: in the social no the communal web of living and
Speaker 1: remembering together. Outsiders could never learn it. Even outsiders who
Speaker 1: stayed became insiders only by absorbing it into their own memory,
Speaker 1: not their mind. It was a living proof, carried not
Speaker 1: by DNA, nor by heritage, nor by explicit teaching, but
Speaker 1: simply by joining in the act of being here day
Speaker 1: by day. The digital world, for all its reach and rigor,
Speaker 1: could not capture nor replicate it. No database, no phonetic key,
Speaker 1: no AI coaching would break the spell. The only map
Speaker 1: that mattered was the one inside, the collective experience, ever changing,
Speaker 1: ever stable, always accepted, and always being made. On the
Speaker 1: final day of our organized research, we gathered in the
Speaker 1: museum's main hall, tired, but some happier. The inquiry had
Speaker 1: run its course, and no more tests seemed necessary or
Speaker 1: even possible. The phenomenon would not yield to further probing.
Speaker 1: It could only be circled, inhabited, quietly, marveled at. I
Speaker 1: walked home in the twilight, the lanes slick from a
Speaker 1: light rain, the river hissing over its shoal of pale stones.
Speaker 1: The fractured sky above the Voresse forest bled pink and silver,
Speaker 1: and the lamps along the main street glowed through a
Speaker 1: humid mist. As I walked, I allowed the tension of
Speaker 1: relentless questioning to ease. I passed the sign for moret lane.
Speaker 1: I heard in a nearby yard a child yelling the
Speaker 1: name to call in a friend. The names spun from
Speaker 1: her mouth, unchanged in shape, obvious in belonging. The old unease,
Speaker 1: the sense of being shut out gave way to a
Speaker 1: gentler admission. There are forms of knowledge. No taxonomy will hold,
Speaker 1: meanings that only form in the hum of collective memory.
Speaker 1: I thought of how in my teaching days I'd insisted
Speaker 1: every student know how to read not just the symbol,
Speaker 1: but the terrain. How now in retirement I was learning
Speaker 1: to accept that there exist places which quietly, stubbornly will
Speaker 1: never let the outsider in, not because any one means
Speaker 1: to exclude, but because inclusion is the organic sum of years, voices,
Speaker 1: stories woven together every day. That night, sitting on my
Speaker 1: back steps with a mug of weak tea, the dog
Speaker 1: asleep at my feet, I did not try to rehearse
Speaker 1: or unravel. I simply sat listening to the distant hum
Speaker 1: of town, the last rush of the river, the creak
Speaker 1: of shutters, the high nasal notes of teenagers practicing a
Speaker 1: counting song as they wandered home. Some of the names
Speaker 1: made their way into the song, sung in a round,
Speaker 1: circling out into darkness. The next morning, I returned to
Speaker 1: the museum for my regular shift. Julie was by the
Speaker 1: front desk, organizing a new display of nineteenth century compasses.
Speaker 1: She greeted me, waving at a group of new volunteers,
Speaker 1: students from Lion here for a summer internship. I explained
Speaker 1: the project to them, careful not to oversell the strangeness
Speaker 1: lest it become a caricature. You'll notice some oddities with
Speaker 1: place names in this archive. Some you'll pronounce without trouble,
Speaker 1: some will refuse to let you. That's not a flaw
Speaker 1: of memory or technique, just well a marvel in its
Speaker 1: own right. The students, curious, opened the drawers and began
Speaker 1: reading aloud in stumbling, charming efforts. Julie listened, offering no corrections,
Speaker 1: simply beaming at their attempts. I watched her as she
Speaker 1: gently demonstrated ZUELI. It still the syllables eluded me. There
Speaker 1: was a shape to the vowels, a weightedness to the
Speaker 1: consonants that my mouth could not conjure. After the others
Speaker 1: had left, I sat at the long table, arranged with
Speaker 1: maps and ledger books, once more, regarding my own scrawled
Speaker 1: attempt at the name. I tried it again, softly and
Speaker 1: stumbled as always. Julie, smiling, spoke it with ease, as
Speaker 1: if to remind me that there was nothing wrong in
Speaker 1: missing the mark. Something in that exchange my fruitless repetition.
Speaker 1: Her gentle response suddenly seemed less a defeat and more
Speaker 1: a gift, a permission to marvel, to accept without owning.
Speaker 1: I closed my note book. The room was bright, full
Speaker 1: of dust, motes, and distant traffic, and I felt the
Speaker 1: lightness peculiar to those who know they've reached the end
Speaker 1: of one kind of inquiry and the beginning of another.
Speaker 1: If there exist languages, memories, and places that only come
Speaker 1: alive through shared experience, how many other invisible maps might
Speaker 1: criss cross the world, waiting patiently for each of us
Speaker 1: to step inside them, not as explorers, but as unwitting
Speaker 1: participants in a story so old it's very word can
Speaker 1: never quite be learned. And that is the end. Thank
Speaker 1: you for listening, and I will see you in the
Speaker 1: next one.