Subject: (urth) Re: Digest urth.v021.n003

From: Gap <gape at dsuper.net>
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 1998 17:17:12 +0000

Hello!

>> > I've not yet seen SF which gets
>> > Linguistics right at all; the tendancy is to go wild on the wildest
>> > version of Whorf' hypothesis, or to get some basic concept wrong.
>> > As an MSc in Computer Science, it's the same for computing.  This
>> > is not to say that there couldn't be a tool for programming the mind
>> > via language (indeed, advertising and so on show that there _is_),
>> > but it's not going to be Sumerian.
>>
>> This post is interesting, because I recently saw a book by Jack Vance
>> called _The Languages of Pao_, which said something like "The first
>> science fiction book based on the science of linguistics" on the
>> cover.  I have no idea what the story is about.  Since Wolfe says he
>> was influenced by Vance, particularly the Dying Earth books, I
>> wondered if there are any stories where someone has noticed any
>> emphasis on linguistics.
>
The Languages of Pao is a very interesting book where the language is use to
reunite
different cultural group. I live in montreal (im sure you notice that im not
english) and i think that ill start to teach this language to all people in
this town...im sure (if you are aware of the political situation here) this
will help us to understand each other! ;-)

>What about C.S. Lewis's "Out of the Silent Planet"?  The main character is
>a philologist and a significant portion of the book is about language
>learning.  Does that count as "linguistics"?
>
>There is Wolfe's whole "I'm just translating this old manuscript from the
>future" conceit, which is fairly old hat (except maybe the "from the
>future" part.  Have other authors done that before?  Wolfe seems to play
>it pretty much as a joke.)
>
Some other exemple of the use of linguistic as a tool in a SF text can be
found in this 2 famous work:
1984 and Flower for Algernon.

Gap
http://www.dsuper.net/~gape
"la vie est trop courte pour etre prise au serieux"

n.b.: soorry for my so poor english...but ive begin to read this list a long
time ago and now i just want to say at least a little "hello" even if its
not understable...

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/