Subject: (urth) Cursing in Old Solar

From: Dan Parmenter <dan at lec.com>
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 1998 14:44:58 +0000

> As a BA in Linguistics, 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.  

Actually, I thought that Wolfe's treatment of the Ascians' language
was a wonderful refutation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (aka
"linguisitc relativity" which most people have encountered in some
form or other, either through anecdotes about the number of "Eskimo"
words for snow or Hopi conceptions of time - roughly stated as
"language determines worldview").  Severian, in a rare moment of
lucidity, concludes that the Ascian prisoner's thoughts are in no way
limited by being forced to speak entirely from stock phrases and that
he can express any human thought through his language, inlcuding
things which have never been expressed, original thoughts.  This also
serves the purpose of showing us that the Ascian leaders have failed
in their Orwellian attempt at controlling the masses.  Surely Wolfe
was referring to Orwell, but I'm half-convinced that he may have had
some exposure to the S-W hypothesis and some of the standard arguments
against it.  For a good source of these arguments, check out THE
LANGUAGE INSTINCT by Steven Pinker.

Of course Star Trek handled this same concept rather well in the
"Darmok" episode, which for my money is probably one of the better
popular treatments of this sort of thing.  The premise was of our
Captain Picard marooned on a planet with some humanoid alien who even
through the Universal Translator seemed to be spouting gibberish.  It
turns out that all conversation among these people is expressed in
stock phrases from their "national epic".  Picard figures it out,
hilarity ensues, I think there's probably some shooting at some point.
Good episode.

I believe that Suzette Haden Elgin is a linguist who has written SF
that touches on these issues.  I haven't read any of it.

Sapir-Whorf is controversial, though linguists consider it essentially
a dead issue.  It is perhaps out of the scope of this mailing list to
go into all of the different views and their rationales.

From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>

>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"?

It certainly involves language, if not linguistics as it is understood
now.  I tend to view Lewis' linguistics with about the same
seriousness as I view his biology.  A philologist hero is of course a
wonderful idea and I have nothing but praise for the series, but I
don't look to it for serious discussions of language.

>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.) 

Don't forget that Wolfe even claims to have photographed the era's
remains!  If the future influences the past, I suppose that means he
brought his camera on a vacation to Argentina!  So yes, I suppose he
winks a few times, but doesn't necessarily treat it as a joke.

Yr pal,
Shellac (computational linguist)

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

---

From: Peter Stephenson <pws at ibmth.df.unipi.it>
Date: Sat, 31 Oct 1998 15:58:18 +0000

> hilarity ensues, I think there's probably some shooting at some point.

I enjoyed it too, and it certainly seems relevant to the Ascians, but
put in this context the idea struck me as utterly implausible.  I
can't understand how a space-faring culture could ever get off the
ground if instead of `Captain, the dilithium crystals canna take it'
they have to say something like `Laforge, crawling around in a flimsy
studio tunnel again'.  Well, all right, they do that every episode so
it's completely transparent after all, but think of any mildly
technical sentence you like and try to construct a parallel for it
using only references to ancient epics.  (`And Arjuna said: "How then
shall I rig the transporter beam so that the army of the Pandavas
arrives in the hold of the freighter without the phaselock undergoing
quantum degradation, O Krishna?"...')

Maybe it's another example of what I was talking about a couple of
weeks ago with respect to Wolfe's science:  the idea of the Ascian
language works perfectly in the context Wolfe uses it, exactly because
you're never shown an example where an Ascian is saying `You two go
round the other side of the hill, wait till exactly 11:35 and take out
the two sentries without making any noise'.

Maybe, too, the trick in Star Trek is different, maybe if it works
there it's because there is such a limited repertoire of things you
can do: beam up, beam down, lock on tractor beam, set phasers to stun,
pick up strange vibrations (Troy only), engage, ...

-- 
Peter Stephenson <pws at ibmth.df.unipi.it>       Tel: +39 050 844536
WWW:  http://www.ifh.de/~pws/
Dipartimento di Fisica, Via Buonarotti 2, 56100 Pisa, Italy