{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/588",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 588,
    "subject": "Rats write?",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1998-05-11T00:30:14+00:00",
    "last": "1998-05-11T00:30:14+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0010-0131@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "William H. Ansley",
        "address": "wansley at warwick.net"
      },
      "date": "1998-05-11T00:30:14+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Rats write?",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Quite a while ago in this list there was a discussion about the rats in\nUltan's Library and whether they really could write. In looking back over\nthe archives, it seems that more people took this as a metaphor for rat\nmanure than took it literally. I want to join the literal camp and I have\nsome \"new\" evidence to back my position up.\n\nThe quote in question is:\n\n--------\nSome of the shelves were disordered, some straight; once or twice I saw\nevidence that rats had been nesting among the books, rearranging them to\nmake snug two- and three-level homes for themselves and smearing dung on\nthe covers to form the rude characters of their speech.\n--------\n_Shadow_, ch. 6, p. 42, Orb ed.\n\nSince Severian mentions rat dung directly, I don't see how the \"rude\ncharacters\" made of it can be a metaphor for it as well.\n\nMy new evidence? In _Sword_, (ch. 2, p. 17) we have this:\n\n--------\nBut the truth is that there is a wildness more vicious (as we would know\nbetter if we were not so habituated to it) in certain domestic animals,\ndespite their understanding so much human speech and sometimes even\nspeaking a few words...\n--------\n\nNow, this is hardly definitive; perhaps he means talking birds which\n(unlike Oreb) don't know what they are saying, although those are not among\nwhat are generally understood to be domestic animals. Neither are rats, for\nthat matter, although rats are as bound to (and, to some extent at least,\nshaped by) man as domestic animals are. And if domestic livestock has been,\nin some cases, genetically engineered to speak, it is not terribly unlikely\nthat this genetic material might be transferred to rats via viruses or\ntransposons.\n\nA more serious objection is that it is a huge leap to go from speech to\neven rude symbols representing it. But rats are mighty adaptive!\n\nThere is also this passage from _Claw_, ch. 27, p. 383.\n\n--------\nOccasionally, moths vastly larger than any I had seen before passed from\ntree to tree. Their figured wings were as long as a man's arms, and they\nspoke among themselves as men do, but in voices almost too high for hearing.\n--------\n\nNow, I really don't know quite what to make of this. I tend to interpret it\n(metaphorically!) as meaning that the moths were communicating in moth\nspeech just as men talk in human speech, but it certainly could be taken to\nmean that the moths were talking in human speech and that Severian could\nunderstand them. I prefer not to not to believe the latter version.\n\nWilliam Ansley"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}