Hello, and welcome to my new monthly(ish) column about language and linguistics in science fiction and fantasy! My name is Conni (CD) Covington, and I have MAs in both German and linguistics. I wrote my linguistics thesis on the effect of usage frequency on verbal morphology in a subset of German strong verbs (class VII), and my analysis suggests that there is a threshold frequency below which strong (“irregular”) verbs are most likely to become weak (“regular”). Catch me at a con, and I will happily talk your ear off about this! Broadly, I’m interested in how people use language: why a particular group of people uses a particular set of words and what it means to do so; whether it’s snuck or sneaked; what effects the massive increase in global communication allowed by social media is having on languages.
On the SFF end of things, I am a graduate of Viable Paradise 17 (2013), and I’ve had a few short stories published in anthologies. I tend to read or watch space opera-type stuff, like Bujold’s Vorkosigan series, CJ Cherryh’s Alliance-Union and Foreigner series, Yoon-Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire series, Babylon 5, and The Expanse. I enjoy mecha anime, mainly Gundam and Macross. I haven’t read a lot of fantasy recently, but Lord of the Rings was very formative when I read it the first time, aged 10. That sparked my interest in languages, like it did for a not-insignificant portion of my fellow linguists.
What is this column going to be about? I’ll be taking a look at the ways various authors use language in their works, and, in some cases, how linguists and linguistics are portrayed in fiction and media. I have a running list of works I want to talk about in a notebook—and I’ll take suggestions! Some of these topics will be positive, some will be neutral, and some things just make me want to hit my head against a wall.
Sapir-Whorf and SFF
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a very commonly used trope in speculative fiction (for example, it shows up in Arrival, Ancillary Justice, and Embassytown), so this first entry will give some background information on the concepts involved.
Also known as “linguistic relativity,” the Whorfian hypothesis declares that the language one learns shapes the way people think. On the surface, this sounds like common sense, right? If you don’t have a word for a thing, how can you imagine or discuss that thing? Once you dig a little deeper, though, it becomes stuff and nonsense. You can invent a word for a new thing. Before computers existed, no one had a word for the thing, so we invented plenty of words to talk about them and how to use them and program them and make them. Someone had to come up with the idea to use a machine to calculate things.
Alternatively, you can borrow a word for a new thing. English has a plethora of them, including scribe (from Latin), cherry (from French), Zeitgeist, angst, poltergeist, gestalt, Weltanschauung (all from German), plus a lot of vocabulary that came from colonization, like mango and khaki.
There is, admittedly, some potential validity to a weak version of the hypothesis. Language is a product of society, which is tightly woven with culture. If cultural norms equate femaleness with weakness and frailty, and maleness with strength and virility (from Latin vir ‘man,’ related to English wer—as in werewolf, weregild), people may associate these things in their minds. It’s this concept that is behind the push for more sensitive use of language, and not using words derived from slurs or insults in a casual manner—like not using ‘lame’ or ‘gay’ as a generic pejorative, and instead choosing a more specific word to convey your actual intended meaning, like ‘ridiculous’ or ‘terrible.’ Unweaving culture from society from language is extremely difficult, although it seems more likely to me that sociocultural norms are what shape worldviews and language reflects that.
Linguists have abandoned the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but it lives on in anthropology, where people study the effects of various color words on color recognition: i.e., if people have a word for dark blue and light blue, as in Russian, whether that allows Russians to perceive more colors than English speakers, who have to preface “blue” to distinguish it, rather than say goluboy or siniy. Some studies suggest a difference, while others suggest they are unreliable. Anthropologists also study the effect of relative (left, right) versus absolute (north, south) systems of direction, or counting systems (most famously, the Pirahã).
Every now and then, you get economists making claims that people who speak languages with a strong future tense are less likely to think about the future. This is, clearly, nonsense. This economist claims that English has a “strong future” tense—when, strictly speaking, it has no future tense at all, only a periphrastic (needs a helping verb) future. In English, the present tense can indicate the future, as in “the movie starts at 6, don’t be late” or “I’m going to the store tomorrow.” So English is definitely not a strong future language! The linked article dissects the claim in thorough detail, and it links to follow-up articles at the end.
The wonderful people at Language Log have written a variety of posts about the Whorfian hypothesis, which are excellent.
The Whorfian hypothesis is bad science, but it can make for great fiction. One of the key features of SFF is speculation—a “what if?” In some cases, the question is “what if language really did shape the worldview and cognitive processes?” If there are aliens involved, human neurobiology is less relevant. This is just one more thing I have to suspend disbelief over—aliens, FTL travel, linguistic relativity. A good, well-written story will allow me to keep my disbelief suspended, while a less-well-written one may break that suspension. Come along with me as I read and discuss stories where my disbelief stayed suspended—or where it was broken.
What’s next: My next columns are going to look at the field linguistics in Arrival and types of aphasia in Butler’s “Speech Sounds.” I hope to see you there!
CD Covington has masters degrees in German and Linguistics, likes science fiction and roller derby, and misses having a cat. She is a graduate of Viable Paradise 17 and has published short stories in anthologies, most recently the story “Debridement” in Survivor, edited by Mary Anne Mohanraj and J.J. Pionke.
” Before computers existed, no one had a word for the thing”
Before digital computers existed we had people who computed values. These people were known as “computers”, because they computed. So when the analog and digital computers came along, the word was repurposed.
I look forward to these. My favorite SF with a linguistic theme is Janet Kagan’s Hellspark.
Can anything be inferred by the presence or absent of a concept in a given language? Does it make a difference if a person needs five words or two words or one word to express a concept? I have many questions and should have taken linguistics in university.
@1 Now I have to look up the history of the word to see how old it is. One would assume the word was not coined (to mean one who has a job computing) until we had enough of a need for fast and accurate math that people specialized in it. According to Wikipedia, it dates to the 17th century and was usually associated with astronomy. It’s older than I thought. Neat.
Two examples of linguistic SF which refer to the hypothesis would be “The Languages of Pao,” Jack Vance, and “Babel-17,” Samuel R. Delany.
I saw the title of this post and instantly thought of “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, which stretches this already tenuous linguistic concept nearly to the breaking point!
@@.-@,
Yep- Babel-17 is my go-to example on this.
So does Star Trek fandom have a Sapphire Worf Hypothesis?
And, if so, what is it?
I would be interested to hear your thoughts and/or reactions to the language used in books like Alastair Reynold’s Revenger and Shadow Captain.
It seems to me that they are meant to convey a sense of Moby Dick-ian ships in space, and also meant to illustrate the level of scientific thinking of the then-current civilization, but I feel like it’s both overly contrived and yet that I am missing something of significance. I would love to read a linguist’s take on it.
dies
(Is it just me, or does the last character of italicized text tend to vanish here?)
(edit: and closing parentheses too?)
Nice to discover another Language Log fan! I am always interested in the intersection of language, metaphor/idiom, and thought. Consider metaphors about contemplating the future. In English, the future is ‘ahead’ of us, since we are moving ‘towards’ or ‘into’ it. In Classical Greek, it is ‘behind’ us, since we cannot ‘see’ it, unlike the past, which is ‘in front’ of us since we can examine it. Not sure if it is important, but I recall a spate of articles on the Aymara of the Andes being unique in having a “forward” past and a “rearward” future and how it may have affected their status under the conquering Spanish. Strangely, no one ever seems to look at the Greeks being treated with disdain by the conquering Romans due to their linguistic “failing”.
@7
Yes there is. If Worf were painted sparkling sapphire, would he be less macho? Unfortunately, the theory could never be proven or disproven as Worf would kill anyone trying to paint him sparkling sappire.
Looking forward to this series! How about looking at restrictions in language as a tool of oppression?
@11 Dax might paint Worf sparkling sapphire. He wouldn’t be any less macho because he’d kill anyone who mocked him for it.
I am very much on board with this, given my interest in word history and usage. Even in our own world, there are some fun implications when shifting between languages. The English “feel afraid,” while the French “have fear.”
@1. You took the words right out of my mouth, though I admit I only know this due to The Calculating Stars.
And for a strong negation of Sapir-Whorf, there is Loyal to the Group of Seventeen’s Story in Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun.
@12/noblehunter: In the 24th century, machos are allowed to sparkle.
I hope that H.Beam Piper’s short story Omnilingual will be discussed in later columns!
Wait, how does Sapir-Whorf enter into Ancillary Justice? Is it just the pronouns? (Because Breq clearly understands there is a difference, there was just no need for them to learn the distinction) Isn’t the point more about how the use of pronouns affects the reader?
A nice example of the weak hypothesis is in The Dispossessed, where the Annaresti have eliminated the possessive case from the language they speak.
@17/NickH: And where copulate is a verb that can only take a plural subject.
I’m also very interested in linguistics, albeit purely as an autodidact, and I look forward to your future columns. Embassytown and Peter Watts’ Blindsight are among my favorite 21st Century novels. I’ve also read quite a bit of Daniel C. Dennett. You probably won’t go into my real interest, though, which is the relationships between languages. I can bore someone for hours on why Finnish, Estonian & Hungarian aren’t related to any other European languages, or on the history of Occitan. But I don’t see how a discussion on language families would be relevant to science fiction (perhaps excluding Michael F. Flynn’s Spiral Arm series, where it’s an explicit plot point).
Here’s a question I’ve always wanted to ask a linguist: assuming both humans and an alien species exist in this universe and use tools, do you think we would be able to communicate? I’ve always thought so as no matter how different our thinking process, a wrench is a wrench. The opposing views says that in all our years of trying, no human has ever had a conversation with a dolphin, chimpanzee, or dog, which is compelling. Koko the gorilla is a frustrating border case which could buttress either theory.
Thanks!
I’m German and don’t know what class VII verbs are. I probably know more about English grammar (we did have a class about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis when I studied English linguistics at a German university).
When I first read LotR I didn’t understand Tolkien’s alphabets (why can’t he just decide which letter represents which sound?), but after taking phonetics classes I looked at it again and thought that is exactly the kind of system linguists would invent to represent different languages.
The problem with Tolkien’s Elvish languages is that their development ignores the long lives of the speakers.
@20 but we communicate with animals all the time. I guess it depends on what you mean by conversation.
@7 I think there is a “Sap, Worf” hypothesis in ST. It is when Worf gets played for a sap and slapped around a bit to prove how dire the threat is.
I guess the only thing I can really say about this whole linguistics thing is Darmok and Jalhad at Tanagra. Temba, his arms wide?
Or to get a little more prosaic, how do you communicate with pirates who don’t understand idioms?
This is a great start a series that I look forward to! Bravo Tor for even more thoughtful content.
I’m a bit surprised there’s no mention of Bank’s Culture series here (unless I’ve missed it), which explicitly uses the S-W hypothesis as part of the construction of the setting.
Ian Watson’s The Embedding is one of my favorite sf novels about linguistics, one which manages to tackle both the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and Chomsky´s Universal Grammar. I hope you´ll eventually write about it.
What are class I though VI verbs?
@1 – Thanks! I admit that computer was an off-the-cuff example. But there still had to be a shift from the concept as person who computes to a machine that computes.
@3 – There’s not really a difference in whether a language expresses something in 5 words vs 2. Take German for example: the one thing everyone knows about German is that you can smash words together into a frankenword, which then takes several words, or even a sentence, in English. It’s more efficient, perhaps, but it doesn’t say anything inherent about the culture it comes from. (Think “40 words for snow.”)
@everyone leaving their favorite linguistic SF books, thank you! I have a list, but I’m always looking for more.
@10 – I remember reading about that and thinking it was cool, but I don’t have any details on them. Natural languages do SO MANY cool things!
@11 – Do you have any examples in books? I also think that would be interesting, but I’m blanking on examples.
@13 – The Germanic root that led to town in English, tuin in Dutch and Zaun in German is neat, because it originally meant fence, enclosure. In English, it became the thing that is enclosed, in Dutch a fenced-in area (garden), and in German it’s still the fence. (I think etymology is pretty neat.)
@17 – I’m mostly thinking of the pronoun situation in AJ. It is slightly parallel to real-world languages without gendered pronouns (which leads to people saying “my uncle” and “she”), but in the real world, people still have a distinction between male and female relatives, for example, like mother or father. It’s been a while since I read it, but that definitely tripped my “I don’t think it would work that way, but I could potentially be convinced” switch.
@21, 27 – The short version of verb classes is approximately this: Historically speaking, strong verbs (the ones who take an -en in the participle) followed a CVC pattern in their root, which changed in each principal part (present, past singular, past plural, participle). What the consonants and vowels were determines which verb class they fell into. This, of course, became extremely messy over time, where the nice, tidy categories of Old High German get muddled by Middle High, and in modern German, it’s even worse.
The class I verbs are eg reiten – ritt – geritten, treiben – trieb – getrieben. Class II includes bieten – bot – geboten. Class III is the singen – sang – gesungen group, and IV is nehmen – nahm – genommen. V is geben – gab – gegeben (but also weben – wob – gewoben – that’s one of the messy parts).
Classes VI and VII are unique to the Germanic languages. Class VI is the fahren – fuhr – gefahren group. Class VII used to form its past tense through reduplication, which is evident in Gothic haitan – haihait – haitans. But reduplication fell out of use in the other Germanic languages, and class VII created its own, new pattern of vowel change, such as heißen – hieß – geheißen, lassen – ließ – gelassen.
I hope this helps (and it’s a very superficial overview). The wikipedia article “Germanic strong verb” is quite good and very detailed, if you’re interested in a deeper explanation.
@23 – I really want to play with Darmok and Jalad. I love that episode. Idioms are a fascinating subject, and they’re so weird. They don’t stand up to literal translation for the most part, and sometimes that can lead to humor. I wrote a paper one semester on bilingual German-English humor on the internet (tumblr, specifically), and how much of it is related to overly literal translations of things for the lulz.
noblehunter @12:
@11 Dax might paint Worf sparkling sapphire. He wouldn’t be any less macho because he’d kill anyone who mocked him for it.
You’re ignoring the Prune Juice Option: Whorf looks at himself painted sapphire and announces, “This is the color of a warrior!”
@20 – that is a question I don’t have an answer for! I don’t think anyone does. People argue against Koko having truly acquired language because she seemed to mimic other people’s reactions to things. I am definitely not an expert on Koko! There are probably people arguing one side or the other around the internet. Language acquisition isn’t my specialty, though I’ve had a class in it.
back to @21 and Tolkien: I am definitely not an expert in Tolkienian languages, though I sat in on a 3-week intensive about them. The way he designed the Feanorian tengwar was 10000% the way a linguist would do it (and he did the same thing with the runic scripts). And if you look at European (Latin-based) scripts, there’s very little rhyme or reason to most of the letters. Sure, ok, B is a P with an extra bump, but the lowercase versions are flipped over, and then you have d… Basically, he did it for the #aesthetic.
On to the problem of language change among elves. Tolkien knew this would present a problem and an inconsistency, so he wrote an essay called “Dangweth Pengolod” to address it. It’s published in The Peoples of Middle Earth. It’s difficult to summarize, because it’s written in the voice of an elf and is very … florid, shall we say. It has to do with memory, basically? But also the elves did it consciously to choose new sounds that were more #aesthetic.
@29 Have you seen the economy economy economy joke? I vexed my brother-in-law with that one.
@30 You’re right.
@29, re:@11, Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay maybe? Where the oppressive regime makes the name of the conquered region Tigana unspeakable and unhearable by anyone not born there, and the region was renamed after the conquest, so anyone born after the conquest wouldn’t technically be born in Tigana.
@31, I was under the impression that Greek and Latin alphabets originated as ideograms that evolved into representing sounds rather than objects.
I studied Linguistics for my Bachelors degree and will be reading these articles.
I thought of several language examples in SF.
In the Liaden searies by Miller and Lee words from Liad are introduced then used throughout the books. ie denubia=darling relumma=96 days.someone made a dictionary here: https://www.google.com/amp/s/korval.com/partial-liaden-universe-dictionary/amp/
In several Anne McCaffrey books they use Fardle, or Fardlings as a swear word. (Nimisha’s ship, the ship who searched etc)
Isn’t that the basic principle underlying the idea of Newspeak in 1984? That if language no longer contains the words necessary to express democratic and egalitarian principles, it will be harder for people to rebel against totalitarianism?
I think there are some ways that our language inflences our culture and thinking,but most of the examples require getting into political issues. Look at the way social acceptability shifts when we start saying “enhanced interrogation” rather than “torture” or “alt-right” rather than “neo-Nazis”. Or how language like “illegals” is used to dehumanize people.
“Anthropologists also study the effect of relative (left, right) versus absolute (north, south) systems of direction,”
There’s a story about an American linguist driving a Jeep in rural Australia, and his Aboriginal passenger yells “Turn North!”
@35: To be more specific, that’s the Party’s idea of how Newspeak is supposed to work. Whether Orwell thought it really would work is not clear—at least I don’t think the novel itself gives us reason to believe one way or the other (as opposed to something like Babel-17 where events show that it does work), but it’s in character for the Party.
English just leaves spaces in compound words, that’s why people don’t notice that they exist in English, too.
There are also bonobos like Kanzi and chimps like Washoe who were taught sign/symbol languages.
add me to the list of people excited to hear about forthcoming posts!
And do please add Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue books to your list!
Two favourites of mine that haven’t been mentioned yet:
Ursula Le Guin’s “The Author of the Acacia Seeds” (in The Compass Rose) is a fictional scientific paper about a short text written by a rebellious ant. It shows both the limitations of language and ways to overcome them. Ant has no word for “alone”, so the titular author uses the phrase “without ants”; the only pronouns are the first person plural and the third person singular and plural, so it has to use the root forms of the verbs when talking about itself; “Up with the Queen” probably means “Down with the Queen”, because for ants, “down” is good and “up” is bad.
In Diane Duane’s Star Trek novel Doctor’s Orders the Enterprise surveys a planet with intelligent beings so unlike the usual humanoids that they have to feed the universal translator a lot of words before it starts working properly. Here’s what Uhura tells the others in a briefing: “These people have a higher verb density in their spoken language than any species in the Galaxy. Given differences in sentence structure, the relative density is something like ten verbs to every two nouns. Their pronouns are all verbs – which I suppose shouldn’t surprise us, when you consider that these people make tools and buildings out of themselves. They cannot imagine not acting on their environment.”
Anyway, great idea for a series, I’m looking forward to the next posts!
The online SF Encyclopedia has a Theme entry on Linguistics at http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/linguistics which lists many relevant examples, and has a list of further readings. of works
@38: There’s all sorts of compound words in English without spaces, too. There’s one in the previous sentence, even. They’re almost invisible unless you’re looking for them, at least in my experience, simply because you’re so used to them that they’ve become an atomic unit in your thinking. Consider ‘sunrise’ as an example, or ‘waterfall’, or ‘fireplace’.
It gets even more ridiculous if you move beyond compound words where the units are English words in their own right and start in on the compound words formed by smashing together other languages, like television.
@36 I once knew a couple who sailed a boat around the world a couple of times with their kids; their youngest was born on the boat and would use “port” and “starboard” instead of left and right. It got really confusing if you were on a bus or something with them, because while they’d use P/S like I’d use L/R if they were just running around the beach or in the house, as soon as they got in any vehicle they’d immediately revert to P/S orientated to the front of the vehicle, no matter which way they themselves were facing. Their parents had always used nautical jargon while on the boat. IYSWIM.
I haven’t thought of them in years. Thank you for bringing back a warm memory there.
The Player of Games contrasts the thought processes associated with Marain (the Culture’s constructed language) and Eachic (the Empire’s naturally-evolved language). It’s strongly implied that talking, and therefore thinking, in Marain is what gives Gurgeh the edge in his final game.
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@32 – I have, and I’ve used it in class :D (In the chapter where students learn about occupations and majors, because it’s funny and it hurts their brains.)
@39 – That’s already on my list! It’s available through my local library system *and* at the university library, even. (The tricky part about a lot of this column is going to be getting my hands on some of the more obscure and older titles.)
And a side note – I’m not going to be focusing exclusively on Sapir-Whorf in this series, but since it comes up a lot, I thought I’d start with a brief intro on that. Swears to evade the censors (frak, frell) and fannish slang are on my radar, too, along with universal translation and general depictions of linguist(ic)s in SF. When I have time to re-read it, the Foreigner series is definitely something I want to talk about, and I’m planning to look at Belter creole in the Expanse.
My current list will get me well into 2 years at this point :D
Very interesting.
It seems to me that if one does have a word for a thing or a concept or an idea, or two words for a distinction this proves that someone somewhere has already thought about that thing or that distinction. Doesn’t mean it is still relevant, but it is or was “thinkable”.
Whereas if there is no word for a concept, one would need to invent both the idea (from more remote concepts) and the word. That concept has a higher “cognitive hurdle” to overcome. Doesn’t make it unthinkable, but it will be harder.
In this sense a Very Weak SWH might be true? Don’t know if this makes any sense.
Hi
This is a great idea for a series. I want to second the suggestions that you tackle Hellspark and Omnilingual in your columns. All the best.
Guy
@49 – *nod* The cognitive hurdles are definitely something to take into consideration for new concepts. Weak Sapir-Whorf might be real. We just don’t have a good way to tease apart the threads of language and culture.
One thing I think is really fun about English is contrastive focus reduplication. The most famous paper on this is called “the salad-salad paper,” and you can read it here. Basically, English speakers have a way to distinguish between the prototypical X and a specialized X, like “Are you bringing a salad-salad or a potato salad?” or “do you LIKE HIM like him?” It’s really neat. When languages have reduplication, it’s often used for emphasis, but also plural marking (like in Japanese). I am not expert enough in world languages to say whether English is unique in using it for contrastive focus.
#33, @tkThompson:
Actually the Greek and Latin alphabets originate as modifications of the Phoenician script, along with the Hebrew, Persian, etc.
Phoenician letters originated as modifications of Egyptian hieroglyphics. These were multi-purpose, being a syllabary, an alphabet, and ideograms.
#37, @Eli:
The last chapter of Nineteen Eighty-Four is told by someone writing after the fall of the State, so it didn’t ensure their survival, at least.
The light blue vs dark blue bit reminds me of a tumblr post about how maroon could be called navy red.
Lexical gaps don’t necessarily mean that the concept is unknown. Just because attempts to invent a word for “not thirsty” failed doesn’t mean people don’t understand what it means.
It’s been ages since I have read them, but I seem to recall language, an inability to translate things properly between beings of a drastically different mindset, and “assumed” things being baked into labguage as a result of culture being a subplot or theme running through Whipping Star and its sequel The Dosadi Experiment by Frank Herbert. But then again I may be completely wrong lol.
” Before computers existed, no one had a word for the thing”
Before digital computers existed we had people who computed values.
Before computers would not be the 1940s, it would be the 1840s, or earlier. Babbage and Lovelace built a Difference Engine and invented a form of software to run it. Later there were mechanical adding machines.
The idea preceded the hardware and the language.
I guess Snow Crash is more Julian Jaynes than Sapir-Whorf, but I’m still reminded of its dubious use of Sumerian.
What’s really important cognitively is categories/concepts, and being able to label them. “Sour grapes”, as in the fable, is as much a mental category as “red” or “ball” or “to run”. Once you can label a category, which can use many words, you can think about it better. OTOH having a short and frequently used label probably makes it easier: “red” vs. “the second cousins once removed on my father’s side.” (Which *some* language might well have a word for.)
Re: aliens: humans are likely the only fully linguistic species on the planet, and possibly the only linguistic species, period (hard to tell if the various ape experiments are warped by wishful thinking; certainly no ape has learned language as fluently as the typical 3 year old human); not having a conversation with dogs just means dogs aren’t the sort of animal that has conversations. Doesn’t tell us anything about potential aliens.
But from grad school I recall experiments about teaching chimps labels for concepts like ‘same’ and ‘different’. IIRC having the labels made them capable of doing some higher order reasoning, and also increased their self-control. I don’t recall details or names, though.
@56/femfan1946: Not that it invalidates your point, but mechanical adding machines preceded the difference engine, and the difference engine was a calculator for polynomial functions, not a general-purpose computer. Babbage only built a small working model. The first computer, i.e. the first Turing-complete machine, would have been his later invention, the analytical engine. He never built that one.
My favorite linguistic-based SF series has to be Cherryh’s Foreigner books, I think! If you’re looking for more additions to your list… The main character is a human assigned as the translator between his people and the alien Atevi species. Lots of good culture and language stuff in there.
I recently started reading Embassytown, and Arrival is on my TBR. I’ve been scrounging for other sci-fi/fantasy books that focus on language, so I was thrilled to find this new column. I’m looking forward to the next one!
I’m a sociologist. We regularly teach the S-W thesis, as, I believe, do cultural anthropologists. I read your article with interest to consider how my understanding of (and thus my teaching of S-W) is faulty. You clearly state that it is bad science but offer no evidence or real explanation, mostly that linguists don’t like it anymore and that we can simply make up words for things. These seem very shallow understandings of the S-W thesis, that linguistic structure affects cognition. Did I miss something?
The word “computer” existed long before the machine was feasible. It referred to an occupation, whereby a person would sit and do math all day (as I understand it, tables of logarithms and the like).
Words do shape our perception. Newspeak would work (though I shudder at the thought).
While no doubt had there been no word for computer someone still could have communicated the idea, it would have been more difficult to discuss the concept until some term had been coined for it. People with small vocabularies are often the most difficult to explain anything to. The one-two-many cultures will never invent calculus on their own.
I remember being struck by the “True Speech” of the Venusian dragons in Heinlein’s Between Planets. The claim was that since it didn’t have a word for “lie”, you could only tell the truth in it. Even at the age of ten I was pretty sure this wouldn’t work. But it was a neat idea.
Accurate or not, Jack Vance’s Languages of Pao was an eye opener for me: SF of the best kind – the kind that makes you think!
The reference to computers reminded me of something I read a few years ago. In James Gleick’s The Information, he devotes a chapter to Charles Babbage and his 19th century attempt to build mechanical computers (the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine). Gleick spends a lot of time quoting from Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and their contemporaries to show what a difficult time they had describing (or even understanding) what it is that computers were actually doing.
Even as a visionary inventing an entirely new technology out of whole cloth, Babbage seemed to have trouble holding the concepts in his mind, and Lovelace’s genius seems to be largely about how she was able to identify the gaps that needed filling and inventing (or borrowing) the words that would allow her to talk about and explain them more clearly.
Would this inability to talk about and understand the new technology be an example of a weak version of Sapir-Whorf?
@61
The problem with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, from a linguist’s point of view, is that the majority of the human race is bilingual or multilingual (most of the people in India and Africa, for instance, and most people living in former colonial countries that speak both an indigenous language and a colonial lingua franca). It does not offer any kind of mechanism for what happens when you speak more than one language, and which way your cognition changes.
If we do assume that bilinguals have their personality and cognition change depending on which language they are thinking in, it makes predictions that do not pan out and cannot be distinguished from people having associative memories. I am shyer and more inhibited when I speak Russian than when I speak English; however, I’ve met Russian-English bilinguals that claim the opposite for them. Surely, this is not evidence that Russian makes you inhibited or uninhibited; it’s evidence that we learned it in different contexts, and to blame language while ignoring context is committing the Fundamental Attribution Error.
I have a Ph.D in linguistics.
I remember Alien Tongue by Stephen Leigh as being decent.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1988395.Alien_Tongue
Agree w/ @16 and @50 that Omnilingual needs to be included.
i like that people are pointing out Delany’s Babel-17, high surely has to be one of the earliest SF books to explicitly use the theory (the theory dates to 1950-55 and Babel-17 was published in 1966).
But it also informs Delany’s later Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984} in many of the same ways it later informed Anne Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. The shift in pronoun usage (the masculine pronouns are used only to signal sexual desire) is shown to affect how humans (and the lizard-like Evelm) interact with one another as individuals. There are several major characters whose gender we never learn. So I found that even as a reader, I found myself somewhat transformed—Affected by this radical deemphasis of the thing that in our culture now (and even moreso when the book was published) is usually the first thing you learn/perceive about another person.
Very nice point. “Native Tongue” is also good fiction with that hipothesis. “Anciliary Justice” is in my list. Embassytown and Arrival are some of my all time favorite sci-fi stories. Language is such a big deal that it becomes a focus point for big themes. If there is a big shift in language or a different type of language altogheter in a narrative, we allow ourselves to imagine that things would be really different. In Sci-Fi it’s the second sylable the most important one. This happens not just with language, but with most classic themes. For instance, there is a long tradition of stories about time travel. And most aren’t even coherent with the scientific speculation, let alone things like Einstein’s formulas about time. We tend to think of time travel as a kind of teleportation in time, which makes no (scientific) sense as an idea. But can create quite interesting paradoxes and points of view to look at humanity.
@61 – the summary by @66 is my thinking. There is no evidence that language can shape cognition (although Piaget’s model of language acquisition follows the stages of cognitive development – which is discussed in Tomasello 1996 (https://www.karger.com/article/pdf/278478; behind a paywall). I’m not different when I speak German than when I speak English; I don’t think about things differently in each language. Different words have different connotations, of course, like cherry tree in the US, aside from “pretty flowers” and maybe “Japan,” is associated with George Washington, while in Germany, a Kirschbaum has fruit that’s sweeter in the neighbor’s yard (rather than grass being greener), and some people aren’t good to eat cherries with. (I love idioms.)
The argument that language shapes the way you think because you can’t conceive of something unless you have a word for it … that’s Aquinas’ reasoning for why god exists: humans can conceive of something greater than themselves, therefore god exists. (NB: I learned about Aquinas in a class I took around 1995. This may be a pithy oversimplification. A review of wikipedia suggest that this was college-me’s takeaway of the Tertia Via.)
There’s also the aspect that a lot of use of S-W (especially the original “studies” of the time system in Hopi, which, turns out, is actually very wrong) gives off an air of “studying the noble savages who think so differently from us, isn’t that just charming/quaint/hilarious,” and it doesn’t sit well with me. Perhaps this has gotten better in recent years (a lot of early linguists & philologists were pretty damn colonialist and patronizing, not to mention sexist, and some still are, but the field by and large has progressed a great deal).
Anyway. Society shapes culture. Culture reifies society. Language supports both society and culture. Teasing these threads apart is probably impossible. The guy who invented Loglan tried, but, well.
A lot of this thread is reminding me of Audre Lorde’s “Poetry Is Not A Luxury“. I don’t know nearly enough about linguistics to try to participate in the conversation, though :(
@31: I think it is uncontroversial that Koko acquired *vocabulary*. I would say it is very controversial (and, to my ear, clearly not the case) that Koko, in a lifetime of training, acquired anything resembling grammar. “Language” is, after all, not one single thing, and nonhuman species can and do acquire parts of it without acquiring other parts. (Birds have fairly clearly acquired something like grammar without vocabulary. This probably means other dinosaurs did, too… hmm…)
“The Whorfian hypothesis is bad science” seems a bit strong after saying “There is, admittedly, some potential validity to a weak version of the hypothesis.” The wikipedia article you reference does imply that proponents of the current Chomsky orthodoxy regard linguistic relativity hypothesis negatively. But ‘bad science’?
Strictly, a hypothesis cannot be bad science. Hypotheses lie at the foundation of science. A hypothesis may be disproved, or remain unproved. What may be bad is to assume that a hypothesis is true without proof or justification. There is also a difference between the validity of a hypothesis and combining propositions into an argument. There is an ancient logical fallacy of the form: “Plato is a man. Rapists are men. Hence Plato is rapist.” Compare with “Language affects the way we think. The X tribe has no word for thought. Hence the X tribe do not think.” Just because the conclusion is patently false does not mean that either or both propositions necessarily are false. There are rules for obtaining a truthful conclusion from truthful propositions. The presence or absence of words in a language may be truthful propositions. The conclusions might be absurd. But some of the conclusions reached in the article seemed to me to be the result of poor logic, not a demonstration of the invalidity of the hypothesis.
The wikipedia article on linguistic relativity cited states: the hypothesis holds “the structure of a language affects its speakers’ world view or cognition”. However, the discussion was about words, not structure. I speak both English and Russian, and studied Cantonese. To speak properly in a language *does* require an appropriate way of thinking, not just knowledge of grammar. It is possible for a native to speak idiomatically but ungrammatically, and it is possible to speak grammatically, but still be obviously foreign. There are things easily said in one language that cannot easily be said in another. So as I am thinking about what to say, I choose an easy way, and perhaps say something slightly different than I would have said if I was speaking another language. I have also found that English makes it much easier to think about logical assertions (Bool of Boolean logic was English :) ), and I find it very difficult to make logical distinctions in Russian (doubling a negative is needed to get a true negative). That does not mean that it is impossible to make such distinctions in Russian, or that Russians cannot understand logical nuances.
Even if we only restrict ourselves to words, then surely the very existence of jargons invented by scholars, which allow them to make subtle distinctions in their fields (modern tribes?) and discuss them, seems to me to be a confirmation of a form of the hypothesis. They can say and think things about reality that others cannot.
The Whorfian hypothesis, of whatever strength, may not be productive in linguistics in the way Chomsky’s ideas are. It is not, however, wholly without merit or foundation, which is why anthropologists study it.
This looks like a fascinating series and I look forward to reading more of it.
It seems to me that it’s not impossible to conceive of something that you have no words for, but it is considerably harder. If you know a word then you’ve already spent time wrapping your brain around the concept that word describes.
For example, if you know the word “planet”, that means you already grasp the concept that we live on a spheroid world, rotating and travelling through space in orbit around the sun. (Sidenote: At one point that wasn’t what “planet” meant, but it is now).
A culture that doesn’t have a word for “planet” is a culture that hasn’t yet wrapped its brain around that concept. They can (and probably will) come up with it eventually – at which point they’ll coin a word for it. But at this point they don’t have a word for it because they don’t have a concept of it.
IMO, that’s why the words we have (or don’t have) make it easier (or harder) to think things. Not because we need the words themselves, but because possessing a certain word indicates that a person has already pre-considered that concept and doesn’t have the barrier of having to go through all the mental work of developing and formalising that idea before they can use it.
I have to say I don’t know much about linguistics, but I love language and reading about it.
@1 et al.: I am reminded of my earliest (and therefore to me most memorable) example of a concept lacking a word. In 1956 Forbidden Planet was released, and I first saw it no later than 1962. This was some years before I was introduced to computers and programming in any way. In 1956 this was a very specialized field, and probably the verb to program (a computer) was not widely known to the public. But when Robby the Robot said something like “I am not monitored to answer that question.” — I understood immediately what he meant.
No one has mentioned Delany’s Triton, a fantasia on the arbitrariness of the form -meaning relationship.
@51: I’ve heard a Jewish Christian speak about Hebrew texts: “In Hebrew we use repetition as a form of emphasis. In Hebrew we use repetition as a form of emphasis.”
“There is no evidence that language can shape cognition”
Unless it’s been debunked since I was in grad school, there *is* evidence that color terms affect how quickly you can categorize colors, and maybe how fine a distinction you can draw. Russian having separate terms for what we’d call “light blue” and “dark blue” is the classic example. And though it’s non-human and low level, there are the experiments I mentioned about the effect of label training on chimps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity#Empirical_research mentions some time error differences between Swedish and Spanish speakers.
Speaking as a psychologist, you are correct that this theory is bunk. It showed up in psychological research as well, notably by Alfred Bloom, who proposed that because counterfactual reasoning (this would happen IF this were true, BUT it isn’t) is harder to parse in Chinese, it would be harder for native Chinese speakers to process. Dr. Terry Kit-Fong Au completely slam-dunked this in her doctoral dissertation in 1983 (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0010027783900380). Given that this has been generally accepted for over thirty years, it’s not a new finding, so well worth reminding people to stop assuming it.
Given that SF is, well, speculative, it is certainly a reasonable thing to use as a jumping-off point for aliens, but definitely not humans!
Chomsky isn’t as popular any more as he once was. There was a time when computational linguistics was generative grammar, but that time is over.
S-W has the relationship between concepts and words backwards. When there is a new concept people find a word for it (or reinterpret the meaning of an existing one), it isn’t the word that causes the presence of the concept.
“Every now and then, you get economists making claims that people who speak languages with a strong future tense are less likely to think about the future. This is, clearly, nonsense.”
Let’s flip this around. Do people who speak languages without tenses have a different view of time? Same concept, different specifics. Is it nonsense?
birgit @@@@@ 80:
S-W has the relationship between concepts and words backwards. When there is a new concept people find a word for it (or reinterpret the meaning of an existing one), it isn’t the word that causes the presence of the concept.
I just finished reading David Wootton’s The Invention of Science, an excellent history of the Scientific Revolution, and part of it is about just that process: people inventing new words or repurposing old ones (“discovery”, “fact”, “evidence”, “proof”, “experiment”, “hypothesis”) to reflect new forms of thought, understanding, and argument.
@81/AI: That’s what Whorf originally claimed about the Hopi, see comment #70 or the Wikipedia entry on the “Hopi time controversy”.
Is “The still small voice of trumpets” by Lloyd Biggle Jr. already in your list?
As for Sapir-Whorf, I think I tend to agree with the “weak” version mentioned in some comments, that it’s not so much about whether you can conceive of a given idea as how much you’re in the habit of thinking of it a certain way. Words are tools, and tools make tasks easier. If your language has the right word to convey an idea already, it makes it easier to work with and handle that idea, easier to use it as a regular part of your mental repertoire. If you don’t have that word, that doesn’t make it impossible to conceive of the idea; you just have to come at it more indirectly or using a less specialized tool, like if you don’t have a screwdriver and have to use a spoon instead.
For instance, I watch a lot of subtitled Japanese TV/movies, and I’ve gotten into the habit of thinking of a group of people including person X as “X-tachi,” because it’s so much simpler and more convenient than “X and the others.”
Anyway, I haven’t read “Story of Your Life,” but Arrival totally lost me when it posited that Sapir-Whorf was so strong that knowing the words for a concept could actually alter physical law itself. That’s just taking it too far.
@29/CD Covington: I got to play with “Darmok”‘s language when I wrote a sequel story to it for a TNG anthology (“Friends with the Sparrows” in The Sky’s the Limit). I put together an analysis in my development notes (though I’m not a linguist), and then I posted it online on my website. Here’s the PDF: https://christopherlbennett.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/tamarian-grammar.pdf
@31/CD: The claims that Koko merely imitated others were wrong. She often initiated conversations and expressed her wishes unprompted, she was captured on video signing to herself when no one was around, and she invented original compound signs of her own that conveyed coherent meanings.
@48/CD: In my 2012 Tor novel Only Superhuman, I invented futuristic profanities for my asteroid-dwelling Strider culture, but not to avoid censorship, just to reflect the way profanities lose value over time (e.g. “Golly” was a serious curse in Elizabethan times, because it was short for “God’s body” and referring to God having physical form was blasphemy). So Striders use the f-word freely, but only as a non-obscene term for sexual intercourse (since it’s already mostly lost its obscenity value by now anyway, and I expect that trend to continue), so they need something else to use as a curse. It may be contrived, but I gave them curses based on things that space-dwellers would fear and hate, like “vack” (short for vacuum), “punk” (short for hull/suit puncture), and the like. Also words like “suck” and “leak” have been repurposed while still reflecting their earlier profane/scatological value. So you get constructs like “You vack-sucking hull-punking leak-brained hose-clog! Go vack yourself out a very small punkhole!” I think it still manages to sound pretty nasty.
I also dabbled a bit in other aspects of future slang and creolization, e.g. trying to come up with a bit of Chinese/English pidgin that was more logical than Firefly‘s pure English dialogue alternating with pure Chinese cursing.
CLB @85
I’m surprised no one has mentioned “Congo ” (the book, not the awful movie) in this context. I just started rereading it a couple of days ago and language use by apes is very important.
@86/wiredog: The old self-aggrandizing myth that humans are the only conscious animals continues to get eroded by more discoveries about animal cognition. Now, there’s good reason to believe that numerous species have cognitive abilities that we used to arrogantly assume were unique to humans — all great apes, cetaceans, elephants, cephalopods, maybe even corvid birds and parrots. Some think that the only thing limiting the cognitive development of octopus and squids is that their lifespans are too short for them to learn much. If they had humanlike lifespans, they might even surpass us in intellect. I read recently that some researchers think the only reason elephants don’t have a language or civilization like ours yet is that they haven’t invented a symbol language, a means to store information outside their own minds and pass it along to others. Some researchers are actually trying to work with elephants to help them invent one and see how it affects their development. I’m intrigued by the possibility that our breakout advancement as a species isn’t because our brains are intrinsically more developed than other species, but because we had the means (through long lives and language/symbols) to transmit our knowledge among individuals and generations and therefore multiply it beyond what any single brain could achieve alone. In a way, perhaps, we’ve always been a collective consciousness, a whole greater than the sum of our parts.
I’ve always been amused by the speciesism of people who were determined to deny the sentience or personhood of apes, dolphins, etc. based on the premise that if their cognitive abilities were less than human in any way at all, that meant they couldn’t possibly have real minds. I mean, if you think about it, that’s tantamount to saying that humans are the least sentient life forms that could possibly exist, the absolute bottom of the scale. So in trying to assert their insistence that humans are intrinsically superior life forms, they’re inadvertently insulting our entire species by saying that no sentient being could possibly be stupider than we are.
When cave explorers found paintings in Europe that are too old to be by homo sapiens some scientists still had trouble accepting that Neanderthals could have produced art, although they obviously were the only people around at that time. If some people have so much trouble accepting that Neanderthals are intelligent, why should they be more open-minded about animals?
@88/birgit: That was my big problem with Robert J. Sawyer’s Hominids trilogy (well, one of my big problems) — its assumption that the so-called “Great Leap Forward” to behavioral modernity 40-50,000 years ago was the first time any life form on Earth actually achieved consciousness, that even anatomically modern humans had no self-awareness or conscious thought at all until the very instant we became behaviorally modern. (And that in the book’s parallel universe, it was Neanderthals that made the jump to consciousness while our subspecies didn’t.) I don’t buy that at all, that it was some magically instantaneous transition from no consciousness to full consciousness. That just doesn’t reflect how evolution works. Even if we did achieve some new threshold when we first began to create art and more sophisticated tools and show the first signs of abstract culture, that doesn’t mean we had zero awareness whatsoever until a switch was thrown. It would’ve just been a refinement of what was already there, the existing potentials finding a new way to express themselves.
I had thought the idea of Sapir-Whorf was reality. I didn’t know this theory had a name but remember hearing/reading that “concept” type languages (Navajo seems to be the one I remember being mentioned) gave the speaker a completely different view of the world than say English speakers, would have. I always felt somewhat “lesser” for not being at least bi-lingual but my attempts to learn a 2nd language as an adult didn’t get far.
@87. Yes, I gave up eating squid and octopus (thankfully I have never been offered gorilla or elephant meat in the first place) because all the studies coming out put them too close to the consciousness line, it would be too much like cannibalism IYSWIM. I still wince when I see it on the menu in restaurants.
@85 In “The Story of Yor Life”, a third party would never observe any change from learning the alien language. The protagonist sees the future, but always behaves exactly as she would have if she didn’t. I do wonder what happens if you put her in a brain scanner and show her faces she isn’t supposed to have seen yet,
Stranger in a Strange Land also depends on thinking in a new, alien language to elicit new abilities.
I am appalled at the language this columnist uses in her wholesale rejection of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. She is certainly unscientific in her choice of pejorative adjectives to describe the hypothesis. She belittles the very concept (which is, after all, merely a hypothesis and not even a theory), while she fails to provide substantive evidence to justify her rejection. The examples she selects are for the most part facile and silly. While many linguists may reject the strong version of the hypothesis, it is not clear to me that the field of linguistics is sufficiently developed to produce such a firm and definitive dismissal. (BTW, I quite enjoyed Embassytown, although I admit that I found its basis not entirely believable.) I wish the author had confined herself to discussing some linguistically-oriented Sci-fi instead of producing this diatribe.
@92/Gareth Wilson: Seeing the future is still a change in physics, specifically the physics of information transfer and storage. If it were possible to do that, it makes no physical sense that it would only work for brains that had a certain way of describing the concept.
Stephen Hawking once said something to the effect that the reason our brains store information about the past and not the future is because storing information increases entropy, so we can only store information from a time when the system we inhabit was in a lower-entropy state, i.e. the past.
Judging animal cognition is hard, but If A Lion Could Talk is an interesting work on the skeptical side.
A summary: we should ask what animals are good at, not whether they’re good at what we’re good at. And what they’re good at doesn’t take decades of ambiguous experiments to establish [like ape language]. There is a commonality of many basic cognitive tasks and abilities between humans and other animals, *and* across ‘ranks’ of animals (mammals vs. insects) or brain size; there is also a huge discontinuity of language and being able to have ideas about ideas. Look at animal stupidity (what are they bad at and what does that tell us about how they think), not just smarts. Animals show some mental modeling but it’s hard to find behaviors that can’t be explained as learned associations.
@96/zdamien: But let’s not be blind to our own prejudices in the process. Throughout history, every human belief that defined us as central or superior — that we were created in God’s image, that our world was the entire universe or the center of the universe, etc. — has been disproven one after the other. By now we should’ve learned humility — any hypothesis that defines us as intrinsically unique or superior, any model that satisfies our ego about ourselves, should be approached with intense skepticism. The burden of proof should be on the presumption that we are unique, not the premise that we aren’t.
A lot of great suggestions here, and I look forward to reading the future columns.
When you run out of ideas gleaned here, maybe a visit to why “general semantics” was such a hot thing for van Vogt and other authors during the Astounding era.
@87/CLB: Wow.
…that’s tantamount to saying that humans are the least sentient life forms that could possibly exist, the absolute bottom of the scale.
I never thought about it that way. You make the point perfectly. Just wow.
@99
That sounds plausible to me. Presumably, if Australopithecus could have invented civilization, they would have done. We are probably the dumbest creatures that could have done so.
@100/ad: It is deeply ethnocentric and self-congratulatory to assume that the only valid definition of sentience just happens to be the one thing we’ve done that nobody else has. That’s not science, it’s narcissism. It’s circular argument, like if the world’s top cornhole player argued that cornhole was the only actual sport in existence so they were therefore the world’s greatest athlete.
I mean, obviously “inventing civilization” is not a function of brains, it’s a function of fingers. A dolphin might be ten times smarter than you or me, but you try lighting a fire underwater with only a pair of flippers. So it is the height of self-serving illogic to equate civilization with intelligence.
This is the point I’m making — it’s oversimplistic to assume that sentience as we define it, or civilization, is purely and exclusively a matter of how much brain power you have. That’s probably just one ingredient in the mix. As I mentioned before, the theory is that elephants might be as intelligent as we are but haven’t yet invented the kind of symbol system that would let them share and transmit knowledge and thereby amplify their individual brainpower into collective achievement the way humans did. And squids and octopus show signs of surpassing our intelligence in some ways, but they only live 3 years or so. They could be like a race of brilliant toddlers, with enormous potential that just doesn’t have time to be fulfilled (which is incredibly sad). It’s not just a question of whether a species has the intelligence, but of whether they have the tools and opportunity to make effective use of it.
@101/Christopher: How cool. In which ways do squids and octopus show signs of surpassing our intelligence? Can you recommend an article or a book about that?
@102/Jana: See the first link in my comment #87.
@103/Christopher: Thanks!
It funny how you used Ann Leckie’s books as an example of the Saprir-Worf troupe. The author just tweeted that they are not an example of the troupe. She believes that strong Sapir-Worf is utter bullshit (and doesn’t believe in the weak version either). Its use in classic SF makes her twitch.
She points out that many real languages exist without gendered pronouns for people (and they are not genderless).
> every human belief that defined us as central or superior — that we were created in God’s image, that our world was the entire universe or the center of the universe, etc. — has been disproven one after the other
“Created in God’s image” hasn’t been disproven. It’s still believed by the Abrahamic believers, and is irrelevant/meaningless to atheists.
Some beliefs in our uniqueness have been disproven, others haven’t. Modern science has even taught us non-traditional ways in which we’re unusual compared to most vertebrate animals: high endurance, high tolerance for medical shock, eclectic diet, hidden estrus and being ready to have sex pretty much all the time. Human language is unique in its complexity and generative power, and teaching it to our closest relatives was not a great success. Are elephants just waiting to be taught a symbol system? That’s an extraordinary claim, we can believe it when it has solid evidence behind it.
A key way in which we’re nigh unique is imitation. Apes don’t in fact ‘ape’ particularly well, if at all. Alleged incidents of money or ape culture have fallen into doubt: the Japanese macaques washing their food look more like parallel re-invention than imitation; differences in chimp foraging may have more to do with the food available to forage. Monkey see *doesn’t* lead to monkey do. Meanwhile the human eyeball may have evolved to make it easier to tell what we’re looking at.
@30: Now I’m picturing Worf singing “Shiny” from Moana.
@1: No one had a word for the silicon-metal-plastic object that IBM and Apple made popular. The fact that the pre-existing word “computer” was chosen for it was logical considering the function of the object. This is how I interpreted CD’s statement: not about the existence of the word, but about the application of the word to the new concept — and related concepts like “program”, “memory”, “storage”, “disc”, “floppy”, etc. that were also pre-existing words applied to the new concepts.
@105 “trope“, not “troupe“.
@107 You should hear his cover of “I’ll Make a Man Out of You”
@106/zdamien: ““Created in God’s image” hasn’t been disproven. It’s still believed by the Abrahamic believers”
It’s called evolution. It’s been conclusively verified by overwhelming evidence and is frequently directly observed in the field and the lab, despite the denials of the ignorant. You might as well say the roundness of the Earth hasn’t been proven because there are still flat-Earthers. That’s not a legitimate use of the word “proof.”
And no, Creationism is not still believed by most educated followers of the Abrahamic religions, just certain fanatical, willfully ignorant minorities thereof that propagate the self-serving lie that they speak for the rest. You’ll find few Creationist Christians outside of the United States, because it’s a movement that started here for largely political reasons (because William Jennings Bryan mistook the misnamed “Social Darwinism” of European fascist movements for actual Darwinian theory and thus erroneously perceived the latter as a threat to religious liberty). The official position of the Vatican is that evolution is an accepted scientific fact, that science explains the physical origins of humanity and the universe while the Bible metaphorically engages with their spiritual nature and meaning.
Your conflating of monkeys and apes in your last paragraph is nonsensical; apes and monkeys are no more closely related than bears and badgers. Great apes are far more closely related to humans than to any order of monkey; indeed, humans are the closest genetic relatives of chimpanzees, even closer than chimps are to gorillas or orangutans, so as far as modern taxonomy is concerned, humans are great apes (indeed, we’re essentially neotenous chimps), whereas we are definitely not monkeys. (Although at least four of us have been Monkees. People say they monkey around, but they’re too busy singing to put anybody down.)
@108/rpresser: The term “computer” for an electronic device was coined decades before the personal computers you’re talking about. Per the dictionary:
1640s, “one who calculates,” agent noun from compute (v.). Meaning “calculating machine” (of any type) is from 1897; in modern use, “programmable digital electronic computer” (1945 under this name; theoretical from 1937, as Turing machine). ENIAC (1946) usually is considered the first.
I recall reading something about language and thinking, regarding word order in language. It boiled down to this: that regardless of word order in a sentence, when a person non-verbally explains a task, they use “subject-verb-object”, such as “I open the door” by pointing to themselves, pantomime opening the door, then pointing to it. Even if in their language they verbally say “I the door open”.
It was a while ago, so I don’t recall details about veracity.
By Americans. Germans say Zuse‘s computers were first.
@113/birgit: Also, ENIAC used decimal numbers, whereas Zuse already used binary numbers in the 1930s.
IANALinguist, but I’d be keen to read your thoughts on Jules Davidoff (2006) about the Himba tribe, who have no word for blue, but many for green. Layman’s summary here.
As for fiction and the concept, I think that Terry Pratchett’s notes on Dwarfs’ words for Rock:
:)
This is a pretty poor understanding of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, and particularly Whorf’s work. Whorf went to great pains to show he was NOT talking about the “23 words for snow” idea that you’ve characterized it as (“If you don’t have a word for a thing, how can you imagine or discuss that thing?”). By the time Whorf was working, anthropologists and linguists pretty much understood that no language exists that was inadequate to represent the speaker’s world. Whorf’s concern was with the categories and structures within languages that materially impact the way we act in and respond to the world. A language’s vocabulary is not relevant — Whorf doesn’t even compare languages directly, but language groups (for instance, lumping the various descendents of Latin and German, including English, into “Standard Average European”) — but rather focuses on the way tense, noun gender, case, and other elements of a language’s syntax and semantics work together to shape how we behave.
The S-W Hypothesis failed, but it wasn’t “bad science”. It laid at least part of the groundwork for an understanding of language as a powerful actor in its own right. Both the strong and weak hypothesis fall short because they imagine language as developing somehow separate from the culture it either determines (strong) or influences (weak). It’s pretty clear though that language and culture are deeply interwoven, that there is a back and forth between language and culture that shapes both. Our debates over abortion, over personal pronouns, over cultural appropriation, over the use and reclamation of slurs, over sex and gender and the boundaries that define both, and on and on are based in that relationship, which Whorf observed but failed to wholly grasp.
@@@@@ChristopherLBennett @@@@@ 103:
@@@@@102/Jana: See the first link in my comment #87.
Hang on — your justification for this statement
is a post by Stubby the Rocket on tor.com?
Look, I’m sorry, but that’s just bollocks.
(The actual Nature paper that gave rise to that post has absolutely nothing about octopus lifetimes or things limiting their cognitive development or anything remotely similar. Nothing, zip, zero.)
@112/BonHed: “I recall reading something about language and thinking, regarding word order in language. It boiled down to this: that regardless of word order in a sentence, when a person non-verbally explains a task, they use “subject-verb-object”, such as “I open the door” by pointing to themselves, pantomime opening the door, then pointing to it. Even if in their language they verbally say “I the door open”.”
I did a quick search on the internet and found an article that says the exact opposite, namely that people use SOV (subject-object-verb) even when their language is SVO. The authors conclude that SOV is the natural order and suggest that SVO may be adopted “as language community grows and its functions become more complex”. They even discuss how their findings bear on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
JanaJansen @@@@@ 118:
Thanks for providing the link — that’s really interesting!
@115, Mark Whybird: so in similar vein, there is no such thing as a fish?
Mark Whybird @@@@@ 115:
The idea that the Himba cannot perceive blue, or that they cannot distinguish blue from green, or that they can distinguish shades of green that (for example) English speakers cannot, is apparently nonsense. The original Business Insider article that the Science Alert page is reproducing was discussed by Language Log here.
In short, in the actual research done in 2005, Himba speakers tend to take slightly longer to identify a blue square as the odd one out in a field of green, but certainly didn’t experience a complete failure to do so.
(The pictures shown in the Science Alert/Business Insider article are from that fake BBC version of the experiment.)
@118/JanaJansen, Ah, okay, it was a while ago that I read it, so got it mixed up in my mind. Thanks for the correction!
@122/BonHed: I was quite intrigued by the article myself, so thanks for getting me to look it up!
@121 PeterErwin – Thanks!
@120 NotACat – Thank you for introducing me to that podcast, which, as a bit of a QI fan, I will now definitely check out – but I’m not seeing the relevance?
@124 Mark Whybird, the relevance is that there is no such thing as “a fish”: there are many things called some kind of “fish” but no actual “fish” per se. So rather than not having a word corresponding to something that exists, we have a word but nothing that exists for it to correspond with.
@125/NotACat: Looking at the quote from Stephen Jay Gould, I’d say he was talking about biology, not nomenclature (he was an evolutionary biologist, after all). He was saying that the creatures we collectively call fishes belong to a number of evolutionary distinct groups that are more closely related to other things than they are to each other. So taxonomically speaking, if you group all life forms based on how closely related they are to one another, then all the things we call “mammal” would clump together in one group, and all the things we call “bird” would clump together in another, and so on, but every species that we call a “fish” would end up in some other group, so there’s no unique taxonomic category for fish. Gould was apparently saying that their similarities are due to parallel evolution rather than direct relationship. By analogy, it’s as if we referred to all flying creatures (including birds, bats, insects, and pterosaurs) as, ohh, “flish” instead of using distinct names for their taxonomically distinct groups. It’s not really a common evolutionary grouping, just a bunch of unrelated things that convergently developed a similar anatomy and lifestyle.
Just came across a relevant article, about a study suggesting that a baby’s first language can influence how easily they learn certain concepts depending on whether they’re taught nouns first, as in English (and thus learn to focus more on objects), or verbs first, as in Mandarin or Korean (and thus learn to focus more on relationships or comparisons between objects).
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2019/06/25/want-to-raise-rational-kids-try-teaching-your-toddler-verbs
Of course, there’s the usual mention at the end that some researchers are unconvinced. And even if it’s true, the fact that different languages might make it easier to learn certain concepts first doesn’t mean that it would be impossible to learn other ones later on. And it’s more a difference in emphasis than a really fundamental difference in thinking or perception. Interesting, though.
Sir Terry dabbled with this when Two-Flower the tourist was trying to explain what he did for a living to the owner of The Mended Drum. I *think* Rincewind was acting as the interpreter…
anyhow, Two-Flowers’ profession was described as something like “the reflected sounds of the smaller cousins of dwarfs -yuck!” Which we find out at the end of the book is the phonetically “echo-gnomes-ick!” As the Anhk-Morporkian pub owner is trying to pull the city’s (and possibly the Discword’s) first insurance job (arson to claim the money Two-Flower promised “if anything happened to his establishment), he realises he hasn’t planned his escape route and Death let’s him know it’s pronounced “ECONOMICS”…
I was at at talk at EasterCon this year about gender in SF. The relevance here is that one panel member’s Mother was not a native English speaker. In her native language (Nigerian, I think, but I could be wrong), there are no gendered words, and so she has trouble with applying those in English. So she’ll regularly use Male words when talking to him about his sister. It helps that he has no brother when his mother tells the panel member that “He’s popped down the shops.”
I’m kind of uncomfortable with the S-W hypothesis on the grounds “feels” arrogant. Bad science on my part, but if you consider English to be the Borg of the language sphere, then that suggests native English-speakers are inherently superior. If your language rapidly evolves by assimilating things (including concepts) from other languages your culture finds useful, that infers that you are more capable than individuals that natively speak a less promiscuous (or less thuggish, depending on your mood) language in understanding new concepts. It’s that kind of Victorian Colonial logic that makes me uncomfortable…
WillMayBeWise @@@@@ 129
In her native language (Nigerian, I think, but I could be wrong), there are no gendered words, and so she has trouble with applying those in English.
There is no such language as “Nigerian”, as there are about 500 different languages spoken in that country. Something like five of those are each spoken by at least ten million people. (Of those, the most popular is Hausa, which has grammatical genders; the next widely spoken are Igbo and Yoruba, neither of which has grammatical genders, so perhaps it was one of those, if the speaker’s mother is indeed Nigerian.)
Lacking grammatical gender (in the “male”, “female”, and possible “neuter” sense) is hardly unusual; in Europe, it’s the case for Turkish and the various Finno-Ugric languages (Finnish, Estonian, and the Sami languages, as I understand it). In grad school, I had a Turkish girlfriend who complained about the same problem of figuring out which pronouns to use (after I’d remarked that she had referred to her mother as “he”).
Of course, English speakers have somewhat the same issue when trying to speak more fully gendered languages like Spanish, French, or German — as Mark Twain famously put it, how are you supposed to remember that in German, turnips are feminine but young women are neuter? (“Where is the turnip?” “She is has gone to the kitchen.” “Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?” “It has gone to the opera.”)
I believe Turkish has no gendered pronouns, along with several other languages. See https://wals.info/feature/31A#1/60/12
Lack of gendered pronouns doesn’t seem to have resulted in genderless societies.
WillMayBeWise @@@@@ 130:
I’m not sure I understand your argument; it doesn’t make any sense to say that the Sapir/Worf hypothesis “suggests native English-speakers are inherently superior”.
but if you consider English to be the Borg of the language sphere …
I’d say that’s a good example of Anglocentrism — the belief that English is somehow the most unusual, most extreme, best (or worst) language in the world. While it’s true that English is high on the scale of borrowing, it’s hardly the highest. From this presentation using data from the World Loanword Database, you can see that it’s beaten out by Romanian, and even more so by Tarifiyt Berber (spoken in Morocco). And also by Gurindji (spoken by about 500 Australian Aborigines) and Selice Romani. (And since the World Loanword Database only has 41 languages, there are almost certainly quite a few more languages that are more “promiscuous/assimulationist/thuggish” than English.)
So, no, English is not “the Borg of the language sphere.”
English is more the Voyager-era Borg of language. Everybody thinks it used to be harder, the reality doesn’t match expectation, and its glory days are long behind it.
Hello all, for some reason, my computer isn’t showing me any comments unless I open an incognito window, so I have gotten far behind on the comments :(
A general note – I am not a devotee of Chomsky by any means. His universal grammar is a useful model, but I don’t think that’s how the brain literally works. I will change my mind if a neuroscientist can prove it, but, well. Ethics and all.
Note the second: the books I read are dependent upon what I can get from my libraries. Fortunately, Georgia has a network of libraries that do ILL to each other, and I have access to a university library.
@85 – I have just opened your Tamarian grammar page, and I will be looking at it eagerly! Also, please look forward to my July column, which will be on Arrival. AND I really want to write about cursing (and worldbuilding through it and slang) at some point, because it is a really cool topic.
@90 – there is a very common popular notion that multilingualism makes you think differently and that sort of thing; it is extremely questionable in reality.
@94 – I’m sorry you feel that way. This is the first post in what is going to be an ongoing column, in which I will be discussing a variety of linguistics-oriented SFF. It’s not an academic paper, nor do I have the available word count to write a 10-15-page paper with references. I did link, however, to posts by prominent linguists. Embassytown is on the schedule for September, and I have my article drafted. (Gotta get ahead while I still have time to read before the semester starts and I have 3 classes to teach.)
@105 – Interesting! I don’t follow her twitter account, so I didn’t see that tweet. The link I see is that Breq is incapable of telling whether people are male or female because their language doesn’t use gendered pronouns. If that’s not what she intended with that idea, it’s the one that came across to me. It’s true that people whose native languages don’t use gendered pronouns have trouble using he and she appropriately in English, but they can say “man” and “woman.”
*apologies for the extremely binary nature of this; languages are annoying.
@108 – thank you, yes, that’s what I was saying :)
@112 – A lot of research into creoles looks at word order (with SVO being the most common because it’s “easiest”, but you could also argue that SOV is just as easy). I don’t know about this particular study, but it sounds interesting.
@118 – Aha! Yes, that makes sense. And thanks for the link!
@127 – I remember reading about general exposure to nouns vs verbs in infancy/toddlerhood varying in different languages in my language acquisition class. I think English was heavy on the nouns, in part because caregivers emphasize them (“Oh, do you want the doggy? Here’s the doggy!” with stress on the doggy). (So put me in the “not convinced/need way more evidence” camp.)
@135/CD Covington: Maybe you should try clearing your browser cache. If it works with an incognito window, that suggests you need to clear the cookies or whatever other junk has accumulated in your browser cache.
Grammatical gender usually has little to do with biological gender. It is just a kind of noun class. Another grammatical classification system are Asian counting words. English speakers might be more likely to confuse grammatical and biological gender because English has lost most of its grammatical gender. Of course Germans don’t think that girls are neuter or that all cats are female and all dogs are male. Wikipedia has a list of languages by grammatical gender system.
@136 CLB – that worked, thanks for the suggestion! I thought maybe it was a browser extension doing weird/annoying things, since I couldn’t get it to load on my phone or tablet, either, but clearing the cache worked.
Looking forward to this column. Now I want to reread Jack Vance’s Languages of Pao.
@125. NotACat – ah, gotcha. Thanks for the explanation; yes, similar re rocks and fish.
About the Imperial Radch (if it’s not ludicrously late to comment on this post), I think a better-supported reading is that Breq has difficulty gendering people because of culture, and her language reflects that difficulty, not the other way around. She’s an AI with the memories of a ton of different people from cultures that all treated gender differently, and the culture that’s primarily responsible for creating her is an imperialist one that doesn’t take note of gender difference among themselves and certainly isn’t interested in respecting the gender roles of suborned worlds. She’s better at it in places she’s more familiar with.
@141 – That also makes sense, and is probably more accurate!
This video about a Mayan language (which is tenseless – and according to strong S-W would mean that they can’t conceive of time) was in my youtube recommendations today. (Spoiler: they use aspect and mood to demarcate times.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttq0S4cuIHA
@142/CD Covington: It’s been a while since I read Language, Thought, and Reality, but did Whorf really claim that speakers of tenseless languages can’t conceive of time? Wasn’t the claim rather that their perception of time was completely different from ours?
Chinese also has only aspect, not tense. Most non-linguists don’t know that those are two different things.
Am rather surprised that this (and no comment that I can find) has mentioned THE book on the subject: Aliens and Linguistics: Language Study and Science Fiction by Walter E. Meyers.
Highly recommend it although it’s one downside is that it’s a bit elderly now and I’d kill for a decent ‘update’.
You’re not having my autographed copy! Well, you can read it if you come visit and don’t remove it from the house – this is a treasure from the early days of my internet connection, before the world wide web when I managed to stumble across the book’s existence, emailed the author having tried to get a copy unsuccessfully from the British Library, and was mailed a signed copy gratis! Thank you Prof Meyers!
@47 Native Tongue is worth tracking down. A sci-fi scenario in which Linguists become the most important people in the world. The two sequels are much less interested in Linguistics but there was a dictionary of Láadan published, if you can find that.
@143 Worph’s work was interesting but his methodology was very sloppy. This wrecked his reputation. Sapir followed up by redoing the field work properly but it was too late. To this day the theories are dismissed as faulty despite some better scientific follow through. Part of the problem is that ‘Language, Thought and Reality’ is a much snappier read than the better work that came later.
The Silent Language by Hall has influenced a fair amount of SF both deliberately and I suppose indirectly. An interesting example of confusing usage for time. Then again in regional English this – coming – week and next -week after have confused two native speakers.
Notice that for snow a snow cat operator grooming a ski slope will have a large vocabulary talking to another snow cat operator as will somebody waxing skis.
It can be amusing to see how early adapters can influence vocabulary across space and time as laptop computer is current usage in Appenzell. Languages that make a strong effort to maintain tradition, Icelandic or Afrikaans may consciously translate a new usage as Microsoft Windows may not be back formed to wind hole but to leather scraped thin to let some light in or scooter to buzz pony.
“A Darkling Sea” by James Cambias introduces an alien language that has in-built attribution – supposedly making its speakers better scientists. You can’t just say “My hovercraft is full of eels”. You have to say “Graham tells me that my hovercraft is full of eels” or “I have seen that my hovercraft is full of eels” or something similar.
And I learned this morning that similar languages exist on Earth: for example Tariana, which has five forms of making a statement depending on whether you’ve seen it yourself, sensed it in another way, been told it, deduced it or just assumed it. This property is called “evidentiality” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality
So, according to the fieldwork of the linguist Alexandra Aikhenvald, here are five ways to report on the culinary activities of your father’s younger brother:
Nu-nami karaka di-merita-naka
My younger uncle is frying chicken’ (I (the speaker) see him)
Nu-nami karaka di-merita-mha
‘My younger uncle is frying chicken’ (I smell the fried chicken, but cannot see this)
Nu-nami karaka di-merita-pida-ka
‘My younger uncle has fried chicken’ (I was told recently)
Nu-nami karaka di-merita-nhi-ka
‘My younger uncle has fried chicken’ (I see bits of grease stuck on his hands and he smells of fried chicken)
And my favourite:
Nu-nami karaka di-merita-si-ka
‘My younger uncle has fried chicken’ (I assume so: he gets so much money he can afford it, and he looks like he has had a nice meal)
Of course, as Aikhenvald points out, English has evidentiality too, just in the form of added phrases like “I assume” or “I saw”!
“Golly” was a serious curse in Elizabethan times, because it was short for “God’s body” and referring to God having physical form was blasphemy
God taking physical form wasn’t blasphemy in Elizabethan England, it was the central tenet of the state religion.
And “Golly” like “Gosh” is just a euphemism for “God”. Modern English speakers do much the same thing by saying things like “Sheesh” instead of “shit”.
You are confusing it with other abbreviated oaths like “‘Zounds” for “By God’s wounds” and “Sblood” (used often in Shakespeare) for “By God’s blood”.
Nor was it a curse; a curse is a verbal phrase intended to harm the object. “Damn” is a curse because it’s short for “damn you” – may you go to Hell. As is “blast” – may you be blasted, may you wither.
An oath is an emphatic phrase intended to reinforce a statement by invoking something sacred or precious; is this true? Yes, by God’s wounds, it’s true! On my head it’s true!
@150/ajay: Fair point about my misuses of “curse” and “blasphemy,” but here’s corroboration for the main point:
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/science/almost-before-we-spoke-we-swore.html
The NY Times isn’t really a reliable source (for anything, unfortunately). None of the standard online etymology resources back up the “God’s body” origin. There was a shortened form of “By God’s body” used as an oath in early modern England, but it was “Odds-bodikins” (or variations on it) not “Golly”.
“Golly” isn’t old enough, apart from anything else; only goes back to about 1800. People weren’t swearing “By God’s body” in 1800.
@152/ajay: The article’s author, Natalie Angier, was a founder of Discover Magazine and a writer for Time before she joined the NYT, she’s been a professor of science reporting at NYU, she’s had her work collected in many volumes of The Best American Science Writing, and she’s won a Pulitzer and numerous other awards for her work. So your barb against the NYT is both odd and misdirected.
I thought this was an interesting article and a nice start to what feels like it’s going to be a great series.
And I’m glad I read all the comments for the many interesting ideas presented and various reading suggestions.
But I confess I read them all the way down mostly in the hope I’d find out what the economy economy economy joke was, since I was so curious and Google wasn’t very helpful.
154: from Twitter user Lupintweets: if you feed this German into Google Translate:
Die Volkswirtschaftslehre (auch Nationalökonomie, Wirtschaftliche Staatswissenschaften oder Sozialökonomie, kurz VWL), ist ein Teilgebeit der Wirtschaftswissenschaft.
you get this in English:
The economics of economics (including economics, economics, economics, economics, economics, economics) is a part of economics.
153: not a linguist, then. A science journalist. And it does not improve the reputation of a science journalist to point out that she has been a science journalist for a long time. In this instance she is wrong (or her editor has miscorrected her). The NY Times is generally bad on linguistics. There is a flourishing cottage industry of academic linguistics bloggers spending their time pointing out how bad it is. It is also a clumsily written and pompous newspaper that replaces news with gossip and analysis with self interested wittering.
But maybe I’m wrong – maybe there’s an etymological source out there that backs up “golly” as short for “God’s body”. Could be.
ajay @@@@@ 150, 156:
And “Golly” like “Gosh” is just a euphemism for “God”. Modern English speakers do much the same thing by saying things like “Sheesh” instead of “shit”.
Sheesh is rather more plausibly a euphemism for “Jesus”, not for “shit”.
… it does not improve the reputation of a science journalist to point out that she has been a science journalist for a long time.
I think that’s perhaps unnecessarily catty (the unstated implication being that the longer science journalists work at their job, the worse they must become).
There is a flourishing cottage industry of academic linguistics bloggers spending their time pointing out how bad it is.
Although the only mention I could find at Language Log of Natalie Angier’s work is this:
One should always be a little cautious about science stories in the news, and I think you’re right about the etymology of “golly” — but from my perspective as a scientist (an astronomer, not a linguist), the NY Times has some of the best science reporting around, and probably the best of any major English-language newspaper (certainly of any US or British newspaper), including writers like Carl Zimmer, Dennis Overbye, and Kenneth Chang. It’s not 100% perfect — and I should perhaps stipulate that I’m talking about their Science News section, not random articles or editorials from other sections — but it is, generally, very good.
An old joke avers that the change from Old English to Middle English was the result of Norman men-at-arms attempting to seduce Saxon barmaids.
Poul Anderson wrote an introduction to a basic physics text, written as though the Norman Conquest had never happened. He used words with Germanic roots, and avoided words of Latin derivation. He called it Uncleftish Beholding.
The term AnderSaxon was invented by those who chose to play the same linguistic game. It’s the class of language used with only a limited set of linguistic roots.
This link takes you to the guilty text.
https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=alt.language.artificial/ZL4e3fD7eW0/_7p8bKwLJWkJ
@159/Fernhunter: That’s fun! Some of those words are like the actual German ones (bernstone – Bernstein, sourstuff – Sauerstoff, waterstuff – Wasserstoff, kernelish splitting – Kernspaltung), but others are very different (firststuff, uncleft, firstbit, bernstonebit, neitherbit,…).
janajansen@18 – “X copulates with Y”.
implicitly plural, explicitly singular.
@161/Danny Sichel: In Pravic, you’d have to say “X and Y copulate”.
No one who has read even a small portion of the vast literature on linguistic relativity could be so dismissive of it. The research has proven that the theory is correct. The only debate remaining is exactly in what ways it is correct.
@165: “The research has proven that the theory is correct.”
That’s not how science works. “Proof” only exists in mathematics. Science only shows that a theory has been supported by experimental results so far, and continues to test its predictions to refine the theory further or unearth its flaws or incompleteness.
In English, the future is ‘ahead’ of us, since we are moving ‘towards’ or ‘into’ it. In Classical Greek, it is ‘behind’ us, since we cannot ‘see’ it, unlike the past, which is ‘in front’ of us since we can examine it.
Fascinating. Terry Pratchett fans will recognise that the same distinction exists in Trollish. (I wonder if Pratchett knew about the Classical Greek case or just invented it independently?) Trolls, being nocturnal, also refer to times long ago as “the sunset of time” rather than “the dawn of time”.
assuming both humans and an alien species exist in this universe and use tools, do you think we would be able to communicate? I’ve always thought so as no matter how different our thinking process, a wrench is a wrench.
What is this “wrench” thing? Do you mean a spanner?
We had a Klingon linguist? Cool!
@167 / ajay – from the little I know about Sir Terry, he likely did know. He had an amazing capacity for taking real-world examples and including them in his world-building.
For instance, Vimes’ is nicknamed “Old Stoneyface”, after his ancestor that was so dedicated to the law he chopped of the last King’s head. It happens to also be Judge Dredd’s nickname, so I asked if that’s where he got the inspiration while he signed one of his books for me. “No,” came the acerbic reply “I used it because it was Oliver Cromwell’s nickname.”
so much for teenage me trying to ask an intelligent question… :)
At least I got an intelligent reply.
From the stories I’ve about him, he had a magpie’s urge to collect shiny little facts for his stories. He certainly likely playing around with Latin puns in his work. I wouldn’t be surprised if he included other linguistic anomalies.
Suffer-Not-Injustice Vimes is clearly the Oliver Cromwell of the Disk.
@170,
Cromwell was perfectly willing to accept and perpetrate injustice, like killing 20% of the population of Ireland because they were the wrong variant of Christianity
But he didn’t see that as an injustice. The past is a different country. Also those Irish Catholics were supporting the royalist cause.
ChristopherLBennett no matter how often you repeat that makebelieve it has nothing to do with the meaning of proof (from probe as in probability) and theory (for observe). By definition a theory is a proven hypothesis like when data and model match to 95% confidence or +2 sigma.
swampyankee by definition sects (Orthodocs, Catholic, Anglican, Protestant) aren’t Kristian/Jesuist but Hæretic (Petrist, Papist, mishmash, Paulist) as they expressly do what what Gospels oppose. In the Catholic case it breaks the “call no one father”, “eunuchs”, and “can’t serve two masters” laws.