On Nov 12, 7:29 am, "Sally Caves" <Piman...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello, Arik! Did you (of course) use Walter Meyer's wonderful book
> _Aliens and Linguists_ in your class?
> Sally
Yes, "of course" is appropriate - it's a great resource.
Unfortunately, this book is more than a quarter century old now, so it
misses out on much interesting SF, as well as on more recent linguistic
theory. Also, it has a very specific take on many issues which, while
legitimate, is not the only possible one.
In answer to Sai's question, here is one example of the sort of
thing I have in mind. In Ted Chiang "Story of Your Life", there is a
description of a written language where every letter forms part of all
the words in the sentence. Hence, when you start to write a sentence in
this language, you have to know exactly what the end product will look
like. Obviously, writing in such a language would be fiendishly
difficult for humans (though see below); it would be easy for creatures
that could actually foresee the future, as indeed the aliens who use
this language are. With great ingenuity, Chiang portrays the
implications of such a world view, for instance on the physics of the
aliens. But more so, in an extreme case of Sapir-Whorf fashion, the
protagonist who learns this language adopts this world view, and can
actually see the future. Now, the idea is extreme, and highly
implausible; in fact, I understand that Sai is developing a language
along simiar lines, but I will be very surprised to learn that, as a
consequence, he can foretell future events ;) However, it is very
useful as a thought experiment in the almost self defeating attempt to
visualize fundsmentally different ways of viewing the world, and
fundamentally different languages, and the possible relations between
them.
Arik
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