Re: OT: SF: Le Guin, Elgin, Spinrad, etc.

J Y S Czhang scripsit:

> >Samuel Delany _The Ballad of Beta-2_
> >
> >This is a novella which begins with a cryptic poem which the main
> >character "decodes" in the course of the story. It's told after the
> >fact; the ship, the Beta-2, is a museum piece.
>
>     Hmm, I have heard of that one, but haven't read it.
It has some (con)linguistic relevance.  The actual ballad, after which
the book is named, exhibits interesting cases of vocabulary drift:

	There came one to the City
	Over land with her bright hair wild
	And her eyes coal black and her feet so sore,
	Under her arms a green-eyed child.

It turns out that _City_ 'ship', _arms_ 'limbs', _under_ 'spatially
associated with', the last two reflecting the zero gravity environment.

In Delaney's unrelated work _Nova_ we find an outworld Sprachbund that
maps various languages (English, Portuguese, maybe others) to SOV order,
which is represented in the English of the book as such.

--
John Cowan  jcowan@reutershealth.com  www.reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the
continent, a part of the main.  If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a
manor of thy friends or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for
whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.  --John Donne