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

J Y S Czhang wrote:

>    I was doing a websearch on "generation ships" & "language" and I came
>across this: in Ursula K. Le Guin's recent short story collection  _The
Birthday
>of the World & other stories_ (2002) :
>-
>"Paradises Lost" — a 6 generation ship story. What happens in
generations who
>know ONLY a ship? Good
>language-over-time material - mostly vocabulary.
>    I gotta get this book :)
____________________________
I have read the story in question (I'm a huge LeGuin fan).  It is excellent
(as are all the stories in the book with one exception IMHO).  However,
the "language over time" material is not what you may be thinking.  What it
involves over the course of six generations of the ship crew is that words
referring to things that don't exist aboard the ship lose their meaning and
become archaic.  For example, the crew finds that Earth history and
literature is very difficult to understand because it constantly refers to
things like 'trees,' 'buildings,' 'rivers,' 'war,' etc., all of which have
become archaic words that have to be looked up in reference books because
there no real-world examples on the ship.  Consequently, even though the
ship completes its mission to found the first extraterrestrial Earth
colony, they find that the reports from Earth are meaningless, and soon
sever communication.  Language is only a minor component of the story.  The
best part of the story is what happens to the crew in a social context.

--John Quijada