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

In a message dated 2004:04:08 09:41:19 AM, jq_ithkuil@INREACH.COM writes:

>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.
    I figured as much - afterall it does say "vocabulary."

>  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.
    Intriguin' idea that. That would actually make conlanging somewhat easier
in _some_ ways ;)

>  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.
    But I imagine that a truly workable, self-sufficient generation ship
would have to be a macro-sized Biosphere - practically a massively huge greenhouse
in space with both agriculture and aquaculture sorta like the O'Neill
orbitals that NASA artists imagined in the 1970's: www.islandone.org/APC
www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/PAO/warp.htm .

>  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.
    Yes. IMHO it is rather hard not to write anything worthwhile and fairly
interesting _outside_ of a social context.
    IMHO I think a _fictional_, narrative story about sentient characters is
more appealing than one more focused on language(s). But this does not
preclude exploring the edges of language a la Cordwainer Smith, Anthony Burgess, J.
G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, Doris Lessing, Russell Hoban, John Clute,
etc..

---  º°`°º ø,¸¸,ø º°`°º ø,¸¸,ø º°`°º ø,¸¸,ø º°`°º  º°`°º ø,¸~->
Hanuman "Mister Sinister" Zhang, Sloth-Style Gungfu Typist
- "the sloth is a chinese poet upsidedown" --- Jack Kerouac {1922-69}
    <A HREF="http://www.boheme-magazine.net">=> boheme-magazine.net</A>

"Poems are sketches for existence." - Paul Celan

"One thing foreigners, computers, & poets have in common
is that they make unexpected linguistic associations." --- Jasia Reichardt

"There is no reason for the poet to be limited to words, & in fact the poet
is most poetic when inventing languages. Hence the concept of the poet as
'language designer'."  --- O. B. Hardison, Jr.

    "At some point in the next century the number of invented languages will
probably overtake the number of surviving natural languages." - Cullen Murphy

“Linguistics is our best tool for bringing about social change and SF is our
best tool for testing such changes before they are implemented in the real
world, therefore the conjunction of the two is desirable and should be useful.”
— Suzette Haden Elgin 1996.


--- *DiDJiBuNgA!!* Hang Binary,baby...---

Hanuman "Stitch" Zhang, ManglaLanger (mangle + manga + lang)
<A HREF="http://www.boheme-magazine.net">=> boheme-magazine.net</A>

     Language[s] change[s]: vowels shift, phonologies crash-&-burn, grammars
leak, morpho-syntactics implode, lexico-semantics mutate, lexicons explode,
orthographies reform, typographies blip-&-beep, slang flashes, stylistics
warp... linguistic (R)evolutions mark each-&-every quantum leap...

"Some Languages Are Crushed to Powder but Rise Again as New Ones" -
John McWhorter, _The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language_

"WITH MASTS SUNG EARTHWARDS
the the sky-wrecks drive.

Onto this woodsong
you hold fast with your teeth.

You are the songfast
pennant." - Paul Celan

= ¡ gw'araa legooset caacaa !
    ¡ reez'arvaa. saalvaa. reecue. scoopaa-goomee en reezijcloo ! =
[Fight Linguistic Waste!
    Save, Salvage, Recover, Scavenge and Recycle!]