Re: Conlangs in History

On Fri, 18 Aug 2000, Jonathan Chang wrote:

>     Also too bad sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick didn't invent more of his
> ConLang (i.e. CitySpeak). [I kinda wish more sci-fi writers were into
> futuristic ConLangs, esp'ly pidgins & creoles, futuristic Englishes,
> Spanishes, Chineses, and Hindis & various mixes of some and all... etc.]
Probably because many sf writers are in love with depicting technology,
and even if not, don't know enough about linguistics.  I've found among
my friends--don't know if this is true in general--that people
(especially monolinguals) assume a lot of things about (their) language
(or in general) that seem "obvious," but really aren't, or don't hold
across many languages, etc.  I should poll some people and find out why.
I also imagine that extrapolating language change and how it interacts
with social change (does English continue to dominate?  loan words from
Swahili?  meep?) is a daunting task.  The few writer-aspirants I've
talked to on the subject are hesitant to include *existing* languages in
their stories that they don't speak fluently; I remember critiquing a
friend's manuscript that attempted to use French (her future postulated a
French-dominated section of the universe) and even with my rusty HS
knowledge there were some very awkward usages due to unfamiliarity.
Learning enough about a language/languages-in-general takes time that
writers may not have.

The closest I've ever come to dealing with language in my sf experiments
is an unfinished story that I may never finish (I wanted to use the idea
of aliens having a different universal grammar, but I don't know enough
about Chomsky and the evidence for/against to figure out if it's
sensical) and a not-yet-scheduled story where family names come first
(and that's more culture than language, since I didn't do anything neat
with it).  It *is* a pity, though.

Any of y'all writing/submitting sf?  =^)

Yoon Ha Lee
SFWA member
(3 sold to F&SF: 2 published, 1 waiting to be scheduled)