Tenser, said the Tensor

LOLDARMOK

If you enjoyed the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Darmok", you should check out this strip from the webcomic chainsawsuit.  [Thanks to Matt Treyvaud of No-sword for pointing it out to me.]

Review: Brave New Words

Brave New Words (hereafter BNW) is subtitled "The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction", and they're not kidding.  No haphazard collection of SF-related terminology, BNW is an impressive piece of scholarship, based on the OED's method of collecting citations to establish both what a word means and when it began to be used.  As the editor, Jeff Prucher (whose blog, I note with a bit of disappointment, is not named by analogy with Jim Treacher's) points out, BNW is based on the citations collected by the online OED Science Fiction Citations project.  BNW was also copyedited by the linguistiblogosphere's own Language Hat, so you know all those letters and whatnot are in the right place.

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In Which I Stick My Toe, Hesitantly, Into Lawblogging

Consider: the phrase "Bong Hits 4 Jesus", which either is or is not an exhortation to drug use depending on how you squint at it, is syntactically quite similar to Elric's battle cry, "Blood and souls for my lord Arioch!"

Discuss.

Brave New Words

Somehow I've managed to miss the news that there's a new dictionary coming out that's right up my alley.  Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction is based in part, I believe, on the citations collected here, which means it's got that shiny Web 2.0, user-contributed wiki flavor.

You'd think that, since I'm supposedly focussed on the intersection between linguistics and science fiction, I'd have known about this, but it wasn't until I started receiving referrals from the blog of the author, Jeff Prucher, that it finally seeped into my consciousness.  This in spite of the fact that Language Hat mentioned the dictionary in a post that I know I read, because it was written in reaction to something I wrote.  (And there's no subject I find more fascinating than me.)  Of course, the ideal way to find out that such a book has been published is with a heavy thump on the front doorstep as a review copy arrives, but perhaps the publishing industry has noticed that, on the previous two occasions I've received a review copy of a book, no review ever appeared.  Hmm.  Have to work on that.

"Darmok"

[This is part of an ongoing occasional series about linguistics in science fiction.  Fair warning: spoilers.]  I've been meaning to write about the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Darmok" for years.  In fact, I had it in mind when I started this blog, and I promised that a post about it was imminent in September of 2004.  (Doh!)  Well, during our ongoing sojourn in Germany, we discovered to our horror that we'd run out of English-language TV.  Fortunately, I remembered that I've had an AVI of "Darmok" sitting in my hard drive since July of 2004, so we fired it up and watched it.

"Darkmok" is easily the most linguistic of the Star Trek episodes I've seen.  Unlike a lot of the SF I discuss, it's pretty well-known, so I'm a little nervous about writing about it—I'm sure you can find many, many essays about it online, but hopefully I have something to add.  For a comprehensive review, check out this page by Raphael Carter, which includes both a summary and a glossary of all the alien utterances in the episode (and from which I got the official spellings of most of the proper names).  I'm going to summarize the linguistic aspects of the story, then analyze where I think they're wrong—which is, unfortunately, pretty often.

Continue reading ""Darmok""

crowleycrow

Earlier this month I noted in a comment that this blog had received a visit from author John Crowley.  A little Internet sleuthing revealed that he has a LiveJournal: John Crowley Little and Big.  It appears he was directed here by a comment on this post in which he asks for examples of the use of novel language(s) in SF.  His readers provide several suggestions that should be of interest to people who come here for the "Linguistics in SF" posts, including a few I've written about and a bunch more that I haven't.  I guess my inexorably growing to-read list just got a little longer...

The Princes of the Air by John M. Ford

Recently, I've been knee-deep in readings about case, number, and person, and that really cuts into my SF-about-linguistics reading time (though I have been slowly making my way through Babel-17). Fortunately for me, reader and commenter Russell Borogove (russell at estarcion dot com) is taking up some of the slack.  After the jump you can read an email he sent me (reprinted with his permission) about John M. Ford's The Princes of the Air.

Continue reading "The Princes of the Air by John M. Ford"

"Shall We Have a Little Talk?" by Robert Sheckley

[This post is part of an occasional series about linguistics in science fiction.  Fair warning: spoilers throughout.]

This story has been on my to-blog-about list for a long time.  It was suggested to me early in the life of this blog in an email from someone, but unfortunately I was using Yahoo Mail at the time and so don't have a copy of it—you know who you are.  Let's get to the story.

Continue reading ""Shall We Have a Little Talk?" by Robert Sheckley"

This I Believe #12

...that automatic language identification systems, which attempt to determine what language a sample of unknown text is written in, needlessly endanger the sanity and survival of the human race.  In particular, such systems fail to take into account that some knowledge has been wisely hidden away from human eyes for millennia, and that such dangerous knowledge is generally preserved in one of a handful of ancient, disturbingly alien languages.

Continue reading "This I Believe #12"

The Embedding by Ian Watson

[This post is part of an occasional series about linguistics in science fiction.  Fair warnings: this bloomed into a very long post, and there are spoilers throughout.]

Ian Watson's 1973 novel The Embedding is, of all the science fiction about linguistics that I've written about so far, the story that most directly addressed ideas from theoretical linguistics.  Where most SF authors have been content with simple ideas from the shallow end of the field, Watson dives right into the deep end, displaying some familiarity with then-current ideas about Universal Grammar and the phenomenon of center-embeddings in syntax.

Continue reading "The Embedding by Ian Watson"