Category: Book reviews

China Miéville is a socialist who hates Tolkien. He’s also a little scary looking. His books are worth reading, though, even if you’re a reactionary who loves Tolkien.

I’ve read two of his novels, The City and the City and Embassytown. The former has an intriguing setting (two cities that share the same space, where residents of one have to “unsee” residents of the other) but the plot is a fairly ordinary detective/noir story. Embassytown is more exciting, especially for linguists.

Embassytown is an enclave of mostly human foreigners on a distant planet populated by giant insect-like creatures with two mouths. Their language, which is called Language (!), requires two words to be spoken simultaneously. In addition, the creatures (the Ariekei or “hosts”) are not capable of understanding speech unless it has a mind behind it – so you can program a computer to speak Language to them, but they won’t understand it. Many of them also seem unaware that the noises humans make amongst themselves are a kind of language.

The system humans ultimately developed in order to communicate in Language was to breed identical twins who are kept perfectly in sync. They spend their lives as Ambassadors and go by one name, with half of the name applying to each of them: CalVin, for example, or LuCy. One of them speaks as the top mouth, the other as the lower one.

The native speakers of Language, the Ariekei, also lack the ability to lie. This includes not being able to use similes unless they have literally occurred in the real world: in order for anyone to be able to say, “You look like the cat that ate the canary,” an actual cat would have to have been seen eating an actual canary on at least one occasion.  This gets us into the topic of why their language is called merely “Language” — it connects to their thoughts in such a direct, primal way that they don’t have enough distance from it to use it untruthfully, or indeed to call a thing by another name. If you are literally not able to say that the sky is yellow, for example, you probably also lack the capacity to learn another word for blue, like “azul.” If in your childhood you are told “This is a table,” and later in life you begin to call it “ein Tisch,” are you, in some sense, lying? Speaking another language and lying both require you to put some distance between things and the words that refer to them.

Because of the way they experience language, hearing lies is extremely exciting for them. The Ambassadors periodically hold a Festival of Lies where they stand in front of an audience of Ariekei and say whatever manifest untruths come to mind. “The Hosts grew boisterous in a fashion I’d never seen, then to my alarm seemed intoxicated, literally lie-drunk,” says the human narrator (and one-time star of an Ariekene simile that had to be staged so it could be spoken).

The intoxicating effect of lies on the hosts foreshadows the cataclysm that occurs when an unusual ambassador couple with a different kind of mental connection arrives on the planet and begins to speak to them. It is a gripping (and pleasantly disturbing) story with lots of food for thought.

Ursula K. Le Guin called this book “A fully achieved work of art,” and if that’s not enough to recommend it, I don’t know what is.

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s permission.” (Matthew 10:29)

In the not-too-distant future, an observatory in Puerto Rico picks up some chorales broadcast from the Alpha Centauri system. In response, a party of Jesuits and lay nerds sets out with the latest space travel technology (something to do with asteroid mining) to find and explore the singers’ planet, landing there in the Earth year 2039. The planet, Rakhat (did Russell think up this planet’s name while looking at a hat rack?) turns out to be not so very different from earth, with a human-friendly atmosphere and similar categories of plant and animal species. But unlike Earth, it has two species with language – predators and their prey who both evolved to stand upright, speak, and make stuff.

The vegetarian Runa speak Ruanja, a melodious language with good vowel/consonant balance. Their pronouns reflect their herd mentality: Runa refer to themselves only as “someone” or “this one” (“Someone’s heart is glad”, “This one is called Chaypas”) and have two forms of the first person plural: “One is exclusive of the person addressed. It means we-but-not-you. The other is we-and-you-also. If a Runao uses the inclusive we, you may be sure it is significant and you may rejoice in a friendship.”

Spatial concepts determine much of their grammar. The Jesuit star linguist and another team member spend their days pinning down the rules, for example that there are two declensions: one for things that occupy space and can be seen, the other for things that are inherently nonvisual (e.g. concepts such as “hope” or “affection”) or for things that occupy space but are not currently visible. If your friend is where you can see him, he takes the first declension for items that occupy space. Once he leaves, however, he becomes subject to the second declension, which leads one character to wonder “if a blind Runao would always use the nonvisual declension”. (I think I can answer that, actually – No, because in general the blind talk the same way people around them do. They don’t scrupulously avoid visual language. A blind Runao would change your visual/nonvisual declension based on whether you were nearby or not.) Words that seem to refer to objects often turn out to denote the spaces created by those objects, such as the empty space inside a vase. In addition, “there is a word for the space we would call a room but no words for wall or for ceiling or floor, as such. It’s the function of an object that is named. You can refer to a ceiling, for example, by noting that the rain is prevented from taking place in this space because of it.” I find this really implausible – creatures who build houses together are likely to have simple words for the component parts – but who’s to say how weird an alien language might be?

Russell worked out Ruanja in great detail; readers can suppose she built up a substantial file on its grammar and vocab, only some of which made it into the book. She gives us a taste of the carnivores’ language, K’San, but not as much detail. What stands out about K’San is that it has a lot of glottal stops, and its grammar is fiendishly difficult (for English speakers, at any rate).

The Sparrow includes some stomach-turning sexual violence, the reason for which is only fully explained in the sequel, Children of God. (It hinges on a miscommunication between two speakers who overestimate their mutual understanding.) Apart from language issues, these books explore faith and doubt, friendship and love, the ethics of eating, and of course all the usual sci-fi space travel questions. With minor quibbles (e.g. the dialogue can be too cute at times) I enjoyed both of them.

My first blog post!

Went to see the film Arrival the other day and was predictably gratified by the centrality of a linguist/translator. A pretty good film, but if emotional violin music and soft-focus footage of babies make you cry, be prepared to exit the theater wiping your eyes and sniffling, to the alarm of those cinema-goers waiting to replace you.

After leaving Arrival and drying my face, I thought about other stories featuring communication between humans and aliens. There happen to be three on my shelf, so I’m going to review all three, and here’s the first:

Eifelheim by Michael Flynn

A spaceship crashes in the forest near a small German village in 1348. The aliens inside are essentially large, highly evolved grasshoppers. Some are technicians, some scientific explorers, others tourists, and they are lost. The villagers are a lovable lot who are just dying to demonstrate to you, the reader, that the Middle Ages were not nearly as bad as everyone likes to think.  The parish priest, in particular, is really a super nice guy and – importantly for someone about to make first contact with an advanced alien race – superbly well-educated for a random pastor in the sticks.

By the time Dietrich, the priest, gets a chance to converse with them, the aliens have already developed a translation program. It turns out they have been sneaking into the village to plant audio/visual bugs in strategic locations so their translation software can record and analyze the villagers’ speech.

The little speaker box they use as an interpreter is, at least for me, the most delightful thing in this book. Dietrich initially believes it contains a brownie or sprite (a “Heinzelmännchen”), and although the aliens explain that “There is no small man. The box himself speaks,” the name sticks.

As one would expect from the circumstances, the Heinzelmännchen communicates imperfectly. Dietrich has to help fill in gaps in its vocabulary. Its lack of intonation means questions often end in  ” – question”. Its phrasing is awkward and marked by literal translations from German into English. It doesn’t “translate”, it “oversets” (übersetzen); it says “Greet God” (Grüß Gott) for hello and “it gives” (es gibt) for “there is”; it asks “What means ‘tongue’?” instead of “What does tongue mean?”

If you think about this too hard it will start to blow your mind because the phrasing that makes the machine sound a little off is actually correct in the language the machine is supposedly translating into. But somehow it works. I think Flynn’s decision here is designed to give us two impressions: 1. Hasty machine translation is awkward. 2. We’re in Germany!  German words and phrases also pepper the speech of the human characters, but in such a way that it feels more like local color than awkwardness. I don’t think Eifelheim has been translated into German, but anyone who tried would find it a challenge to reproduce these effects. My suggestion would be to hit the Middle High German textbooks and find some obsolete grammar and syntax for the machine to use (and some quaint phrases for the humans). This would give readers the impression that: 1. Hasty machine translation is awkward. 2. We’re in the Middle Ages! Which is probably about the best you can do.

The book also explores the larger problems of communication between creatures with different cultures and technology. “The fluid that drives our ship jumped in an unexpected manner and ran down the wrong mill race,” says one alien. “Certain items burned. Ach! I do not have the words to say it; nor you the words to hear.” The aliens are not sure what to make of Dietrich’s pronouncements at the intersection of philosophy, theology and science. To his speculation about whether there is “a fifth element through which the stars move,” or whether “heavenly motions can be explained by the same elements we find in the sublunar regions,” the alien can only respond, “You are either very wise, or very ignorant.” The humans talk eagerly of Jesus Christ, the lord who came from the sky, took their form, and taught them things, and will return someday – does this mean he is an incredibly advanced alien, a being of pure energy who knows the art of inhabiting a foreign body? If so, wonder the stranded grasshoppers, could he save them? He can save anyone, say the humans, but what exactly does that mean? And inquiries about when precisely he is coming back are answered with frustrating vagueness. True mutual understanding requires much more than grammar and vocabulary.

Eifelheim hits a sweet spot for anyone who likes German, translation, medieval history, philosophy, Catholicism, and science fiction (in other words, me), but you needn’t be a specialist in any of these to enjoy it. A well-researched, funny, touching, and ultimately heartbreaking adventure, it deserves to be more widely known.