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Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

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tranquil islands of San Serif as the ideal holiday resort. A lot of people were completely fooled). In France,<br />

the same tradition exists, but there, you aren't an April Fool, you are a "Poisson d'Avril"—an April fish (or,<br />

more literally, fish of April). How do you translate such a phrase? Literally or idiomatically? And how is a<br />

machine supposed to handle such an idiom? You can't legislate for that. I feel that the regular grammar<br />

and structure of Esperanto is a blind alley.<br />

Besides, how do you translate nonsense? Is Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky written in English? Probably<br />

not. However it is certainly possible to argue that only a native English speaker can understand it. <strong>The</strong>re<br />

is a frisson to the nonsense words that Carroll made up that is purely English in tone. Versions of the<br />

Jabberwocky in other languages simply don't work. Damon Knight remarked of a German translation he<br />

had seen that it was "merely rather sad".<br />

Problems of translation are central to A Rose for Ecclesiastes by Roger Zelazny where a poet-linguist<br />

from Earth attempts to meet the few remaining Martians and translate their holy texts. Translation from<br />

the Martian language also arises in Omnilingual by H. Beam Piper, though this time the Martians are all<br />

long dead and the Earth archaeologists feel the task is hopeless. <strong>The</strong> protagonist eventually finds the key<br />

to the language in a Martian periodic table of the elements—after all, science is constant across the<br />

universe isn't it? <strong>The</strong> periodic table becomes a Rosetta Stone for Mars.<br />

Science may be one constant, but it is possible that other things cross the species boundary as well. In<br />

First Contact Murray Leinster speculates that humans and aliens will cross the cultural divide by telling<br />

each other dirty jokes.<br />

It makes you wonder if there are any language constants as well. It has been said that if the culture<br />

does not have a word for it, you can't do it or conceive of the possibility of it. In 1984 George Orwell<br />

postulated Newspeak—a language designed so that certain thoughts would be unthinkable in it. <strong>The</strong><br />

rulers saw it as a perfect tool for keeping political power by preventing thoughts of opposition. Similarly<br />

Yevgeny Zamiatin in We (a thematic precursor to 1984) introduces a mechanical language that<br />

emphasises conformity and the regimentation of society. Gene Wolfe returned to this theme in <strong>The</strong><br />

Citadel of the Autarch where he expressed a tale of the individual spirit entirely in patriotic slogans.<br />

(All of the volumes that make up <strong>The</strong> Book of the New Sun have a lot of fun with linguistic invention).<br />

So where do words come from? As a child I made up a secret language. Most children seem to pass<br />

through this phase. One of my toys at the time was an old bottle full of buttons and beads. <strong>The</strong>y were<br />

bright and shiny and I called the toy my bottle of abrogating glue. My parents were a bit bemused by this<br />

but they went along with it and abrogating glue it was. Many years later, both my parents and I were<br />

rather astonished to discover that "abrogating" was a real word with a real meaning. Had I heard it<br />

somewhere or had I made it up out of whole cloth? To this day I do not know.<br />

Another word I made up had a more obvious derivation. I had been musing about the word "Yes" and<br />

the colloquial word "Arrr" which comes from the deep South of England and which means "Yes". In my<br />

mind I combined the two words into a portmanteau word and for months, whenever anybody asked me<br />

a question which required an affirmative reply, I would say "Arse", much to the amusement of whoever<br />

was listening (it is not a word you expect to hear from a six year old). Eventually my parents couldn't<br />

stand it any more and forbade me to say it.<br />

I don't know whether these experiences match the true evolution of languages, but consider all the loan<br />

words we have in English and how we have adapted them. English is a most bastardised mixture of<br />

words. We have borrowed terms from almost every language you can think of (what is the common<br />

English word borrowed from the Aztec? Chocolate; derived from Chocolatl).<br />

I remember my Latin master yelling at me:<br />

"What is the common English word derived from ‘tergum'?" He was red in the face and sweating.<br />

"Tergum," he yelled. "Tergum."<br />

<strong>The</strong> class stared at him blankly.

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