Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid
Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid
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.