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BABEL-17
October 21, 2017
In the Samuel R. Delany
novel "Babel-17"... Described in more
detail in--
The central fantastic premise DELANY
is an artificial human
language named "Babel-17".
There've been a number of such languages
over the years, such as "esperanto", LOGICAL_LANGUAGE
intended to be a medium of international
communication; and "Loglan" (later forked EXCEPTION
as "Lojban"), an attempt at designing a
rigorously logical human language. WHORF_THREE
Babel-17 is a hypothetical
descendant of Loglan (the
17th version of some This then is the SFnal version of the
agency's development Sapir-Whorf-Korzybski-Boroditsky-whoever
effort), a language so principle, and as is typical of SF, the
logical that becoming scale of it's effects are romantically
fluent in it transforms exaggerated beyond reasonable bounds to
your thinking, enabling a make it suitable story furniture, and
degree of insight difficult perhaps to provide hooks to get it to
for a mere English speaker stick in human minds.
to grasp.
The central idea is that human
languages come with built-in
Interestingly-- biases that steer human thought.
Oh yeah: SPOILERS The "stong form" of this principle
would hold that human beings are
Interestingly, Delany's incapable of thinking things without
Babel-17 is a remarkable words to express the thought.
improvement over evolved
natural languages, except And for me the words that come
in one aspect: it lacks to my mind to express that
the I/thou distinction. thought are "Ah, like Babel-17".
It was intentionally crippled These days,
to suppress empathetic thought someone else
to create super-assassins might think of ARRIVAL
superbly competent in all "Arrival".
practical aspects, but with
limited capability of
developing a conscience.
Delany appears to have
always been a supporter
Another possiblity-- not one of a stronger form of
Delany touched on, as I this position. In "The
remember it-- would be that Einstein Intersection"
the language was designed with he quotes Mario Pei:
the reason/emotion dichotomy "Language is thought."
in mind. If you really
believed that "emotion" is In recent years Whorfishness
antithetical to logical has gotten a boost due to
thought (ala every-other Star work of Lera Boroditsky, who
Trek episode) then you might established that Russian
figure an inherently logical speakers can percieve more
language would be improved shades of blue because their
with empathic capability language subdivides what we
suppressed. A mental tool for call "blue" into two
generals to make those Tough different colors.
Choices.
There are more moderate
A few things one might positions that duck this
note about all this: chicken-and-egg debate,
In the real world, and simply take it that
artificial languages language and understanding
like loglan/lojban are related to each other,
have gotten very little and feed on each other.
traction.
I've heard it called "The
The Chomsky notion that Linguistic Theory of
there's some in-built Understanding": the more
natural human linguistic you can say, the more you
capability (largely know, and the more you
undisputed, I think) and know the more you can say.
hence a universal grammar
underlying all languages There's something inane
(not as well established, about trying to decide
I think) would seem to which is primary.
undercut the idea that
language is the enabler
of human thought-- it's Many computer programming
entirely likely that "languages" are designed
human mental capability with the dream of being
constrains language, not something like Babel-17.
vice-versa.
They're commonly advocated on
grounds of pure consistency,
which is supposed to enable
pure logical thought and clean
design to reduce development time
and maintenance costs...
Rarely does anything seem to
deliver on these promises, but no
one ever seems to notice-- they
just go chasing after the next
Larry Wall had the interesting uber-logical ultra-rational fad,
notion that perhaps we should which repeats the same claims.
look at the features of human
languages to develop artificial THE_PERL_AFFAIR
languages on the assumption that
natural languages are aligned Larry Wall's approach was different
with human mental capabilities. from an older idea popular in the
60s and 70s that a computer language
In particular, Larry Wall would be eaiser to use if it
worked with the idea of using *looked* like a sub-set of English.
context to resolve meaning:
perl has a "scalar" and "list" Cobol and SQL are two Perl was
context (much like singular or major englishoid designed
plural) and evaluating an examples which remain to look
expression as one or the other in use despite their like an
has the potential to return critics. amalgam
something entirely different. of things
For example. you might get a SELECT familiar
list of values in plural lastname, firstname to unix
context, and a count of the FROM customers; nerds.
values in scalar context.
Perl also has "pronouns",
in particular the special
scalar "$_" which is the It's the "underlying"
default variable for many variable, hence the
built-in functions. underline: $_.
@capitalized = map{ ucfirst } @words;
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