Week 10: Babel 17, by Samuel Delaney (5)

 This book is hilarious when you stop and think about it. The plot is less a story and more a complete dissection of communication and it's plasticity, but it's a book that's carrying the discussion.

Thinking about it, the sparsity of Babel-17 is probably a deliberate echo of the apparent epigrammatic language itself. Like, we get only glimpses of the geo-galactic-socio-political background, and absolutely nothing about the 'Invaders' beyond all the connotations behind the word itself. Language is really fascinating, especially when you need to describe it and its mechanics, because it's like having a mirror try and reflect itself, which gets complicated. Too complicated for the average level of linguistic understanding most people have, which is sad, because the more you understand it, the less you have to use. It compacts on itself even as the meaning behind it expands - paradoxically logical. 

English is pretty much one of the most complicated to learn languages in the world, despite what we probably think as native speakers. It has extreme kleptomaniac tendencies where it takes from other languages what it lacks within itself, a lot like how Rydra paves over the problems of the Babel-17 self-spy program. Which is also to say that language consistently lacks. How do you concisely convey a series of impressions? The connotations and context of a concept? Not easily, and often not without others to absorb and accept the change too. 

Language is communication after all - it's no wonder so many characters throughout Babel-17 profess to be lonely, when we look at the gaps between cultures, individuals, and ideas schismed by next to no communication, and communication rife with cognitive bias. Ideas, cultures, and individuals are constantly changing, and so language is always changing and evolving to match. A good example is how internet lingo and jargon have completely warped communications - we speak in hyper-condensed reference to in-jokes that change literally by the day, and now 'lol' and 'yeet' are actual words unto themselves, with a cemented legacy of use already almost a decade or more old. And even the grammar itself has shifted to reflect such- you can when something is written online because it often lacks punctuation and capitalization, unless you have Something Of Great Importance to emphasize, or you want to mock something (oR iF yOu WaNt To MoCk SoMeThInG).

It's probably a really fun time to be a linguist, in all honesty.

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