From: cozzlab@garnet.berkeley.edu ()
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written,sci.lang
Subject: Re: Science Fiction books with linguistic content
Date: 28 Sep 1992 20:03:38 GMT
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
NNTP-Posting-Host: garnet.berkeley.edu

In article <1a27f3INNlgv@agate.berkeley.edu> curtis@cs.berkeley.edu (Curtis Yarvin) writes:
"In article <1a1qqdINN3op@function.mps.ohio-state.edu> edgar@function.mps.ohio-state.edu (Gerald Edgar) writes:
""
""One of my favorites is _Riddley Walker_, by Russel Hoban.
""The whole thing is in the narrator's own dialect, which is a future
""form of English.  It requires concentration to read, but I think
""it is well worth the effort.

[and various people posted, asking, WHY?]

"It was disappointing.  At a glance, Hoban's language seems to
"be nothing more than English with rather queer spelling.  Not
"used to express any concepts that English cannot perfectly well
"express; and even devoid of any interesting linguistic
"concepts....
"
"I'm unsure what the point of such a move is meant to be.  It
"certainly slows the pace of the novel, by making it harder to
"read at the lowest level; perhaps this adds to the book's
"flavor.  

Well, let me try.

The dialect in which the story is told is indeed a future form of English.
It's descended, over several hundred years of near-total illiteracy,
not from American English or BBC English, but from Kentish dialect.
Get off somewhere private, where no one can overhear you, and try reading
some of it aloud, pronouncing it the way it's spelled.  You'll realize
you're reading in a dialect whose sounds are vaguely familiar if you
watch PBS--"some kind of English country dialect" is probably as much
as your ear will tell you.

And, mind you, Hoban has done his homework.  He knows that languages
change according to regular patterns--that, for instance, if you and
your brothers start pronouncing words with "f" that your granddaddy
pronounced with "p", you're going to do it to all the words.  So you
get Germanic (e.g., English) fish, foot, father for Indo-European
(e.g., Latin, which didn't get this soundchange) piscis, pes, pater.
These are called regular soundchanges.  Go on reading in the dialect,
after a while you get used to the soundchanges.  

So why do it that way?

My two cents worth: it helps lead to what you might call the "AHA!"
reaction.  This is what you get when long-standing questions are answered
and/or unrelated facts suddenly fall together.  Examples--highly subjective,
obviously--include my reaction at the end of _Second Foundation,_ when
I suddenly found out where the Second Foundation was and who the First
Speaker was; and the end of Bester's _The Stars My Destination,_ when
I found out at last who had been doing what to whom and with what result.

Read patiently through _Riddley Walker_ and you will find more than one
"AHA!"--where you suddenly put together seemingly unrelated facts and
find that two and two add up to a hell of a lot more than four; or when
you become familiar enough with the soundchanges to realize that this
word you've been reading all along without understanding it must be--
why, that's--AHA!

And it's worth it.  Or at least, it was worth it for me.  There are people
who would not enjoy _Riddley Walker_ even if it were in 20th Century
English, because it's not fast-paced enough for them, or not violent enough,
or maybe even too violent.  Everybody to his own taste, as the old
lady said when she kissed the cow.


Dorothy J. Heydt
UC Berkeley
Disclaimer: This is the Cozzarelli Lab's account, not mine--but I don't
think anybody else ever reads it.
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written,rec.arts.books