Author: katenepveu

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McWhorter, John: Power of Babel, The: A Natural History of Language

John McWhorter’s The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language is a lively, discursive, readable look at how language changes. I particularly recommend it to SF and fantasy novelists looking for worldbuilding information, but think it has a lot to offer any reader who just thinks language is cool.

As the subtitle suggests, McWhorter is looking at language change in ways very similar to those of biologists looking at the evolution of life—though he takes pains to stress both the limits of the analogy and the lack of a “goal” for language change. He starts with the first language and the small-scale mechanisms that turned it into thousands and thousands of languages, such as sound changes and the creation of grammatical rules. He then looks at what happens when different languages encounter each other (with a side trip into language, dialect, and how the line between the two is essentially cultural), or when languages develop mostly in isolation, or when they get enshrined as standard written forms. He concludes with a look at language extinction and the prospects for language revival movements (with an epilogue on the claims that words from the world’s first language have been reconstructed).

The book is full of fascinating tidbits about world languages: some languages have sixteen genders for nouns; or lack verb tenses; or require you, as a matter of grammar, to specify how you know something; or change initial consonants of nouns based on the preceding pronoun. The twenty most popular languages are spoken by a full ninety-six percent of the world’s population. One Australian language, Jingulu, has just three verbs: come, go, and do. And so on.

The book is also full of digressions (usually on pop culture, a few of which have already dated poorly) and other authorial asides, which I found largely entertaining, but I can see that your tolerance may vary. For instance, in discussing the transition between treating Italian as a village dialect of Latin and a noble language in its own right, he notes that

Dante, afflicted with that queer medieval southern European malady called courtly love, in 1293 dedicated a volume of poems to his adored Beatrice, who combined two traits unusual in a dedicatee of love poetry—namely, having never been touched in by the author at any point in her life and being dead.

Or in discussing bits of leftover “junk” from prior days, he observes:

It’s like Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown is a bald child. Did you ever think about that? Charlie Brown is an eight-year-old who has virtually no hair on his head! . . .

The reason Charlie Brown has no hair is that, until roughly the mid-1960s, in comics and cartoons baldness was a kind of established signifier for dopiness—when someone drew a guy as bald, it meant something specific. . . .

 . . . By the end of the run in 1999, Peanuts was only faintly recognizable as the strip that had debuted in 1950. But throughout, Charlie Brown remained bald, as a reflexive remnant of an earlier meaning now bleached out and lost. Languages are chock-full of Charlie Brown heads.8

8. Never again will that sequence of words be used in the English language.

(As that excerpt suggests, there are a good number of footnotes, though many of them are in the more traditional vein of exceptions or providing additional information.)

I skimmed this quickly, because I’d already listened to an audio lecture series taught by McWhorter. If you also have already listened to that, I don’t think you need to read the book: the content is very similar, and indeed the lecture series covers a few more topics. I slightly prefer the lecture series because I have a very difficult time “hearing” things on the page, and thus all the discussion of pronunciations in the book go right past me, though I did find the lecture series dragged slightly in the middle. In either format, though, I very much enjoyed the content and highly recommend it.

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Christian, David: Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History

In Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, David Christian attempts to describe nothing less than the complete history of the universe, from the Big Bang up to the present day (and even beyond). While I am not convinced that the book needed to cover quite that broad a time span, I found it a useful look at the large-scale forces that have shaped the world as we know it today.

The first three chapters cover the inanimate universe, from the origins of the universe through the formation of the Earth. These are the chapters that I am least sure are necessary: not only are they radically different from the chapters that follow, but they include some of the most difficult material. And though Christian is not a physicist, he seems to have internalized enough physics concepts to toss off, just in passing, a couple of remarks that sent me running to Chad to ask, “why didn’t anyone ever tell me this?!” Which somewhat disrupts the reading process.

(They were, for the curious, that photons and electrons interact (I know that photons and atoms interact, but no-one ever mentions electrons), and that energy has mass (I know that energy and mass are two forms of the same thing, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are also each other at the same time; after all, photons don’t have mass). Chad is working on a popular science book that frequently uses photons as examples, so maybe I’m just sensitive to photons at the moment.)

So I think I would have been just as happy with a book that told the history of life on Earth, though I freely admit my species-centered bias here: what most interested me was the look, from a very wide perspective, at the way human societies have developed over time. And here I think the book is both clear and illuminating. It explores the factors that result in the crossing of different thresholds of complexity, with an emphasis on the networks of exchange in which information is shared. It takes an emphatically global perspective, particularly arguing for the importance of India and China up to the Industrial Revolution. And it does its best to avoid describing pretty much anything about humanity as though it were inevitable or a simple straight path of progress all the way. (I should note, though, that my background in history is so weak as to be nearly nonexistent, and so I’m relying on my general-purpose filters to catch problematic attitudes.)

The comparison that probably comes to mind immediately is Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. While I haven’t read that book, my impression is that people interested in the subject matter of Diamond’s book, at least, might well want to take a look at Maps of Time. At about 500 pages, plus endnotes, it’s a substantial read, but generally accessible. I didn’t internalize as much as I would have liked, but that’s partly because I was reading it in chunks over a long period of time. I’ll be acquiring a copy for our own library (I read a copy borrowed from Union College) and look forward to having it on the shelf for reference and re-reading.

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Baker, Kage: (01-02) In the Garden of Iden; Sky Coyote

Because I don’t have enough other series in progress, I decided to pick up Kage Baker’s Company books. I’d read the first two back when they came out and liked them, but put them aside to see if she actually finished the series and in good fashion. Well, she did, and remarkably rapidly too: eight volumes in ten years, with two short story collections (plus her fantasy novel The Anvil of the World and another collection that I haven’t read yet). The general consensus seems to be that the series concludes well, and they seemed to be about right for my current levels of energy and time: absorbing and with a good overall mystery to pull me forward, but not too dense or dark.

Judging by my re-read of the first two, this seems to have been a good call. The series opens with In the Garden of Iden, which is told in first-person retrospective by Mendoza, a botanist for the Company. She describes the setup very well in the first chapter, which is online and which I recommend. But the short version is that the Company, Dr. Zeus, invented time travel (backwards only) and a form of immortality in the 24th century [*]. It established bases in the distant past, turned a lot of children into immortals, and set them to work through time collecting genetic material, art, and other things that would not interfere with recorded history but that would generate fabulous profits when “rediscovered” in the 24th century. But when all those patient immortals catch up to the 24th century, what then?

[*] I suspect Baker may have had a better idea about the timeline later, but that’s a minor point.

Well, eventually the series will get there, but it starts in Spain in the 15th century, where Mendoza is rescued from the Inquisition and turned into an immortal. She chooses botany as a field because she hopes to avoid assignments with mortals; instead, she’s sent to England for what is supposed to be a quiet assignment collecting plant specimens. Except she’s been sent in as part of a team with Spanish cover identities during the brief reign of Mary I, a.k.a. Bloody Mary, and there’s this fascinating mortal man with emphatic religious views . . . (Hence the deliberate reference in the title, though the garden in question did belong to descendants of an actual historical figure named Alexander Iden.)

I liked this book a lot for Mendoza’s voice, her mix of cynicism and passion, and the effective way that Baker slides into the explicitly retrospective parts of Mendoza’s narration to leaven the teenage perspective. I’m unable to evaluate the accuracy of the historical portions, though I believe I’ve heard good things about it. Like the next book, I think the plot is a bit back-loaded, but the characters and narration carried me through.

The next book, Sky Coyote, is narrated by Joseph, who recruited Mendoza and was the leader of her first mission. It’s 1700 and the Company is going to whisk an entire village of Chumash, a California tribe, off for preservation (genetic material stored, cultural information sucked dry, and complete environmental samples taken). Joseph is to play Sky Coyote, the trickster god, and convince the village to agree; and Mendoza is back as a botanist.

Joseph’s narration, also first-person retrospective, is great fun and enlightening. Besides his healthy appreciation for the absurd (see this excerpt online), he knows a lot more about the Company because he was recruited in 20,000 BC or so. There are hints about the Company’s dark past and not-so-light present, and the first mention of the Silence, the date in 2355 after which the Company’s operatives in the past are given no information. The meat of the book, to me, is developing Joseph and the Company. The plot about the Chumash felt rather conflict-free until late, and I couldn’t help but be conscious of its blatant wish-fulfillment aspect—though, to be fair, I think the book is also conscious of it and makes an effort to acknowledge that though these villagers will not see the arrival of the Spanish, it’s still an ending for them and linked to a larger ending for the American Indian tribes. Also, the book is having such fun in smashing stereotypes that I couldn’t help enjoy it. As a Company immortal sums up the Chumash,

“They’re hunter-gatherers but also industrialists, if you can imagine that. They produce a wide variety of objects manufactured specifically for trade with other local tribes. They’ve developed a monetary system that other tribes have had to adopt in order to do business with them, but they’ve retained sole rights to the manufacture of the shell money they use. . . . These people have saunas. They have municipal centers for organized sporting events. They have ballet. They have stand-up comedians. I think most people would define that as the Good Life.”

“Sound like stereotypical Californians to me.”

Or, as one of the Company’s investors from the 24th century puts it,

“These Indians aren’t like the Hopi or the Navajo. Those were clean, peaceful Indians with an advanced society and beautiful mythology. They farmed and they built houses the way we do. These Chumash are different. They’re dirty-minded, lazy, pleasure-loving Indians.”

(The, err, differences in worldview between the historically-recruited immortals and the 24th-century members of the Company—mortal and immortal—is another source of conflict in the novel and presumably in the rest of the series.)

Anyway, so far so good, and I’m looking forward to the next book, which returns to Mendoza’s point of view.

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Chesterton, G.K.: Man Who Was Thursday, The

I am probably the only person in the world who doesn’t know this, but G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday is an allegory. It is not a mystery, or a thriller, or a comedy (in the genre senses of the words). It literally does not make sense on any level other than the allegorical.

It is important to know this, because otherwise you might be like me and start listening to an unabridged reading recorded off BBC7 under the vague impression that it’s a thriller. And then things start making less and less sense, and you get annoyed, and you decide to just skim the book rather than spend more time with people who aren’t very smart, and then boom! suddenly you’ve got allegory all over you.

Which is a terrible thing to happen when you’re not expecting it.

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Kirstein, Rosemary: (04) The Language of Power

Rosemary Kirstein’s The Language of Power is the fourth and most recent Steerswoman book. This time, the subject is a closer look at the wizards, as Rowan investigates an anomaly: a wizard who, at a significant point in history, changed overnight from capricious to kindly, and drew the attention of a Steerswoman—but died before she arrived.

This starts a little slowly, but kicks into high gear roughly halfway through with the first of three wonderfully tense sequences in a row, and culminates in another revelation that opens the world up even further for the reader. (However, I do not recommend reading this as a substitute for a nap, lest you completely misunderstand said revelation the way I did initially.) The book also contains the fine, compassionate characterization that I have come to expect, including another detailed look at a town and its social dynamics.

A spoiler post follows.

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Highsmith, Patricia: Strangers on a Train (radio, text)

I listened to Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train as a one-hour BBC radio play (currently available for download at M Radio), and enjoyed it up until the end, which prompted me to get the book out of the library. The book is better, in my opinion, but hard for me to assess objectively because much of my reaction to it is in relation to the radio play, about which more in a spoiler post.

Anyway, the premise of Strangers on a Train is brilliant in its simplicity: two strangers meet on a long-distance train. [*] They have dinner and get drunk in a private compartment, and find that they have something in common: their lives would be much improved by the death of one person. One proposes that they should swap murders, but the other doesn’t take him seriously until their one person turns up murdered. Then what?

[*] The book is copyright 1950, which reminds me of John M. Ford’s comments in From the End of the Twentieth Century about how certain plots are no longer possible with the demise of trains as a major form of transportation.

The BBC version is a very tense listen, if a bit compressed, and kept me metaphorically on the edge of my seat until the end. (It’s metaphorically only because I was driving.) But the ending surprised me in one aspect and puzzled me in another. And the play also had a very peculiar view of love—at one point, one character says to another, “I don’t love you because you’re good, I love you because you’re mine.” Which, when it’s murder at issue . . . ? So I was curious if these aspects were originally part of the book.

The book, it turns out, has a different ending. (And the Hitchcock movie has a third.) I much prefer the book’s ending, but as I said, I can’t really see it in isolation, because I was reading it in dialogue with the radio play (and to a much lesser extent, the movie, which I have not seen). I can say that the first half really pulled me in, but the second half seemed to drag and the head-hopping omniscient became distracting—which is especially unfortunate given the complex and claustrophobic psychological portraits the book is built around. I certainly recommend it to those who like their thrillers dark, twisty, and internal.

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Torkells, Erik: A Stingray Bit My Nipple!: True Stories from Real Travelers

I requested a review copy of A Stingray Bit My Nipple!: True Stories from Real Travelers, by Erik Torkells and the readers of Budget Travel, from LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program. (This review is, alas, not early; the book was published in April.)

This paperback consists of single-page anecdotes from readers, mostly of international travel, and often accompanied by their pictures. Because I find it very difficult to turn off my analytic tendencies, I found myself wanting to categorize the stories: weird food, mistranslations, sexual boundaries, toilets, animals . . . (I also found it difficult to avoid forming opinions about some of the people recounting these anecdotes, which is perhaps less than charitable of me, but probably more understandable than wanting to chart the distribution of story types. I will note on the evidence of the pictures, the readers of Budget Travel are quite overwhelmingly white.)

There are some good stories and pictures in here. I particularly like the pig drinking a beer and the camel drinking a Coke—they both look very happy about it. I envy the woman who bathed in a mineral spring pool with flames dancing on the surface. And I laughed at the hand-painted sign on St. John that reads, “Tourist Info: You Are Lost” (they were, too) and the guy who bought a T-shirt that accurately labeled him, in Swahili, as a white boy tourist.

This is a good book for flipping through, either to get a feel for whether you want it or someone you know would, or just to browse on occasion. Reading it straight through, the way I did, is probably not the best way to experience it.

A minor note: the book’s pages are thickish, and I found it easy to skip pages without realizing it.

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Banks, Iain M.: (04) Excession

I skipped to Excession in my intermittent re-read of Iain M. Banks’ Culture books, one sunny weekend day when I wanted to be outside and I saw a random mention of a black-body object, which always reminds me of this excellent back cover copy on my edition:

Two and a half millennia ago, the artifact appeared in a remote corner of space, beside a trillion-year-old dying sun from a different universe. It was a perfect black-body sphere, and it did nothing. Then it disappeared. Now it is back.

I’d remembered Excession as a fun book and the one most about the Culture proper, at least until Look to Windward. I’d forgotten that it involves Dajeil Gelian, a woman who deliberately remains nine months pregnant for forty years. So, as you might imagine, when I opened up the book in my sixth month of pregnancy and encountered her, I blurted out, “The hell you say!”

A moment’s reflection told me that the same level of bioengineering that let her halt her pregnancy must also give her the ability to ameliorate all the many physical side-effects of being pregnant, which allowed me to just barely suspend my disbelief. Still, as Chad put it when I mentioned this to him, the Culture, which has pregnancies, is written by Iain M. Banks. In contrast, the Vorkosigan universe, which is much less technologically advanced, nevertheless has uterine replicators, and is written by Lois McMaster Bujold.

Anyway. The Excession appears and plots immediately spring up around it, which end up affecting a number of vastly self-absorbed individuals such as Dajeil. The wide-angle stuff is fine, just as entertaining as I remembered, with the minor exception that the Affront (Banks really has a flair for names) is maybe too similar to the society in The Player of Games. But the small-scale stuff ends up being mostly about Dajeil, and because I can’t get a handle on her, it ends up falling flat for me. I first read this in college, and then I barely thought about whether she made sense. Now, I spent a lot of time trying to construct any sympathetic or sensible model of her in my head, and I just couldn’t do it.

So, not as successful a book for me on this re-read, but I am now in the mood for the rest of the series, if only my free time would cooperate.

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