Tag: language

[Sarek, Vulcan Ambassador to Earth, had become close friends with Amanda Greyson during her work adding his language to the then-fledgling Universal Translator Project.]

…There came a time when the day seemed somehow incomplete if she had not called him and asked him about something, or told him what she was doing. There came a time when it seemed odd not to have dinner together at least one day of the weekend, if not both. There came a time when it seemed quite normal that he should visit her at her house, and have dinner with her, and stay late, talking about everything in the world. The worlds. Now there were truly more than one, and he felt as if he was living both of them. The word lists had started the process: it was the word lists that finally put the finishing touch to it.

“You have mistranslated this,” he said, sitting on her couch and tapping the printout. “I thought we had discussed this. Do you mean to tell me that this revision of the list went to the committee?”

She frowned at him. “I told you it was going to. What’s the problem?”

“This word.” He pointed at arie’mnu. “It does not mean elimination of emotion. That is not what we do, by and large.”

“But all the earlier—”

“If you will pay attention to all the earlier translations, you will perpetuate their mistakes! Nor, what is this, down here, nor is it ‘suppression.’ Control is wrong as well. Mastery, it is mastery. There is a difference!”

She shrugged and sighed. “It’s going to be hard to get it changed now. It’s just one word, we can catch it in the next translation—

“And leave everyone who hears the word for the next ten years thinking that we have no emotions? Do you think we have no emotions?”

“Do you have emotions?” she said, arching her eyebrows at him. He was being teased, and he knew it.

And instantly he knew something else, as well.

“You will have to judge,” he said…and drew her close.

And showed her that he did.

And found that she did, too.

— Spock’s World, Chapter 7

Author’s emphases.

The relationship between written language and political legitimacy stretches deep into antiquity. Just as the earliest literate cultures had invented fables to explain the spellbinding power of the written word, later civilizations would invoke mythologies to assert the bond between writing and the political authority of the state. Ancient Romans attributed the prosperity of their empire in part to the purchase of three divine books by the ancient King Tarquin. According to the story, Tarquin bought the volumes from the Prophetess Sibyl only after spurning her original offer of nine books, six of which she proceeded to burn out of spite. Realizing his mistake, Tarquin quickly came to his senses and snapped up the remaining volumes. Those books would later occupy a place of honor in the Roman forum, providing a tangible bridge from the mythic world to the present, until they were finally destroyed along with the empire during the great sieges. The Assyrians assigned a similar mythological significance to the power of writing in their tale of Zu, a lesser god who steals a divine tablet from the ruling god Enlil and brings it to Assyria. The tablet is said to reveal the fate of the gods, thus granting the Assyrian kingdom a measure of power over the gods themselves.

— Glut, p. 54

Early writing systems—in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and later in Mesoamerica—were pictographic at the outset, employing a picture per word or, in some cases, combining two or more pictures to represent more complex words. These symbols were not related to a particular language and its sounds but might be usable by another language, just as today’s universal road and toilet signs may be comprehensible whether one speaks English, Arabic, or Korean. This was true, also, of the earliest symbols employed in the systems we call Linear A and Linear B.

But though pictographs may be drafted to represent nouns and fairly low numerals (and were therefore admirably suited to the work of ancient accountants, who could confine themselves to counting the number of chariots and javelins in the armory and the number of horses in the stables), they are less serviceable in representing the multiple forms of a verb and begin to disintegrate altogether under the weight of such linguistic complications as subordinate clauses. So these ancient systems soon added other, more arbitrary signs to represent more accurately the actual labyrinth of language, eventually introducing even symbols that represented some of the syllabic sounds of a specific language. The final network of symbols was a combination of pictographs, considerably stylized and simplified by generations of scribes, and other complicated signs and syllabaries. These hundreds, sometimes thousands, of separate symbols could be mastered only by those who had years to devote to the study. Such cumbersome writing systems became the fuel on which their civilizations ran—the oil of the ancient world. If you participated in ownership, you had it made in the shade. Otherwise, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss, the main function of such systems was "to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings"—literacy as oppression.

Though we don’t know who thought of it, we know where the idea of an alphabet came from: the Levant, that small corridor of coast running from Syria to the Sinai and encompassing Lebanon and Israel-Palestine. The first alphabet was, in the main, a borrowing from the underutilized syllabaries hidden away in the vast network of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Like most inventions, this one probably evolved in several stages and was helped along by more than one inventor. But by the middle of the second millennium [B.C.E.], we find a language being written on stones in the Sinai that is neither pictographic nor strictly syllabic, the alphabetic precursor of written Phoenician-Canaanite-Hebrew. This primitive alphabet came to the Greeks probably by way of Phoenician merchants, whose welcome ships, loaded with metals and such exotic materials as the precious red-purple cloth of Phoenicia, plied the whole of the Mediterranean littoral.

The Greeks added vowels to the Semitic consonants and set this list of pronunciation symbols in an unvarying order, giving us the alphabet (alpha and beta being the first two letters), on which the Romans would subsequently make their own revision—and so bestow on us the very symbols in which [this web site is] printed.

— Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea, pp. 55-57

I have substituted the words “web site” in place of the author’s “book”.