Despite being far from the only, or even the best, novel, novella, or short story about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Samuel R. Delaney's Babel-17 (Amazon Affiliate link as usual) is famous as "that novel about the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis". But, there is a bit more to it than that.
The opening of the story is highly reminiscent of the much later Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang: a language expert who has previously done work for the military is recruited by a general to decipher some alien communication and tells him that it's impossible without more data:
"Unknown languages have been deciphered without translations, Linear B and Hittite for example. But if I'm going to get further with Babel-17, I'll have to know a great deal more. [...] General, I have to know everything you know about Babel-17; where you got it, when, under what circumstances, anything that might give me a clue to the subject matter. [...] You gave me ten pages of double-spaced typewritten garble with the code name Babel-17 and asked me what it meant. With just that, I can't tell you. With more, I might. It's that simple."
In fact, Rydra Wong is in a much worse position with Babel-17 than historical linguists were with Hittite and Linear B--in each of those cases, although we lacked an equivalent to the Egyptian Rosetta Stone, at least we had the context of history and knowledge of other possible related languages to provide some direction in decoding their texts. Or at least, she would be... if she weren't psychic. Delaney neatly sidesteps the entire problem of actually deciphering and learning the language (excusable, because that's not actually the point of the story) by giving Rydra Wong supernatural powers to extract meaning that just isn't actually there. Some biotechnobabble explanation is given for how her ability to read minds works, but it fails to extend to the fact that she is said to have a history of being able to look ant unbroken code and suddenly intuit what it was meant to say--an ability which she also employs to start cracking Babel-17, and which kind of undercuts the otherwise entirely reasonable claim that she needs more data to actually decipher it! She might as well be a D&D character casting Comprehend Languages.
Once Rydra learns Babel-17, we get only minimal descriptions of how it actually works as a language. It appears to be a sort of oligosynthetic speedtalk and taxonomic language, in which the form of every word encodes its definition, a feature which supposedly promotes clearer thinking and deep understanding of everything in the world that it can name. Additionally, it has no word for "I", which is supposed to imply that thinking in Babel-17 prevents someone from acting with self-awareness, with the explanation that
"Butcher, there are certain ideas which have words for them. If you don't know the words, you can't know the ideas."
Which is, well... crap. After all, we coin new words after conceiving of the new words for, so clearly having the words for ideas is not necessary to having the ideas; rarely do we coin new words and then go looking for novel ideas to attach to them! When Rydra talks about language throughout the rest of the book, it's a mixture of reasonable stuff and linguistic technobabble. For example, as a weaker form of the previous statement, Rydra also explains that
"If you have the right words, it saves a lot of time and makes things easier."
which is absolutely true! That's why technical jargons exist. But this gets taken to a ridiculous science-fiction extreme in the description of another alien language: Supposedly, Çiribians can describe the complete schematics of an industrial facility with novel features that they want to duplicate in nine short words, which is... implausible, to say the least. Why would anyone have pre-existing short words to describe previously-unknown technological innovations developed by other aliens?
Then, we have this:
"Mocky, when you learn another tongue, you learn the way another people see the world, the universe."
Also very true! This is one of the many arguments for why documenting and trying to save dying languages is such important work--every time a language dies, the worldview communicated through that language, and the cultural knowledge encoded in that language, dies with it. But then...
"Well, most textbooks say language is a mechanism for expressing thought, Mocky. But language is thought. Thought is information given form. The form is language."
I was a little surprised that Delaney-via-Rydra would even provide the hedge of "most textbooks say..." there, because for a long time real-world textbooks would've agreed with Rydra, and this is a commonly-assumed position among linguistically-naïve people. The fact is, many people do experience their own thoughts in the form of language, and are shocked and disbelieving when they discover that not everyone else shares this experience! Yet, such people do exist, despite the existence of a good bit of 20th century academic literature claiming that they can't possibly--literature which I spent a mid-term paper in my grad school Intro to Semantics class tearing to shreds. So, there is a certain type of person who would've read that line in the book, and just like me, immediately thought "Bull! Crap! Rydra!"--but if you are not that sort of person, just take it from me that language is not identical with thought.
But let's get to the actual point: that learning Babel-17 turns a person into an agent of the enemy. There is actually a teeny-tiny kernel of truth underlying this conceit: multilingual people do often tend to develop different personalities when using different languages. This is a multilayered effect--partially, it can probably be attributed to the fact that different languages require that you pay attention to different things. Thus, Russian speakers are, on average, better at distinguishing shades of blue than English speakers, and Guugu Yimithirr speakers are better at absolute orientation than English speakers, because the vocabulary choices and grammatical categories required by their languages require them to pay more attention to those things, and thus develop the skills; and its not too hard to imagine that shifting aspects of your attention when shifting between languages could have some impact on personality. But a much, much larger component of the effect is simply an extension of the fact that we all have varying presentations of ourselves in different social groups, and languages are strongly associated with the social groups among whom we learned them and with whom we used them, and with the purposes we have in communicating with those groups. Rydra did not learn Babel-17 from "native speakers", in the presence of the enemy, so in reality, there is no particular reason to believe that just learning the language from decoding intercepted communications would have had anywhere near such a drastic effect on thought processes or personality.
So: neat idea, definitely science fiction. However, we can draw a parallel with a slightly more plausible idea from Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash. In both works, language is used as an attack vector to allow an enemy to take control of other people's actions. In Snow Crash, there is a language which acts like a programming language to insert instructions into people's brains; in Babel-17, the language itself is the program. (How is Snow Crash's take on this concept more realistic than Babel-17's? Well, you'll just have to wait for me to get around to reviewing Snow Crash to find that out.)
There is, however, another sci-fi linguistic idea in Babel-17 which is completely overlooked in most discussions of the novel: communication from "discorporate" people can't be remembered. Babel-17 is a wild ride through a psychedelic future with all kinds of ridiculous world-building details thrown in that have no direct bearing on the core premise of intergalactic war and Whorfian linguistic weapons, and one of those is the existence of ghosts, and in fact the requirement that some positions on a starship crew be filled by literal ghosts--or, as they are called in the novel, "discorporate people". The integration of discorporate people into the crew is complicated by the fact that living humans cannot remember anything said by a ghost for more than a few seconds, so special machinery is necessary to allow communication between the living and dead crew members--which is really kind of a neat concept all by itself, and I'd love to see that explored as the basis of a story on its own. (Not necessarily communication with ghosts, but just the idea that there is some class of people whose words cannot be remembered. Cf. the Silence from Doctor Who, but in that case nothing about the person can be remembered once you stop perceiving them, not merely their words.) Rydra ends up using her multilingualism to derive an advantage in this regard--while she can't remember the actual words spoken by a ghost, she gets around this by translating ghosts' speech into another language in her head as they are talking. And while she forgets the original words, she can remember the process of translation, and what she translated them into, and thus recall the content of the conversation without the need for assistive machinery.
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Still, Babel 17 is a fun book!
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