Toolmaker Koan (only available from third-party sellers, which is incredibly amusing if you've read the book, but I've provided an Amazon affiliate link anyway), is a 1988 science fiction novel by John McLoughlin about first contact with two different non-human... species? (don't want to spoil too much!)... while humanity is on the cusp of an apocalyptic nuclear war. It's only a few months older than me, just barely older than the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a prime example of just how consistently late 20th century sci-fi authors failed to predict said collapse!
There is quite a range of linguistically interesting stuff going on in here. Not a large total volume of it, but a lot of small bits of different kinds of things.
We start out, upon meeting our first alien intelligence (who has been studying humanity in secret for some time, and thus conveniently speaks English), with a technical articulatory phonetic description of how to pronounce it's chosen name! ("Charon") This sort of linguistic detail doesn't show up again, but the specification that the Greeks would pronounce it with "the back voiceless stop consonant you call K" becomes relevant in the denouement for recognizing the adjective "Karonic".
A bit later, we get some Greek when discussing the significance of the alien's name:
"The Greeks always buried their dead with a coin offering, the danake, in their mouths. Charon, I'm afraid, was a bit of a miser; with the coin the soul paid Charon's naulon, his toll."This is straightforward diegetic translation, in which the character is using appositive definitions. I'm not really sure why the character, and thus why the author who wrote that character, bothered in this case, though; it feels very much like a forcibly inserted chance to show off cool background knowledge, which reminds me of this XKCD comic (even though the words in this case are not made up by the author!) This seems like a good time to point out that, while I am a great proponent of Interesting Linguistic Content, all of the techniques I am documenting are pointless if they are not used in support of the story! You've got to find a way to give it a function, or, as much as it pains me, cut it out.
Later, the alien Charon, by application of god-like alien technology, uh... reconstitutes a tribe of Australopithecus. Several of their vocalizations are quoted (presumably onomatopoetically), but our human protagonists obviously don't understand them (or even know if there is anything to understand in the first place!), which makes this a very clear case of Making it Irrelevant. (For reference, if the Australopithicii have language, two of their words appear to be "Skaroch!" and "Skuh!")
Eventually, Charon introduces the humans to the whileelins--or at least, their name is spelled "whileelin". How it is pronounced is anyone's guess, as their language is supposed to be whistled! (Or perhaps "sung", as it is supposed to sound similar to birdsong.) Whistling is a modality in which natural human languages actually exist, but never a primary modality; like writing, it always serves as a secondary encoding of normally-spoken language. So a non-human species that naturally whistles is a neat idea--especially since I happen to working on a primarily-whistled conlang myself right now!
Sadly, there is no indication of how information is actually encoded in the whistled signal, and no description of how the transcription system works, and thus no easy way to compare the whileelin language to human whistle languages. On the bright side, that means I am free to assume that it does not rely on absolute pitch discrimination! No indication of how data is encoded in the whistle signal. The only descriptions of the sounds or lexicon of the whileelin language that we get is that "Hwiliria"(the name of the whileelins' spaceship) sounds like a "four-toned burst of music" (a very strange description given that there are more than four letters and more than four types of letters in the name), and this bit of non-diagetic translation:
"Haijar," agreed the First.
which takes advantage of the specific semantics of the word to give you an approximate definition in the speech tag! That's not something you can get away with very often!
Prior to the humans' introduction to the whileelins, however, McLoughlin establishes some dramatic irony by shifting to the whileelins' point of view for a couple of scenes, which are used to establish a particular kind of Narrative Translation Convention, in which the use of archaic thee/thou pronouns and associated verb conjugations in English to represent the "Patriarchal mode" of the whileelin language.
Whileelins are not built like humans, physically or mentally. Thus, there are three stages to whileelin languages: They are born with an innate, genetically-programmed understanding of a basic "creche language"; upon reaching adulthood, their brains grow to unlock another innate Patriarchal/Matriarchal language. In between, there is a ten-year period of high intelligence and mental flexibility in which all the variety of arbitrary language can be learned and developed--unless a whileelin is neutered, halting their transition into full adulthood and allowing them to maintain mental flexibility indefinitely. We only ever encounter one linguistic community of whileelin in this novel, but presumably this means that whileelin languages can diverge from one another... but all possible whileelin languages would be much more similar to each other than human languages are, due to the constraints of developing from a common innate language, and needing to accommodate the integration of a second innate language--at least, as long as juveniles and castrati care about learning to understand the speech of sexually-mature adults! This is a fascinating bit of fictional linguistic science that qualifies this work as linguistic science fiction--which does not focus on the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis!
Returning to human languages, there are three insertions of Spanish; one short bit of code-switching right near the beginning, and two longer phrases in the last third of the book. That bit of code-switching looks like this:
"Nossir. But we're good hackers, que no?"
In this case, English syntax Makes the meaning Obvious. It's a tag question, and English is pretty liberal with what can go in the tag slot already when multiple dialects are considered (cf. "eh?", "innit?", etc.)--so when you drop some random short thing with a question mark after it (which happens in this case to be Spanish) in the tag slot, it's pretty obvious what it means just from where you put it! And while we have been told that the characters here are a multi-ethnic, multi-national group, this little bit of inserted Spanish helps to show us that--even though the rest of the dialog is English (excepting the couple of words of Greek mentioned above) for the next 212 pages!
But, on page 242, we get a reintroduction to the character who was the addressee of that tag question, who was out of the action for a god long while. And just in case you forgot who he was, his reintroduction consists of thinking "Madre de dios!" while "wiping his lap frantically" because he spilled hot coffee! The context, and exclamation mark, and implicit background knowledge that people tend to slip back into their native(or most comfortable) languages when stressed or cursing (or stressed and cursing) makes it pretty Obvious that this is an expletive, Irrelevant what the literal meaning is, and helps remind us who this character is--oh yeah, it's the guy who was addressed with Spanish!
Later on, we get this interesting passage:
--but then this Charon had claimed to be a sentient machine, one speaking like a crazy old man. Un viejo poquito loco, and it claimed to know a great deal.
Like the earlier inclusion of Greek, I cannot see an obvious purpose for this; it might just be there to remind you again, in case you forgot, that at least one character here (this one) has a native language other than English. However, regardless of purpose, the structure is fascinating. You've got the English "crazy old man" and the Spanish "Un viejo poquito loco" in direct textual juxtaposition--but, they aren't actually in the same sentence, and so not in syntactic apposition, which considerably increases the cognitive load on the reader to identify one as a (rough) translation of the other. Now, that could be a bad thing if the meaning is really important--or perhaps a good thing if you want the reader to pause and think about a particular passage. But McLoughlin side-steps the issue by simultaneously ensuring that the meaning of the Spanish is totally irrelevant. You can just delete it, and the sentence is still perfectly comprehensible, so it doesn't matter if a monolingual English reader doesn't figure it out! They still will have been shown the Spanish and given that reminder.
Finally, in the Epilogue, we get this:
"Munirda, strangeko!" The girl glanced shyly at the Mother, back again at the Karonic. "Mensch, two, Marma, oltimaku wringlerising!"
"And to me, my noisy descendant, you speak English!"
Now, I really hope that that's just Irrelevant, 'cause I cannot figure out what exactly it's supposed to say. (I'm pretty sure it is, 'cause the rest of the epilogue makes perfect sense.) However, several individual bits are tantalizingly familiar--which, in the context of the response, suggests that all this seeming gibberish is supposed to accomplish is to show you that this girl in the future is speaking something descended (at least partially) from English, but different from contemporary English, which helps to suggest the depth of time that has passed between the last chapter and the epilogue.
But, what does all this have to do with metaphor? Well, the linguistic content of Toolmaker Koan reminded me of the conflict between the Conduit Metaphor and the Toolmakers Paradigm, first described by Michael Reddy.
The Conduit Metaphor is a conceptual metaphor deeply embedded in the English language; it is the conception of utterances as containers into which thoughts can be placed, and sent (through the conduit of speech) to another mind. A few examples from Reddy's paper:
- Try to get your thoughts across better.
- None of Mary’s feelings came through to me with any clarity.
- You still haven’t given me any idea of what you mean.
- Whenever you have a good idea practice capturing it in words.
- You have to put each concept into words very carefully.
- Try to pack more thoughts into fewer words.
- Insert those ideas elsewhere in the paragraph.
- Don’t force your meanings into the wrong words.
Any neurodivergent person who has encountered the double empathy problem, or any author who has encountered baffling analyses of their work, can easily understand the far more accurate nature of the Toolmaker Paradigm. And yet, despite being toolmakers, as Toolmaker Koan repeatedly reminds us that we are, we English speakers at least seem to really want it to not be so! It would be so nice if language actually contained thought and transmitted it accurately; and I'm sure it doesn't help that the Conduit Metaphor can be made more accurate for transmission of information between machines; but it just ain't that way for humans! In fact, I think we can even do better than the Toolmaker Paradigm as described by Reddy; language itself is a tool. No metaphor required! Even apart from acting as cognitive technology (as a I referenced in my review of Ted Chiang stories), language is a blunt tool with which we try to sculpt crude replicas of our thoughts in other people's minds. The simple fact that humans create and use languages makes us toolmakers all on its own.
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