LINGUIST List 2.467

Thu 05 Sep 1991

Disc: Linguistic Novels, Films

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. , Linguistic Titles
2. , Re: Linguistic Terms in Titles
3. Peter Salus, Re: Linguistic Novels
4. "Larry G. Hutchinson", Re: Linguistics in Novels, Film... (Part 1)
5. , Re: Linguistics in Novels, Film... (Part 1)
6. BROADWELL GEORGE AARON, linguists and movies
7. Joe Stemberger, Re: Linguist Novels, Films, TV
8. "Larry G. Hutchinson", Re: Linguistics in Novels, Film... (Part 2)

Nobody yet has mentioned C.S. Lewis's hero of the Perelandra
novels (his religious/science fiction trilogy). He is a
philologist named Ransome who, says Lewis, is really not as
dull as one would expect of philologists. It is sad to add
that Humphrey Carpenter says much the same thing about JRR
Tolkien in the biography he wrote of him!
Let me add how much I am enjoying this discussion of popular
culture and linguistics. It allows me to read LINGUIST instead
of reading science fiction and mysteries, which is a good thing
given the number of postings that arrive every day!
 Margaret Winters
 Southern Illinois University

Since our trivia on linguistic tiltes now includes musical groups, I can't
resist mentioning a pop-rock group, the flyer of which I never threw out.
Their name is the Semantics, and they supposedly were to perform in
Boulder, Colo., on July 21st, 1984. Never got to see them, and have no
idea why they chose this name.
Even though he's a linguist, I think we should mention the Klingon Dictionary,
written by Mark Okrand, who did a superb diss. on Mutsun on the basis of
J.P.Harrington's fieldnotes. The book contains a short grammar, and a
conversation manual. Sure, enough, the language has a few Native Californian
features, but is also a bit esperanto-like with its absence of any
morphophonemics. Not really a novel, but lots of fun nonetheless.
Willem de Reuse
										Department of Anthropology, U. of Arizona.

There was a posting concerning a novel (featuring a
dolphin) by Derek Bickerton. There is no listing
for this work in the Books in Print or the pb Books
in Print I looked at yesterday.
Could someone with a copy please supply full bibliographic
information?
Peter H. Salus

There is Joan Smith's mystery novel, "A Masculine Ending" (Fawcett Crest,
 1987),
which contains a description of an academic conference sounding a lot like the
 LSA, among many other interesting things, and there is also a grammar in Marc
Okrand's 1985 "The Klingon Dictionary: English/Klingon, Klingon/English".

Two additions to the Popularization of Linguistics discussion:
Ursula LeGuin:
In reply to Carol Georgeopoulos's query about Ursula LeGuin's
linguistic "novel": it's not a novel (at least the one I know about),
it's a short story, the first title in a collection called _The
Compass Rose_. It's own title is something like "Lines Written on an
Acadia Seed." It's written like a linguistic anthropology article,
addressing new discoveries in the language of a variety of life- (and
non-life-) forms. The title of the story is taken from the first
language discussed, ant writings scribbled on an acacia seed. It
reveals the "literal" meaning of the text (the one I remember is "up
with the queen") and takes stabs at the cultural meaning (since ants
live underground, "up with the queen" would expose her (the queen ant)
to the killing elements and so, in "our" terms, may mean "down with
the queen"; so this acacia seed is something like a revolutionary
tract.
The story takes up three or four other languages, each only slightly
less plausible, until at the end we are asked to contemplate the
language of stones. Really wonderfully done!
While you have the book, read another story, called something about
"... the Shortage of Time," in which several causes of the shortage of
time are discussed; for instance it may be because there's a tiny hole
in the space-time continuum through which time is leaking....
The Dark Crystal:
In the movie "The Dark Crystal", with those fantastic Jim Henson
creatures, the humanoid Jen, wandering alone after some disaster, is
befriended by another creature who takes him to her people and
introduces him in what sounded to me like Serbian. I can imagine the
writers sitting around trying to come up with the wildest, craziest
language that they could put in the mouths of these creatures, one
that nevertheless was a real language, so they wouldn't have to make
it up! I think the movie is available for rental; people who are sure
they would recognize Serbian might want to check it out.
Christine Kamprath

When I was at UCLA, the linguistics dept. used to get a lot of strange
calls from people in the film industry asking us things. My favorite
was the studio that called us to ask how to say 'shit list' in Latin.
After some discussion, the classicists in the dept. came up with
'index cacorum'.

The movie (and book) "Day of the Dolphin" involves a project to teach
English to dolphins. There is a scene in the movie where the researcher is
telling someone about the dolphin's language acquisition; the filmmaker's
attempts to prevent this from being dreadfully dull "talking heads" are
ludicrous.
In the classic SF movie "Forbidden Planet" from the 1950's, one of the main
characters is a "philologist". This fact plays virtually no role in the
movie, though.

There appeared a SF novel entitled, roughly, "Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright", in
which a rebel underground invented a spoken language in which each binary
phonological feature carried a separate message. Hence, a given utterance
conveyed 18 plus messages simultaneously!