Re: Speculative linguistics(*)

On 31 May, 07:53, zebo...@xxxxxxxxx (Zeborah) wrote:
(*) In which "linguistics" can be read as any scientific field which
hasn't traditionally been the focus of science fiction.

A recent crit (pointing out that speculative linguistics doesn't belong
in my story about alien librarians)

Was the critter right? I'd have thought a story of alien librarians
would be an excellent place for speculative linguistics.

made me think about the problems
I've had when trying to casually include speculative linguistics in my
stories. It seems far easier to get away with a throwaway comment
involving speculative physics (like space stations and ftl and such)
than with a throwaway comment involving speculative linguistics (like a
language allowing more consonant clusters than English; or more kinship
terms than English; or more pronouns... not that I'm bitter or
anything).

"I liked the story, but those 'lasers' and 'fusion bombs' you made up
really strained my suspension of disbelief." If you can't even get
away with a few extra pronouns beyond English, my vague plans for an
alien race whose basic grammar is Chomsky type 3 is going to cause
problems.

And I think it's maybe because (speculating wildly here) when one does
speculative physics, people recognise it as sf-stuff, and even if
they're not physicists they're still familiar with some of the tropes of
what one is 'allowed' to speculate about. But when one does speculative
linguistics, it's just weird stuff, and (by and large) people don't have
the exposure to real-world languages and/or linguistics in order to grok
what you're speculating about.

Or that people know they don't understand physics but think they do
understand languages because, after all, they speak one (or more, but
I'd guess you'd have fewer problems with polyglot readers).

[snip]
So how does one speculate on linguistics, without those tropes to rely
on? Should I be looking at how early sf writers speculated on physics
back before they had the tropes that are now second nature to us?
Reading those early works now, they so often seem clunky and
infodumpish; was that necessary to introduce readers to then-new
speculative physics? Or is it possible to introduce readers to
speculative linguistics while retaining a modern (incluing-based?)
style?

It might be worth looking at something like early cyberpunk. That
introduced new tropes in networked computing, viruses, etc. and should
feel less infodumpy than early SF. Biology-based SF is another
possibility - there aren't so many established tropes there. Peter
Watts' _Starfish_, for example, has humans plausibly adapted to deep-
sea conditions. He manages to explain things without stopping the
plot; I think it helps that the adaptations are fairly new to the
characters, so he gets to depict how things feel from their POV and
have them think about what's going on.

.