Babel Seventeen by Samuel R. Delany

I finished this book last week, it was kind of weird in a lot of ways, not in a bad way, just very, very different, kind of reminiscent of Alfred Bester’s style. What I liked best were all the little references to language and linguistics and that - in a nutshell - a poet saves the universe through linguistic skills. I liked that notion.

Ah, just lovely, I’m reading this text about sociolinguistics and this passage came up

“Some languages from other parts of the world, on the other hand, do not have tenses, at least not as we know them. […] It would not be too surprising, therefore, if the world-view of a people whose language does not ‘have tenses’ were rather different from our own: their concept of time, and perhaps even of cause and effect, might be somewhat different.”

I’m totally fascinated by all this. The language we speak defines the way we think and conceptualizes our environment. Someone once said that if you speak another language, you have another soul. I think this is utterly true. If anyone of you is only remotely interested in these things, you have to read Babel 17!