Embassytown

"There are a weirdly large number of novels about linguistics and they’re almost all sci-fi. Most of them are about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis , which is the idea that the language you speak controls the way you think. You might think of Newspeak in Orwell ’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as being like that. There’s also a linguist called Suzette Haden Elgin who wrote a fascinating novel where she developed a language which was meant to remove all sexism. And one of my favourite authors ever, Ursula Le Guin, developed a language for a colony of anarchists she put on a moon, which didn’t have any way of expressing possession. I’m a big fan of this kind of speculative novel. It’s another way of philosophizing. I tend to read everything that looks like it might be that sort of book. I really enjoyed Embassytown because it wasn’t about Sapir-Whorf, but about the relationship between language and reality. While I was reading it, I tweeted, ‘It’s Chomsky versus Quine in outer space.’ Quine is a famous philosopher who said that the meaning of the word cup is a cup, an actual thing in the world. Chomsky’s view is, ‘No, no, no, the meaning of the word ‘cup’ is a concept in your mind. We all just live in our minds and communicate with each other by trying to get our minds into some kind of synch through language.’ Embassytown is about who is right. Is it Quine—and most philosophers—who say that words connect directly to things? That seems commonsensical. Or is it Chomsky and others, who argue that we build these models of the world in our minds, and that when we speak or when we act we connect those mental models to the world? And [spoiler alert] Chomsky wins. “There are a weirdly large number of novels about linguistics and they’re almost all sci-fi. ” Miéville has got a brilliant imagination, and in the book he develops these aliens who have two mouths. They have two speaking organs and you’d think that’s like a forked tongue but, ironically, they can’t lie because their language must connect directly to the actual reality. They want to lie, though. They find lying totally fascinating, but they can’t. Even if they want to use a simile, they have to get someone to act it out. So they get humans to act out weird stuff for them. The heroine of the novel ends up having to eat some food in the dark in a restaurant. Then they can say, ‘Ah this is like the girl who eats food in the dark’ and that means whatever it means for the aliens, some weird simile, but they have to make it real in order to use it. Then of course what happens is that the humans mess it all up. They end up introducing, into the ecosystem of these aliens, the capacity to lie. They get these telepathic twins who will speak with the two voices, but who can lie because they’re human. The aliens get addicted to that and it’s going to totally destroy the alien society and kill all the humans. Then the heroine basically solves it by more or less teaching the aliens to lie. Which is kind of an awful comment about how we humans randomly wander around blundering into things and making a mess of what was a perfectly good ecosystem. But at the same time, it’s fascinating because of the whole issue of how does language really work? Could you have a language like these aliens? It’s a really well written book. A lot of Miéville’s work is very elegantly thoughtful. So this is a good fifth book because it’s one of the many fiction books I’ve read throughout my life that tell us something really interesting or ask us really interesting questions about language. If people haven’t read Embassytown and they want to read something about linguistics, it’s fascinating. There’s also the film Arrival , which is sci-fi and very language-based. I always show it to my first years. It was great for linguistics because people saw it and thought it was amazing. This book is similar. If you like science fiction and you’re interested in languages, this is a great book to read. I will absolutely be suggesting my own book ! The original reason I wrote it is because I felt there wasn’t a book that did that. I wrote it with my nephew in mind, who was 17 at the time. It’s aimed at people who have no linguistics or even a university degree but are interested in the topic. Another book to recommend is Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct (1994) , but it’s a bit out of date now. Things have changed quite a lot since then. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There are lots of other fascinating books on language out there. For example, there’s Gretchen McCulloch’s book on internet linguistics, Because Internet . It’s totally brilliant and you learn a lot about sociolinguistics. It’s interesting for people who spend their lives on the internet. I definitely recommend that to people as a good introduction to the socio side—while my book is probably a good introduction to the more cognitive side of linguistics. The other books that are around at the moment tend to be focused on this notion that linguists are descriptive about language rather than prescriptive. Lane Greene’s book, Talk on the Wild Side , is like that. That’s a pretty good book as well."

"Yes, Embassytown is also centred around the idea of alien languages. It’s another example of the more incomprehensible alien species—it’s set on a planet where the native aliens speak two words at the same time. Basically they have two vocal organs, so their language consists of two tracks where we have only one. The human explorers who first met them had translation software and two speakers, and made two sounds at the same time, but these aliens did seem to recognise it even as an attempt at speech. It’s only when—and this is the backstory to the novel—a couple of frustrated human linguists each shout half of the greeting word that these aliens even realise they are being spoken to. That’s because, in this story, the alien language doesn’t function representationally but rather as a direct conduit to the mind. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . This is somewhat fantastical, and it gets tied up with the limits of this alien language. They can’t say anything untrue, for example, because their language is not a symbol. They have this fantastically weird setup where they are able to speak in similes, but the simile must be drawn from something real. The main character, as a girl, was recruited to enact a simile—so they can say something is “like the girl who ate what was given to her”… It adds all these layers of meaning that are hard for me, as a human, to wrap my head around. A lot of the plot of the book hinges on the way that the aliens experience language, and experience the world as a result. It’s also about trying to stretch your imagination to see if you can hold an impossible idea in your head, just for a moment. It’s like trying to imagine what it means that the universe is expanding in more dimensions than we can see. It’s like trying to imagine what a tesseract looks like—a cube squared again. Like, we can’t. But if you really, really try, you can get kind of close. Or you can get it for a second. I think a lot of the pleasure of science fiction comes from encountering new and impossible ideas, and viewing them in a world and in a story that is believable. It stretches you not only to imagine different kinds of people’s experiences, but different realities as well."