9 = Volume 3, Part 2 = July 1976
Walter E. Meyers
The Future History and Development of the English Language
Many people have argued that the author of a science-fiction story lays himself under a special obligation, one the writers themselves never tire of pointing out. As Harry Harrison says, "SF cannot be good without respect for good science. This may be a tautology, but it is so often ignored that it must be clearly stated. This does not include time machines, space warps and the fifth dimension; they will continue to exist in the hazy borderland between SF and fantasy. But it does include everything else in these stories once the warp has been jumped or the centuries spanned." In fact, Harrison rates a knowledge of "the basic facts of the science he is writing about" as the science-fiction writer’s primary responsibility."1
And not only writers espouse this point; reading science-fiction criticism, one cannot escape arguments for a special requirement of scientific accuracy for good science fiction. If we accept this argument (I personally think it is very questionable) then much criticism of the field evades its own primary responsibility—to evaluate that knowledge within the stories being discussed.
I suspect that when Harrison and similar commentators use the term science, they unconsciously but regularly restrict its meaning to the natural sciences. It might be argued that the humanities receive the least attention given to traditionally defined fields of study, but the social sciences get not a great deal more. This restriction becomes almost startling when one considers how very many works of science fiction have communication in general and language in particular as their central concern, and the host of other stories in which language is a secondary, but still important, element.
Only in the genre, it seems to me, is there an abundance of plot situations that present an immediate need for discussions of language or direct confrontations of differing language communities. For example, only one job requires its practitioners to put down on paper their estimates of the language of the next decade, the next century, or the next millennium—the job of writing science fiction. Science fiction has, therefore, a special relationship within the field of language to historical linguistics.
1. The present state of American English is decried by such a large part of the public (by newspaper columnists, television commentators, and others in a position to know) that we might think that they would be doing their best to promote as much change as possible, on the grounds that things could hardly get worse. Such is not the case, however, since one of the tenets of the naive observer is that change is always bad. In 1934, Murray Leinster published a short story that illustrates that tenet, "Sidewise in Time" (C1).2 The premise of the story is that many universes exist simultaneously, each one resulting from a different outcome of a key historical event. For example, when it’s 1934 in one world, it’s 1934 in all, but in some the Civil War was won by the Confederacy. The tale begins with an "upheaval of nature" that shuffles parts of the different universes together unpredictably. A mathematics professor leads a group of his students into a universe where the Roman Empire never fell; there the Romans discovered and settled the New World, but otherwise they have not changed much: they still have centurions, chariots, slaves, etc. One might have expected their language to have changed over the centuries, as indeed it has: our travelers overhear a villa owner speaking "a curiously corrupt Latin."
Over three decades later, the same attitude toward linguistic change still persists, but of course professors of mathematics no longer speak Latin, so it has become necessary to have the change noticed, as in the next example, by an expert. The crew of a spaceship from our own time (give or take a few generations) lands in North America of the future. The ship’s anthropologist identifies the language of the natives: "It’s English. But farther from our brand than ours was from Anglo-Saxon.... It’s degenerated, in the linguistical sense, far faster than was predicted." He has a reason for the degeneration, too: "Probably because of the isolation of small groups after the Desolation. And also because the mass of the people are illiterate."3 But perhaps degeneration in the linguistical sense is not as derogatory as degeneration in the ordinary sense, and we see here a small gain for education.
The writer of science fiction need not have attended a university course in the history of English to avoid mistakes of this sort: had he looked, he would have found advice within the genre on handling the different states of a language. In 1953, L. Sprague de Camp, a well-known writer himself, published a book of excellent counsel for the would-be author. One section specifically discusses language: "What if your characters are ‘really’ speaking a past or future variety of English? If they are using past English, have them speak as the past speakers would have spoken unless the form is so archaic that it makes hard reading. You can use the English of the time of Milton or Shakespeare (if you know how) as it stands."4 But good advice is still just advice: science-fiction writers who attempt archaic English almost invariably make errors in the use of verb and pronoun forms of the second-person singular. Theodore Sturgeon in "To Here and the Easel" (1954; C2) is perhaps an exception, but perhaps not,5 for as De Camp points out, "you can never be so careful as to avoid all mistakes."6
As C.F. Hockett has noted,7 the knowledge of linguistics shown in science fiction, a genre where authors should have a special interest in accuracy, is low in general; we may add that it is abysmally low when it comes to historical linguistics. Hockett no doubt had in mind stories like Nat Schachner’s "Past, Present, and Future" (1937; C1), which strings linguistic improbabilities through ten millennia and mocks grammarians at the same time. In the story, a lieutenant of Alexander the Great is preserved in a chamber hewn from the rock of a live volcano; he wakes far in the future in the company of Sam Ward, an American soldier-of-fortune of our own time. Though but a mere adventurer, Sam is a college man:
Kleon’s face lighted with gladness and a certain astonishment. "You Speak Greek, Sam Ward, yet you speak it as a barbarian would, the accents are false and the quantities wrong." Sam grimaced wryly at that. His professors at college had been most careful in inculcating those accents and quantities. They represented the true Attic Greek in all its purity, they had averred.
A comment about the history of English, in particular, is still most certain to be ludicrously wrong. A brief documentation of that charge would list, for instance, the story that states that speakers of the Northumbrian and Sussex dialects of Old English could not understand each other,8 the story that labels Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale "Old English,"9 and the story in which a character says "‘Have no fear,’... striking the final vowels of the words with a grunting emphasis in the curious brogue of Middle English."10
The last bit of evidence deserves quoting at length. In Harvey Jacobs’ "The Egg of the Glak" (1968; C3) one character is a university professor who teaches the history of English. The narrator of the story has studied under this Professor Hikhoff, who has apparently informed the narrator that the Great Vowel Shift was caused by the Norman Conquest:
If it were not for Hikhoff, I would know nothing of the vowel shift, thought it altered my life and fiber. For it was this rotten shift that changed our English from growl to purr.
Look it up. Read how spit flew through the teeth of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes in the good old days. Get facts on how the French came, conquered, shoved our vowels to the left of the language, coated our tongues with velvet fur.
For Hikhoff, the shift of the vowels made history’s center. Before was a time for the hairy man, the man who ate from the bone. After came silk pants, phallic apology.
Although the humor allows us to forgive Jacobs much, his story remains a textbook example of what Thomas Pyles, a real historian of English, described as the notion that William the Conqueror was rather like Paul Valéry.
Thankfully, some few writers handle linguistic change accurately and to good effect in their fiction. Since science-fiction writers customarily work on a grand scale in time as well as in space, these skillful few can plot over centuries, making the change of a language not just part of the atmosphere but a device to forward the action. Alexei Panshin does just this in Rite of Passage (US 1968). The work deals with the growing up of a young girl, the narrator, who lives in a colossal spaceship. The colony of thousands on the ship is almost self-sustaining, visiting planets only to trade or to place on their surfaces the adolescents of the ship, who must survive a trial period on an often hostile world before being accepted as adults by the ship’s society. The heroine and her classmates are to be set on a planet last visited 150 years before. Although the thought that the language may have changed in that time apparently occurs to no one, the speech of the children betrays their origin to the planet-dwellers almost at once. The girl survives several dangers before finding a friendly native who will teach her to speak in a way that will not draw attention to her. In the education that follows, both sound change and differences in morphology are illustrated:
We worked on my speech for a couple of hours that day. Some of the changes were fairly regular—like shifted vowel sounds and a sort of "b" sound for "p", and saying "be" for "is"—but some of the sounds seemed without pattern or sense, though a linguist might disagree with me....
I couldn’t tell you off hand what all the changes were—I think rhythm was a large part of it—but I did have a good ear. I suppose that there was a pattern after all, but it was one I only absorbed subconsciously. [§16]
With only a little knowledge and care, a writer can use language change like any other detail of his imaginary world, developing it as a plot device or as a mirror of custom, or, as in the next two examples, as a vehicle for humor. Michael Moorcock’s An Alien Heat (US 1972) is set far in the future when today’s languages are mistakenly thought to have been merely dialects of a single tongue. When a woman from 19th-century England is brought to that time, she is addressed by a character with more confidence than accuracy in his reconstruction of her speech: "Good evening, fraulein. I parle the yazhik. Năy ň-sái pă" (§3).11
Poul Anderson’s characters in "Day of Burning" (1967 as "Supernova"; C5) are more accurate, just unlucky. Their adventure takes place when interstellar travel is possible; voyaging to a particular planet, though, is infrequent because of the large number of inhabited worlds. A merchant ship travels to Eriau, a planet not visited in two centuries, and although the crew studies the local language during their passage, they discover that "two hundred years back, Eriau had been in a state of linguistic overturn." The merchants find themselves in a position like that of a man who learns the English of 1400 only to land in 1600. When they reach Eriau, primed with their hard-won language facility, they find they aren’t "even pronouncing the vowels right." In a neat touch, Anderson renders the initial conversations on the planet by putting the aliens’ dialogue in modern English and the merchants’ in an obsolete brand, Elizabethan in effect.
But unfortunately treatments like these, as I have said, are the exceptions. In general the treatment of linguistic change in science fiction is like the sky on a hazy night: a few bright spots seen through an obfuscating fog. When we took more specifically at the treatment of the future development of English, the fog does not lift.
2. De Camp in 1953 had also outlined the principal concerns of a writer who turns his attention to language-to-come, whose characters speak a "future variety of English." He stated reasonably that "we may presume that English will go on changing (perhaps more slowly than hitherto because of the spread of literacy and world-wide intercommunication) so that in a thousand years it would be unintelligible."12 And writers have had an illustrious example since long before de Camp wrote. H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) is usually thought of as the beginning of the theme of time travel in science fiction, and in that novel the central character goes to the future and hears "a strange and very sweet and liquid tongue" (§4) of which he understands not a word. He has to learn the language in the usual way, and never does get very good at it. Like the Time Traveler, many a willing or unwilling subject has, since 1895, visited or viewed the future as his author conceived of it, and it is just this large body of evidence that allows us to compile our survey of post-modern English.13
Surprisingly few stories that describe the future of English hypothesize any sort of influence from other languages. When a story does, however, that other language is virtually certain to be Russian. Stanley Lanier’s "Such Stuff as Dreams" (Analog, Jan 1968) hints at an amalgamation when a character uses "Slavang, the language of Terra," where Slavang is perhaps a blend of Slavic and English. Sometimes the most casual of comments implies profound social, as well as linguistic, changes: in James Blish’s "This Earth of Hours" (1959; C6) a spaceship from Earth is named Novoe Washingtongrad.
This off-hand sort of comment may even effect our understanding of the story’s meaning. Ursula Le Guin’s "The New Atlantis" (C7) pictures a future United States under a thoroughly despotic Federal Government. The critic Darko Suvin labels the society "a well-identified American variant of admass fascism" and "a fairly standard American radical nightmare,"14 appearing to miss Le Guin’s indications of the contemporary model she is using. Although Suvin notices the "Solzhenitsyn-like Rehabilitation Camps" of the story, he does not mention one linguistic clue in a comment the central character makes about her husband: "he’s never been able to publish any of his papers, in print; he’s not a federal employee and doesn’t have a government clearance. But it did get circulated in what the scientists and poets call Sammy’s-dot, that is, just handwritten or hectographed." Sammy’s-dot is a folk-etymology of the Russian samizdat, the term in current use in the Soviet Union to describe precisely the kind of underground publishing Le Guin writes of.
Usually when Russian has some influence on the future of English, it is limited, as in Le Guin’s story, to the borrowing of words. The most notable example of such influence in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (1962). There, in the not-too-distant future, British teen-agers speak a slang called Nadsat; in this slang, words like ptitsa, deng, moloko, and droog, are fairly straightforward English renderings of the Russian words for "bird," "money," "milk," and "friend"; veck shows a clipped form of chelovek "man"; and even folk-etymologies are represented by terms like gulliver (from golova "head") and horrorshow (from horosho "good").15 In "Choice of Weapons" (Worlds of Tomorrow, March 1966) Richard C. Meredith uses the same method as Burgess, interspersing some Russian words, and adds a different use of contraction and perhaps a suggestion of change in pronunciation in the speech of a character of the twenty-fifth century: "Wha’tam wrong tyepyer ["now"]?... I wan’ to know where I’m—Gdye ["where"]?" In general, though, speakers of English can look forward to a rosy future, one in which they can travel where they wish with firm confidence in the shop signs that proclaim "English Spoken Here."
The more chauvinistic among us may think that when all the world speaks English, the world is getting the better of the deal. In Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (US 1953) the millennium arrives, and Clarke enumerates its benefits: "There was no one on earth who could not speak English, who could not read, who was not within range of a television set, who could not visit the other side of the planet within twenty-four hours..." (§6). Presumably they all have tea at four too. Although Clarke is an Englishman, he seems to dread that task which the average American fears more than any other: that he will have to learn a foreign language. A separate article could be written dealing solely with the shifts and subtleties science-fiction writers devise to spare their characters that job.16 And naturally the easiest solution is to have everybody else learn English: "Schwartz had spoken with them several times. They understood English well enough—all galactic races did; Schwartz imagined it would become the interstellar lingua franca as it had on Earth" (C8). There is, of course, the odd story in which neither English nor Russian becomes the new world tongue: Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero (US 1970) has Swedish fulfilling that high function in the twenty-second century, but speakers of English are entitled to hope that merely an alternate universe is depicted here.
If science-fiction writers lean toward the universal spread of spoken English, many are doubtful about the future of written English. Sometimes full-scale nuclear war reduces most of the population to illiteracy, as in Walter Miller’s critically praised A Canticle for Leibowitz (US 1959). Or it may be an invasion from outer space, causing a hard-pressed society to undergo great deprivations from military necessity, as in Algis Budrys’ "For Love" (C9), where a young man is described as "educated—or mis-educated; show him something not printed in Military Alphabet and you showed him the Mayan Codex." But most often future illiteracy simply reflects the linguistic pessimism so often expressed in the pages of Time and Newsweek, a pessimism which sees the use of media as a singular as the harbinger of the collapse of civilization. Thus we find scenes like the one in Samuel R. Delany’s "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" (C10). In the Times Square of a hundred years from now, "the ribbon of news lights looping the triangular structure of Communication, Inc.," spells out its headlines in Basic English. A similarly gloomy outcome appears in Robert Sheckley’s Mindswap (US 1966). The 32-year-old hero of this story, in no way out of the ordinary, learned to read at age twelve; after twenty-eight years of formal education (including four years of post-graduate work), he is employed in a toy factory, fluoroscoping the products for defects. When he wants information on a subject, he adjusts the comprehension rate of his encyclopedia to "simple," and settles down to a chummy lecture from a magnetic tape. In their skepticism about education (public education only—rarely is fun poked at advanced scientific research), science-fiction writers share the media-approved attitude of the larger society around them.
3. Science-fiction writers face problems that Time and Newsweek avoid, though, when they imagine the language of the future. Often their solution to those problems is simply to ignore them. For example, consider a work of extraordinary scope, The Quincunx of Time (US 1973), whose author, the late James Blish, displays knowledge that he fails to use. The story concerns a machine called the Dirac, which transmits messages faster than light, but which has the unforeseen capability of picking up every message sent on a Dirac transmitter at any time in the future. We find that Blish knows about language change: when its possessors first listen to the Dirac, one remarks, hearing an apparently meaningless message, "I suppose it’s whatever has happened to the English language—or some other language—thousands of years from now" (§9). Despite this promising hint (the character is mistaken in this particular case), there is no change whatsoever in the English of any message quoted in the book though the characters intercept, and we read, communications dating from 2091, 2973, 3480, 6500, and even 8873.
In The Quincunx of Time Blish provided a more recent example of the kind of story a colleague had complained of in 1953. Fletcher Pratt, a versatile writer not limited to the field, contended that "most science fiction writers have another irritating habit that does nothing to win friends for the art: the habit of being extremely slipshod about language.... the time travelers hop three thousand years into the future and find people still speaking idiomatic New York English. (How many people today speak any language that was used in 1000 B.C.?) I do not mean this happens every time, but it takes place often enough to constitute a rather general criticism, and it is one of the reasons why non-science-fiction readers tend to regard the art as the property of a cult."17
It is not hard to find stories in which language change ceases utterly as a result of the author’s inadvertence or ignorance. Back in 1933, Laurence Manning’s "The Man Who Awoke" (C1) showed this flaw. The hero awakes after a full five thousand years, a rather extended period, yet one that nevertheless fails to hamper the ease of his communication with the people of the time:
The surprising thing, when he came to think about it, was that the man’s speech was plain English, for which he was thankful. There were new words, of course, and the accent was strange to his ears—a tang of European broad As and positively continental Rs. He was wondering if radio and recorded speech had been the causes of this persistence of the old tongue.
The only new words in the story appear very early: a character asks the hero, "Wassum, stranger! Where is your orig?" meaning "Welcome, stranger. Where is your village?" On reflection, the fact that a language has undergone some phonological shifts and added some new words in five thousand years would seem far less remarkable than the fact it had changed so little, yet even as limp and unlikely an account of language change as Manning’s came as a surprise to one adolescent reader. In a preface to the story, Isaac Asimov recalls that as a youth, he had noticed that "Manning’s view of the future involved not merely new inventions, but new societies, new ways of thought, new modifications of language."18
Note that Manning at least makes an attempt to cover his stunning implausibility by pointing to recording devices. Even this much face-saving is absent from Clifford Simak’s 1931 story, "The World of the Red Sun" (C1). In this, the time travelers leave 1935, but something goes amiss, and they arrive in, not the year 7561 as they had planned, but "more likely the year 750,000." Shortly after their arrival, a mob of barbarians overpowers them and takes them captive: "‘March,’ said one of them, a large fellow with a protruding front tooth. The single word was English, with the pronunciation slightly different than it would have been in the twentieth century, but good, pure English." Later the travelers overhear more conservation among the savages "but, although the tongue was English, it was so intermixed with unfamiliar words and spoken with such an accent that the two could understand very little of it." The most wonderful thing of all is, of course, their ability to understand a single word, yet the phenomenon receives no further mention.
Lest it be thought that these two stories represent an unsophisticated attitude that has disappeared in more recent years, consider Ray Bradbury’s "Forever and the Earth" (1950; C11), which followed Manning’s and Simak’s stories by almost two decades. In that story, the writer Thomas Wolfe is resurrected in 2257 A.D., yet apparently the language has changed not at all in three hundred years. From a few centuries to several millennia, language stands still in Theodore Sturgeon’s "The Stars are the Styx" (1950; C12), in which Earth sends out a fleet of ships to set up a network of matter transmitters around the galaxy. The task will take six thousand years to complete, but the crews of the ships will be thrust "into space-time and the automatics [will hold] them there until all—or enough—are positioned." The returning crews won’t have aged at all, and will be heroes to boot: "Their relatives, their Earthbound friends will be long dead, and all their children and theirs; so let the Outbounders come home at least to the same Earth, the same language, the same tradition." Just how everything, including language, is to be held changeless for 6000 years is not explained.
For arrested development, though, the prize must go to Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars (US 1956). There are actually two cities figuring in the book, Diaspar and Lys, which have been without contact for a billion years. A character makes a trip from one city to the other, the first human to do so throughout this geologic time span. We are told that he "had no difficulty in understanding the others, and it never occurred to him that there was anything surprising about this. Diaspar and Lys shared the same linguistic heritage, and the ancient invention of sound recording had long ago frozen speech in an unbreakable mold" (§10). Although Clarke’s unchanging language puts an intolerable strain on the willing suspension of disbelief, the oddest thing about this linguistic will-o-the-wisp is its complete needlessness. Granted that plot purposes may require immediate communication to take place, still, the people of Lys are endowed with another of science fiction’s more bewhiskered conventions, telepathy. If he had chosen, Clarke could have had them read the traveler’s mind instead of boggling ours, and the continued mutual intelligibility of the languages of the two cities could have been dispensed with. Next to this Manning’s use of a new word or two seems like philological scholarship.
Clarke, like Manning before him, points to sound recordings not just as a retarder of change, but as an absolute barrier to it. Other reasons are offered from time to time to account for a language remaining unchanged over millennia and light-years. One naive explanation occurs in Doris Piserchia’s Star Rider (US 1974). The novel depicts a time, thousands of years from now, when humans hop all over the galaxy quickly and easily. The heroine is held captive on a planet she has never seen. When one of her kidnappers (whom she has never seen before, either) wonders how it that they speak the same language, she replies, "Your people probably copied it from mine, then when yours came to Gibraltar [the kidnapper’s planet] they decided not to change it" (§9). It could be argued that the heroine is an extremely untutored fourteen-year-old who knows next to nothing about anything. But whatever the state of her knowledge, there is no sign throughout the book that anybody speaks a language in any way different from anybody else’s.
The Mote in God’s Eye (US 1974), by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, notes in one section that universal languages invariably fragment (§27), and mutual consent seems a feeble way to attempt to forestall that change. But other methods with more teeth in them have been recounted, as in Zach Hughes’ The Legend of Miaree (US 1974):
We stem, of course, from a common source, all of us, from the rim worlds to the outposts toward the center. But as the centuries passed, as worlds became more isolated and independent from the parent civilization around Terra II, we began to develop variations in language.... Accents changed. Although it never reached the point where one man could not understand another, there was a different ring in the ear when one conversed, for example, with a rimmer and with a center worlder.... We are, in spite of our far-flung travels, one people. And the lengths to which we have gone to keep it that way, among them the enforcement of the standard language regulations, are for the good. [§11]
And the regulations are stringent: earlier in this novel, a university professor warns a student about his regional dialect, and notes it as a mark of provincialism. "Provincialism leads to nationalism. On the isolated planet of Zede II it was allowed to grow. Until, as one would cut out a cancerous growth, we eliminated it" (§6). The method of elimination—destruction of the planet—is surely the literary high-water-mark of vigorous prescriptivism.
4. These horrors, linguistic and otherwise, are not universal in science fiction. There are works that deal knowledgeably and artistically with the future of English, and in examining some of these, we begin with the language of a time close to our own. In Alfred Bester’s "Of Time and Third Avenue" (1951; C13), a man named Knight buys a 1990 almanac; the purchase would not be noteworthy, except that the time is 1950. Although Knight is unaware of his good fortune, the people of 1990 are not, and they send an official back to 1950 to retrieve the almanac, thereby preventing any unwanted repercussions from Knight’s knowing the future. In the history of a language, forty years is only a moment—barring cataclysmic occurrences, we would not expect a great deal of change—and there are no great changes in the language of Boyne, the man from 1990. His speech sounds a little different (a bartender thinks he might be a foreigner),19 and he uses a few words coined after 1950. At the climax of the story, he has just about convinced Knight that any gain he might make from reading the almanac would be, in a sense, cheated from history rather than won through his own efforts. At the peroration, Boyne proclaims, "You will regret. You will totally recall the pronouncement of our great poet-philosopher Trynbyll, who summed it up in one lightning, skazon line. ‘The Future is Tekon,’ said Trynbyll." The story uses language change convincingly, in a way that is both clever and understated, and contains no linguistic gaffes to distract our attention and diminish our enjoyment.
Not all visitors from the future are as trustworthy as Boyne. C.M. Kornbluth illustrates the dangers of gullibility in "Time Bum" (1953; C14). A real estate agent and his wife, a science-fiction buff, suspect an odd stranger of being from the future (this is not as fantastic as it may seem; he gives them good cause). A clandestine search of his house turns up a newspaper page bearing the date July 18, 2403. It reads:
TAIM KOP NABD:
PROSKYOOTR ASKS DETH
Patrolm’n Oskr Garth ’v thi Taim Polis w’z arest’d toodei at hiz hom, 4365 9863th Strit, and bookd at 9768th Prisint on tchardg’z ’v Polis-Ekspozh’r. Thi aledjd Ekspozh’r okur’d hwaile Garth w’z on dooti in thi Twenti-Furst Sentch’ri. It konsist’d ’v hiz admish’n too a sit’zen ’v thi Twenti-Furst Sentch’ri that thi Taim Polis ekzisted and woz op’rated fr’m thi Twenti-Fifth Sentch’ri. Thi Proskyoot’rz Ofis sed thi deth pen’lti will be askt in vyoo ’v thi heinus neich’r ’v thi ofens, hwitch thret’nz thi hwol fabrik ’v Twenti-Fifth-Sentch’ri ekzistens.
The story is too good to spoil by citing any more. It suffices to note that this English of the 25th century differs from our own only in its orthography. Both Bester’s and Kornbluth’s stories limit linguistic change to such comparatively superficial matters.
Respellings are not frequently used, on the whole, as a device to characterize the English of the future. One or both of two simple methods are probably the most often seen: the author notes some difference in pronunciation, and perhaps inserts a few new words. Bruce McAllister uses the first of these in his story "Benji’s Pencil" (1969; C4). It concerns the short career of another of those characters satirized so effectively in Woody Allen’s Sleeper, the frozen hero (since his name is Maxwell, a more appropriate term might be "freeze-dried"). He is revived after two hundred years, and is told that although the written language has not changed much, "inflections and the sectional dialects often make it hard for a ‘new’ person to understand." The speaker, the Introducer, has made a special study of the pronunciation of "past spoken languages" in order to speak to the reawakened. The first time Maxwell hears the new form of the language, it sounds to him like "nasalized English, chopped but softer than German." The impressionistic description of the sounds comes as a surprise, since Maxwell had been an English teacher, and one might have expected him to possess a more effective vocabulary to describe the changes.
All the usual methods of word-formation are represented in the coinages found in science fiction. They include both new formations such as goffin in James Blish’s "A Work of Art" (1956; C15), and old words used in new senses, such as golden in Samuel R. Delany’s "The Star Pit" (1967; C10).
Individual words and pronunciations come and go, however, and their appearance and disappearance shows no special creativity. In fact, Thomas M. Disch has complained specifically about this point as part of a more general criticism: "For some reason, most fiction, in proportion as it advances toward the farther reaches of space and time, grows lackluster and olive drab. Perhaps it’s only that against backgrounds so exotic the pulpy tissue that constitutes 80 percent of most SF becomes, more noticeably, lifeless. It does not grate nearly so much when Perry Mason sits down to a steak dinner for a chapter as when the same dinner is served on Aldebaran V in the year 2500. Even at a meal of hydroponic glop the table settings don’t change; some few new words are introduced, but the syntax is immutable."20
An author needs rather more imagination to conceive of a change in the language that goes beyond word formation, and the conception is doubly imaginative if the author can, at the same time, suggest a plausible reason for the change. An example of this more satisfying treatment of future English is found in David Karp’s One (US 1953). Karp’s excellent dystopian novel is set near the end of the twentieth century. The dictatorial government of England of that time uses two major weapons to enforce conformity among the masses: its hidden one is a network of informers who report regularly any forbidden word or action; the other weapon, just as secret in its purposes but open in its operation, is a growing religion, the Church of State. Church of State members are notable by their speech—they speak of themselves in the third person "as if they did not exist by themselves but only as part of a third group. Me, my, I, mine did not exist in the language of the Church of State families" (§2). In sketching a change in pronoun usage, Karp has gone the inventors of new words one better, and in selecting religion as the reason for the change, he has picked a force powerful enough to make the change possible. He even has historical precedent on his side—witness the continued Quaker use of thee after the word had become obsolete for most speakers.
George Orwell picked the same period for his much better known and much brassier Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). The adaptation of English in that novel, Newspeak, deserves its own study, but Newspeak, with the whole Ministry of Truth behind it, seems not as effective, nor nearly as possible, a means of thought control as the simple change of pronouns Karp depicts.
The changes we have seen so far occur in what might be called Standard Future English. Statements about dialect are infrequent in science fiction, and the use of several different social or geographical developments of the same language is rare indeed. It is tempting to attribute this omission to a general ignorance about dialect; science fiction’s occasional comment about present dialects is sometimes astonishingly misinformed—a character in one novel claims that Great Britain in 1950 had fifty-seven mutually incomprehensible dialects.21 It is therefore a pleasant surprise to find a story that not only shows an awareness of dialect, but illustrates it in a refreshingly irreverent way. In "The People Trap" (1968; C3), Robert Sheckley puts his hero through a Land Race, a contest in the teeming streets of an anarchical future Manhattan. The winner of the race receives an acre of stripped land, and the contest provides diversion and hope for the jammed-in masses.
During the race, the hero seeks a ride from the piratical captain of a Hoboken contraband runner: "Ye seek passage of uns?’ he declared in the broad Hobokenese patois. ‘Thin ee we be the Christopher Street ferry, hai?"’ The captain mistakenly gets the idea that the hero has a wife and children:
"Woife and tuckins?" the captain enquired. "Why didn’ yer mention! Had that lot myself aforetime ago, until waunders did do marvain to the lot...."
"Aye." The captain’s iron visage softened. "I do remember how, in oftens colaim, the lettle blainsprites did leap giner on the saern; yes, and it was roses all til diggerdog."
"You must have been very happy," Steve said. He was following the man’s statements with difficulty.
Steve puts his finger on the chief problem the writer faces: if there is little change in the language the characters are using, the reader has no trouble understanding it; if there is a great difference in the language, then the writer simply states that his characters are speaking in Old High Martian or the thirty-fifth-century development of a present tongue, and writes his dialogue in the English we know. But midway between these two extremes lies difficult ground. Samuel R. Delany solves the problem nicely in Nova (US 1968): some of his characters speak as natives a dialect of English that differs syntactically from that of the rest. The foreignness of their syntax keeps the reader linguistically aware of the exotic setting, while the familiar spelling and vocabulary allow him to understand what they say with a minimum of difficulty. Delany can therefore present whole pages of conversation in the dialect, which essentially consists of a verb-final sentence pattern: "Perhaps your cards of Prince and me will speak?" "In this race, the universe the prize is." Auxiliary do has disappeared from questions in this dialect: "What the cards about this owing into the night say?" "Where Prince and myself among the cards fall?" "Captain Von Ray, you well the Tarot know?"22 One sentence, however, if not a misprint, comes close to the border of unintelligibility; a woman reading the Tarot cards remarks that one’s fate is marked in the lines of the face, and Von Ray, pointing to his scarred face, asks: "From the crack across mine, you where those lines my fate can tell will touch?" But this sentence is not representative of the generally easy flow of the dialect.
A second, perhaps even more successful, example of an ambitious attempt to represent language change occurs in Robin S. Scott’s story. "Who Needs Insurance?" (1966; C16). In order to withstand a threat from outer space in 2106, Earth needs to increase her numbers of people with extra-sensory perception. One such, the 20th-century hero of the story, was killed in a raid on Ploesti in 1943, thus effectively preventing him from reproducing. A time traveler comes to our present time from 2106 and changes the personal history of the hero-narrator, keeping him safe through World War II, Korea, and helicopter duty in Viet Nam, thereby saving his precious genes for the future. In the story, when the narrator; during their first encounter, asks the time traveler if he is the "guy" who has twice saved his life, the time traveler answers in the English of his own day: "‘Yo. I be the guy.’ He pronounced ‘guy’ almost like ‘gooey.’ I couldn’t place the accent." The narrator, linguistically naive, describes the sound of the language impressionistically, and misunderstands its verbal system: "He spoke with broad vowels and clipped consonants, somewhat like a Yorkshireman I had served with in Korea. And he had trouble with verbs. ‘Thought’ was ‘thinked, ‘ran’ was ‘runned,’ and so forth." The traveler has, of course, no trouble at all with his verbs. The language has moved toward the regularization of all verbs by eliminating vowel change in the formation of participles, contractions, and past tenses:
So you see, Colonel Albers, I goed back through time to 1943, set up shop in London, and when I made the power source I goed on to Libya and installed it in your aircraft. Then I comed back in 1950, getted this building as a base, and coined on up to 1980.... Each time then, I comed up to the next five-year check to see if a letter from you will’d indicate that the steps I had tooked had beed effective.
Although there is ample evidence of the leveling of am/are/is to be, there is no occasion in the sentences of the time-traveler for the use of a regular verb in the third-singular-present, so that it is not possible to say whether that inflection has also been leveled. (The one occurrence of is, the two of might, and the one of tooked, may be put down to auctorial slips of the pen.)
Interestingly enough, the development that Scott predicts had already been suggested in Astounding Science Fiction, where in July 1938 L. Sprague de Camp published an article entitled "Language for Time-Travelers," discussing and illustrating historical change. Although de Camp’s brief essay is badly dated in many respects (that of dialects, for example) by more recent work in linguistics, his article is still generally sound, and, had his advice been heeded, could have prevented many of the errors displayed in the first part of this paper.
We are in a position now to make some generalizations about historical linguistics in science fiction. The first observation we might make is that science fiction is a window, not into the future, but into the present: in its stories we can find what the science-fiction writer knows about language in general and historical linguistics in particular. Sadly (especially for those who accept Harry Harrison’s criterion) that knowledge is seldom more than that of the man-in-the-street. In fact, exactly the same anxieties, ignorances, and misconceptions show up in the great majority of science fiction. By Harrison’s metric, we would have to downgrade the effectiveness of many of these stories.
It is not surprising that science-fiction authors should be so much more inventive with photons than with phonemes, and so much more knowledgeable about the future of galaxies than about the past of their language. The schoolteachers of many of these writers no doubt wasted their students’ time and tried their patience with interminable myths about shall and will, continual and continuous, and the like, hardly leaving time for real instruction about language, had they been competent to provide it. Science-fiction writers show us what the man-in-the-street knows about linguistic change, and it’s a paltry amount indeed. But on the whole, the genre is optimistic about man’s ability to solve his problems, and perhaps the competent treatments we have seen point to a time when the First Sound Shift will be as familiar to authors as the First Law of Thermodynamics. And although we know that some are wrong—those authors who expect no change at all in man’s language through his history—some could be right. Perhaps some of the changes indicated here will occur. In fact, one of the characters in Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity (US 1955) makes a comment about our language that will certainly be spoken someday: "‘This is the English the linguists are always talking about, isn’t it?’ he asked, tapping a page" (§15).
NOTES
1. Harry Harrison, "With a Piece of Twisted Wire," SF Horizons #2(1965):58.
2. The short-story collections used for this study: Cl, Isaac Asimov, ed., Before the Golden Age (US 1974); C2, Theodore Sturgeon, Sturgeon is Alive and Well (US 1971); C3, Edward L. Ferman, ed., The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, 18th Series (Ace Books, 1972); C4, Ibid., 19th Series (Ace Books, 1973); C5, Poul Anderson, Beyond the Beyond (US 1969); C6, James Blish, Galactic Cluster (US 1959); C7, Robert Silverberg, ed., The New Atlantis (US 1975); C8, Judy-Lynn del Rey, ed., Stellar 1 (US 1974); C9, Frederik Pohl, ed., Seventh Galaxy Reader (US 1964); C10, Samuel R. Delany, Driftglass (US 1971); C11 Groff Conklin, ed., Big Book of Science Fiction (US 1950); C12, H.L. Gold, ed., Galaxy Reader of Science Fiction (US 1952); C13, Damon Knight, ed., A Century of Science Fiction (US 1962); C14, C.M. Kornbluth, A Mile Beyond the Moon (US 1958); C15, James Blish, Best Science Fiction Stories of James Blish, rev edn (UK 1973); C16, Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison, eds., Nebula Award Stories Two (US 1967). The dates given in the text are for the first appearance of the story in print.
3. Philip José Farmer, Flesh (1960; NAL pb 1969), §2.
4. L. Sprague de Camp, Science-Fiction Handbook (US 1953), p 253. De Camp handles matters of linguistic interest as competently and imaginatively as any current writer.
5. Editorial note. Reading "To Here and the Easel" in the SFBC edn of Sturgeon is Alive and Well (US 1971 xiii+207), I find 50 occurrences of "thy/thine," all correctly distinguished ("thy" before a consonant, "thine" before a vowel or absolute) and three instances of a second-singular verb in the subjectless interrogative construction ("wouldst go to her...?" [p 12], "Art satisfied, girl?" [p 24], "Knowest the monster Orc?" [p 42]). There are 76 occurrences of "thou/thee": two of "thou" as the naming form ("call me ‘thou’"; "I use not the ‘thou’ of an intimate, but that of an animal" [p 12]); one of "thee" as predicate pronoun ("But, ’tis thee, my warrior-maid!" [p 221); 39 of "thee" as object, with none of "thou" as object; 15 of "thou" as subject, with the verb always second-singular ("thou wilt" [p 4]); and 30 of "thee" as subject, with the verb third-singular ("Thee deludes thyself" [p 27]) or indeterminate ("thee will" [p 3], "ere thee call" [p 27]).
This is all so systematic (right down to the subjunctive after "ere") that one must seek some explanation for Sturgeon’s use of "thee" as subject. In the story the narrator, Giles, has dreams derived from his childhood reading of Orlando Furioso, beginning with Rogero’s imprisonment by Atlantes and continuing with his rescue by Bradamante, with the difference that the Bradamante of Giles-Rogero is a dumpy Salvation Army type rather than the beautiful and statuesque warrior-maiden of Ariosto. This suggests that Sturgeon may have deliberately emphasized the mixed-up nature of the narrator’s dreams by mixing Quaker usages with the traditional archaic forms of literary English. —RDM.
6. De Camp (Note 4), p 179. De Camp was referring to a story of his own that, as he says, "threw my hero back into sixth-century Rome. I caused my characters to make a few remarks in Gothic to lend authenticity to the scene. After the book appeared I got a letter from a professor saying that while he liked the story, did I realize that I had caused a couple of these Gothic-speakers to use the nominative case when they should have used the vocative?"
7. C.F. Hockett in a letter to M.J.E. Barnes cited the latter’s Linguistics and Languages in Science Fiction-Fantasy (US 1974), pp iii-iv.
8. Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, "Mute Inglorious Tam," Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Oct 1974, p 112. The time of the story is about 1100.
9. Richard Wilson, "A Man Spekith" (1969), in World’s Best Science Fiction 1970. It is true that the OED records "Old English" as "in popular use applied vaguely to all obsolete forms of the language"; nevertheless, the Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor movie The Sandpiper was scored by one reviewer for (among other things) this same usage, and the standards of Hollywood should not be unsurpassable for the "World’s Best Science Fiction."
10. Ed Jesby, "Ogre" (1968), in C3.
11. The error the character makes, believing that there existed just one Earthly language, satirizes the common science-fiction practice of endowing a whole planet with a single speech—"The Martian language," for example. This particular habit has been burlesqued before. Anthony Boucher’s "Barrier" (1942; in Spectrum 4, ed. Kingsley Amis, US 1959) contains a similar incident, and is possibly the source for Moorcock’s treatment. M.J.E. Barnes (Note 7), pp 75-81, discusses "Barrier" at length.
12. De Camp (Note 4), p 253. In view of the notorious difficulty of measuring the rate of language change, it would be unwise to contradict de Camp’s statement about a decreasing rate of change, yet historically the literate are less hesitant about innovation than the unlettered.
13. A time machine that could visit the past would of course be of value to historical linguists; this observation did not escape Jack Vance in "Rumfuddle" in Three Trips in Time and Space (US 1973). He has a character, the inventor of a time machine of sorts, write in his memoirs, "We can chart the development of every language, syllable by syllable, from earliest formulation to the present" (§10).
14. Darko Suvin, "Parables of De-Alienation: Le Guin’s Widdershins Dance," SFS 2 (1975):267-68.
15. The Norton and NAL editions of A Clockwork Orange contain an Afterward and a Nadsat dictionary by Stanley Edgar Hyman.
16. Some years ago, a group of experimenters claimed to have proof of the molecular basis of memory. They taught flatworms to respond to light in a certain way, then ground up their students and fed them to a second group of flatworms, which were then supposed to have shown the same response to light without training. RNA was as much a term to be conjured with as chlorophyll had been twenty years before, so it was speculated that memory was somehow encoded in the RNA of the cells. New scientific ideas, of whatever validity, quickly find their way into science fiction, and this one was no exception. In Larry Niven’s "Rammer" (1971), in Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, ed. Lester del Rey (US 1972), a man frozen 200 years is revived. When he says to the defroster, "hasn’t the language changed at all? You don’t even have an accent," the defroster replies, "Part of the job. I learned your speech through RNA training." One hopes that it was not necessary to grind up a philologist to supply the RNA.
17. Fletcher Pratt, "A Critique of Science Fiction," in Modern Science Fiction: Its Meaning and Its Future, ed. Reginald Bretnor (US 1953), pp 83-84.
18. C1 (Note 2), p 373. Asimov did not stop learning; his works are notably free of linguistic errors, and he continues to be interested in language in science fiction: on reading an earlier version of this paper, he recalled a similar work published almost forty years ago, the article by de Camp mentioned in section 4 below.
19. Bester records the same perception, but in reverse, in "The Flowered Thundermug," in Dark Side of the Earth (US 1964), where the police of the 25th century, searching for a man from our own time, note that the fugitive talks "a little funny, like a foreigner."
20. Thomas M. Disch, Preface to "Et in Arcadia Ego," in Science Fiction: Author’s Choice #4, ed. Harry Harrison (US 1974).
21. Samuel R. Delany’s Nova (US 1958), §5. This novel is in other respects well-written and linguistically inventive, and will be cited later in another connection. One of the most recent award-winners, Ian Watson’s The Embedding (UK 1973) came into my hands too late to be considered in detail here, but it carries on the science-fiction tradition of dreadful handling of dialect matters.
22. Readers with some interest in generative grammars might amuse themselves by deciding whether Delany’s sentences can be produced by transformation from surface structures, or whether a different deep structure is required.
ABSTRACT
Science fiction has a special relationship to historical linguistics. In the genre, many plot situations present an immediate need for discussions of languages or portrayal of different language communities. Yet as C. F. Hockett has noted, the knowledge of linguistics shown in science fiction is low in general: it is abysmal when it comes to historical linguistics. Despite such exceptions as Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage (US 1968), Michael Moorcock’s An Alien Heat (US 1972), and Poul Anderson’s "Day of Burning" (1967 as "Supernova"), all of which use linguistics well for humor or historical verisimilitude, most writers of science fiction restrict their efforts to the coining of neologisms and fail to consider any structural changes in the evolution of languages. An author needs imagination (and knowledge of linguistics) to conceive of changes in language that go beyond formation of new words: the conception is doubly imaginative if the author can suggest a plausible reason for the change, as in Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. Science fiction is a window not into the future but the present. In its stories we can find what the science-fiction writer knows about language in general and historical linguistics in particular. Sadly, that knowledge is seldom more than that of the man-in-the-street, even in the case of such major writers as Arthur C. Clarke.
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