Analog SFF, July-August 2008
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Analog SFF, July-August 2008
by Dell Magazine Authors
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Science Fiction
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Dell Magazines
www.analogsf.com
Copyright ©2008 by Dell Magazines
NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.
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Cover art by Bob Eggleton
Cover design by Victoria Green
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CONTENTS
Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: CHOOSING TOOLS by Stanley Schmidt
Serial: TRACKING: PART I OF III by David R. Palmer
Science Fact: THE CHALLENGE OF THE ANTHROPIC UNIVERSE by Carl Frederick
Novelette: THE EXOANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE by Carl Frederick
Novellette: SAND AND IRON by Michael F. Flynn
Short Story: A PLETHORA OF TRUTH by Bond Elam
Short Story: LET THE WORD TAKE ME by Juliette Wade
Special Feature: HOOK, LURE, AND NARRATIVE: THE ART OF WRITING STORY LEADS by Richard A. Lovett
Reader's Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: ALL ABOUT TELEPORTATION by John G. Cramer
Probability Zero: OUTSIDE THE BOX by Jerry Oltion
Short Story: JUNKIE by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff
Short Story: IMPRINT by Kyle Kirkland
Novelette: SHOTGUN SEAT by Paul Carlson
Novella: TENBROOK OF MARS by Dean McLaughlin
Reader's Department: THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Tom Easton
Reader's Department: ANALYTICAL LABORATORY RESULTS
Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS
Reader's Department: IN TIMES TO COME
Reader's Department: UPCOMING EVENTS by Anthony Lewis
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Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: CHOOSING TOOLS
by Stanley Schmidt
As members of a technological civilization, we constantly use tools. A very young technological civilization—e.g., an early Paleolithic one—might have only a few kinds of hardware at its disposal: axes and knives, for example, barely sophisticated enough to demonstrate the principle. In such a situation, choice is not a major issue. You can use an axe or a knife, which you'll probably have to make yourself, and your plan for doing so will be approximate and generic. Precision design and variations for special purposes will evolve much later.
As members of a technological civilization that has been around for a long time, we constantly have to choose our tools from a selection that our distant ancestors would have found bewildering and overwhelming. (Sometimes we do, too.) There has been time for a great deal of evolution and specialization, and we've become numerous enough and prosperous enough to encourage it. Our knives, for example, have diversified into tools as different as machetes, scalpels, scimitars, claymores, Swiss Army knives, sabers, and saber saws. Each is optimized for a particular type of work. In picking one for a job in the real world, we often have to make choices based on conflicting requirements—or at least items on a “wish list.” In setting forth into the wilderness, for example, we might anticipate situations in which we'd like to have the cutting power of a machete and others in which we'd like the precision of a scalpel. But if we have to carry everything we're going to use for a week, we may settle on a Swiss Army knife because it combines the functions of several tools in a compact, lightweight package, even if it doesn't do some of those jobs quite as well as a tool dedicated exclusively to a single purpose.
But not all tools are hardware. One of the oldest and most powerful is language, which has done more than anything else to make concerted effort and time-binding possible. On one level, any language, such as English, Cantonese, or Esperanto, can be considered “a tool.” How do we choose which one to use? Most of us, most of the time, don't even think about it as a choice. We use the one that's prevalent in the culture we're born into, because that's the one that works in that environment. Sometimes we learn to use another for such reasons as an impending visit to a culture that uses a different one.
But how do cultures decide what language to use? At first glance the question may seem nonsensical, until you reflect that, on another level, a language is not so much a single tool as a tool kit containing such items as syntactic frameworks, schemes for verb conjugation and noun declension, and writing systems. Whether you choose to view those as small tools within a set, or features of a single tool, cultures do make choices about them, just as surely as individuals must decide whether to regard sharpness, strength, or light weight as the most important feature of a knife. How cultures make those decisions varies as widely as the available choices. Some do it by letting an informal consensus evolve through everyday use; others impose conscious control by means ranging from school curricula to periodic national congresses to standardize usage. As the Esperanto example in my list above suggests, on rare occasions individuals or groups even design a language from scratch.
And, just as we might like a tool we're designing or selecting in a hardware store to meet several not quite compatible requirements, so might we like a linguistic tool—such as a writing system—to do several things at once, such as being easy to use, easy to learn, and preserving a cultural heritage. How does a culture decide which qualities are how important?
I was vividly reminded of this dilemma during a brief but fascinating sojourn in Japan. Unlike many Americans, I enjoy learning languages, and have always tried to learn at least a little of the main local one before traveling to any place where it isn't English. Many European languages are closely related, so if you know one it's relatively easy to learn one or more of its “siblings,” and several have been widely adopted in other parts of the world. So I've been accustomed to being able to travel around large swaths of several continents with at least one comforting ability: I could read most of the signs I saw around me, and if I saw a word I didn't recognize, I could look it up.
Not so in Japan. There I was treated to the humbling experience of being essentially illiterate for a full week. I had learned to speak enough to be minimally functional in a range of everyday situations, but I could read almost nothing that I saw. Nor could I look it up.
I attribute this uncharacteristic deficiency in part to the fact that the months leading up to my trip were unusually busy, largely because of the need to meet a book deadline before leaving. But even if that had not been the case, I still would have fallen far short of my usual standards—because of the writing system Japanese has chosen to use.
All those European languages I mentioned earlier, and many others such as Turkish and Swahili, have one important feature in common: they all use alphabets. We tend to take this so much for granted that non-linguists tend to think of any writing system they can't read as “a foreign alphabet,” but this is not at all accurate. “Alphabet” specifically means a small set of symbols (we use 26, Hawaiian a mere dozen) used to represent the most basic sounds—vowels and consonants—of a language. Some languages do this much better than others. In Swahili the correlation between spelling and pronunciation is simple, logical, and almost perfectly consistent: you can always look at a word and pronounce it correctly on the first try, or hear it and know how to spell it. In Polish, difficult as those who haven't studied it may find this to believe, it's almost as good. In French, you can usually look at a word and tell how to pron
ounce it (though the rules for doing so are hardly simple), but you can't reliably tell how to spell a word from its sound. In English, the correlation is notoriously poor, largely because it has borrowed words from many other languages and in the process incorporated features of many different spelling systems. (George Bernard Shaw pointed out that we could spell “fish” as “ghoti": gh as in “laugh,” o as in “women,” and ti as in “nation.") Both Irish and Scots Gaelic are just about as bad, for different reasons: some vowels are pronounced as such, while others—and it's not easy to tell which ones—serve only to tell which of two pronunciations a neighboring consonant has.
On a subjective scale of 0 to 100, I'd rate the spelling-to-pronunciation fit of Swahili as about 99, Polish 95, French 45, and English or Gaelic 15. But even the worst of them only requires you to learn a few dozen symbols, and they do have at least an approximate correlation with pronunciation. Gh may be pronounced like g (as in “gherkin"), or f (as in “laugh"), or not at all (as in “dough"); but it is never pronounced like a, b, d, e, m, l, s, or a good many other things.
Now compare the situation in Japanese. The closest it normally comes to an alphabet is a syllabary, a set of symbols somewhat like an alphabet except that instead of representing a vowel or consonant, each symbol represents an entire syllable, like ba, ko, lu, or ouch. In Japanese, the correlation between syllabary symbols and sounds is quite good; but there are many more combinations of vowels and consonants than there are single vowels and consonants. Representing all the different syllables of Japanese requires somewhere between about 50 and something over a hundred different symbols. (English would require many more.) I give such a wide range for Japanese because the exact figure depends on how you count. Some of the symbols that could be counted could also be viewed as predictable modifications or combinations of others. Ga, for example, looks just like its unvoiced counterpart ka except for the addition of a pair of short apostrophe-like strokes, and other voiced-unvoiced pairs are related in the same way.
It's not even that simple, though. Japanese uses not one, but two syllabaries, each doing exactly the same set of things except that one of them is used only for spelling native Japanese words or grammatical elements, while the other is used only for borrowed foreign words. So the two syllabaries together contain a couple of hundred symbols that have to be memorized.
But that's the merest beginning. For complicated historical reasons, Japanese also routinely uses several thousand ideographs, complicated symbols adapted from Chinese, often containing many strokes and giving absolutely no clue to pronunciation. Each of these kanji represents an entire word, and can often be pronounced in two (or sometimes more) unrelated ways. For example, the word for “mountain” can be represented by a single kanji but read as either san or yama. Some of them do give clues to meaning, in an abstruse sort of way. Some of the simpler ones started life as pictographs, or stylized drawings of things like people or trees; and some of the more complicated ones were created by combining simpler ones, though in no easily predictable way. The upshot is that, for practical purposes, learning them means lots of memorization. The Japanese government has published a list of approximately 2000 kanji that everyone should know for everyday use, but there are enough additional thousands that an educated adult can go on learning new ones—sometimes after first being puzzled by them—for a lifetime.
From that description, you can see that achieving even an ordinary level of literacy in Japanese requires much more commitment of time and effort than doing the same thing in an alphabetic language. So why isn't Japanese written with an alphabet, instead of a mixture of two hundred-character syllabaries and thousands of ideographs? Certainly it could be. The phonetic structure of the language lends itself quite well to representation by our alphabet, and several slightly different schemes for such “romanization” have been developed and used (mostly in introductory courses and phrase books for foreigners).
The Japanese themselves are aware of the difficulties of their present writing system—the sheer number and complexity of characters, and the fact that many kanji can be read in more than one way—and there have been occasional campaigns to replace it with a purely alphabetic system (or at least use the syllabaries for everything). Proponents of such a change point out that a system of writing with a much smaller number of symbols would make it much easier and faster for people to become literate. People would be able to read just about anything after a relatively short period of learning, rather than going through their entire lives memorizing new characters. Certainly I, as a visitor with relatively little time to prepare, would have welcomed such a change. Had Japanese normally been written in romaji, I'm confident that I would have been able to read a fair number of the signs around me, and to look up unfamiliar words.
Yet all attempts to switch to such a system have failed. Part of the reason is a reluctance to let go of tradition (the Japanese culture has a fascinating, seemingly paradoxical, fondness for both ancient and ultramodern ways, for tradition and innovation). But there's more to it than that. The present system, dauntingly cumbersome as it may seem to someone raised on alphabets, actually has some advantages. Kanji tell you nothing about pronunciation, but they often do tell you something about meaning. Sometimes two unrelated words would look identical if written alphabetically (like the English lead, which is what a military commander or an orchestra conductor does, and lead, element 82 in the periodic table), but each would be represented by a different kanji, thus preventing ambiguity. Also, if you've learned enough kanji, you may recognize elements of them in a new character you encounter, and thus make an educated guess as to its meaning. (Admittedly we can do something similar in alphabetic languages such as English by recognizing roots such as pre-, cogni-, and -tion.) The argument that switching to an alphabet would promote widespread literacy is probably not very persuasive in Japan, since the Japanese already have very high literacy (though it might still be argued that if they used an alphabet they could spend less time acquiring literacy and more using it to learn other things).
Each system has both advantages and disadvantages. When you opt for the advantages of one, you forgo those of the other. As the saying goes, you pays your money and you takes your choice.
And once you've made your choice, it becomes harder and harder to change it later. Even if the Japanese did decide to switch to alphabetic writing now, the move might let upcoming generations learn to read more, sooner—while simultaneously making much of the older literature inaccessible to them unless somebody transcribed and republished it. Since the backlog is huge, so is the work that would be required to convert it.
Chinese is in a somewhat similar situation, but there both the disadvantages and advantages of the old system are even more pronounced. Chinese doesn't use syllabaries. It uses only the ideographs from which Japanese kanji were adapted, but it uses a lot more of them: tens of thousands. Thus the burden of memorization is even greater. On the other hand, China is a huge country, with large populations speaking “dialects” so different that, in their spoken form, they're mutually unintelligible. Yet they can all be written with the same ideographs, so people from different provinces can read each other's writings. This doesn't mean that people from different regions will express things exactly the same way, but they do come close enough to be able to communicate in writing. (Really the “dialects” might better be, and sometimes are, considered separate languages, each with its own vocabulary, but with grammars similar enough to be written with a single script.) If each person instead wrote an alphabetic representation of how he would speak what he wanted to say, someone in another province would get nothing from it.
Furthermore, the potential for ambiguity in writing Chinese alphabetically is extraordinarily high. There are something like 40,000 characters, each representing a monosyllabic “word,” but (in the “Modern Standard Chinese” based on the Mandarin dialect) only about 1600 different pronunciations for them (about 400 combinations of vowels and consonants
, each pronounceable in four different tones). There is now a pretty good alphabet (Pinyin) for showing Chinese pronunciation, but it's so inadequate for showing meaning that it's used almost exclusively as an educational adjunct to the characters.
For one final linguistic example, I've already mentioned the wild variations of spelling in standard English. Back in 1946, Dolton Edwards published in this magazine (then called Astounding) an article called “Meihem in ce Klasrum,” cleverly setting forth a method by which English could in a few years convert to a much more consistently phonetic spelling system, by redefining the use of one letter each year. But would we really want to? Certainly it would make it easier to spell accurately—but we would lose much of our present ability to figure out what unfamiliar words mean by recognizing Germanic, Latin, or Greek roots and seeing how they're put together.
Again, you pays your money and you takes your choice—and whatever you choose, you may be stuck with for a long time. So it pays to make those choices with as much thought as possible for what features are really important to you, right at the outset. And that's just as true whether you're dealing with languages, railroads, computers, or any other system of interrelated tools.
Copyright (c) 2008 Stanley Schmidt
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Peter Kanter: Publisher
Christine Begley: Associate Publisher
Susan Kendrioski: Executive Director, Art and Production
Stanley Schmidt: Editor
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