Misunderstood Archaisms

Confronted with yet another stretch of several rainy days in a row, I'm reminded of the passage in the New Testament that illustrates divine impartiality with the statement that God sends rain equally on the just and unjust. We residents of the often waterlogged east coast of North America could be inclined to think the rain falls as a punishment, as in this humorous verse:

"The rain it raineth every day

Upon the just and unjust fella,

But more upon the just because

The unjust hath the just's umbrella."

On the contrary, though, in the arid Middle East of the original quotation rain comes as a welcome gift.

We often hear about people morally "walking the straight and narrow." In the King James version of the Bible, Jesus' remark actually says that on the path to life "strait is the gate and narrow is the way." "Strait" means "tight," as in "straitjacket" (NOT straightjacket). And when you think about it in the context of the original quote, does a straight gate make much sense?

Nowadays the vast majority of educated people probably know Juliet isn't asking about Romeo's location when she says, "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" "Wherefore" means "why," a counterpart to "therefore." She's asking him to go by some other name instead of the one given by the family hers has a feud with.

The medieval expression "passing fair" sounds odd to us, like faint praise. Dorothy Parker wrote a sardonic poem on this topic that ends, "If minus D be passing, she is passing fair." Doubtless a brilliant writer such as Parker actually knew "passing" in this phrase is short for "surpassing"; a passing fair lady would have been a stunning beauty.

Mondegreens, misheard song lyrics, fall into a related but separate category. There's the probably apocryphal case of the child who named a teddy bear Gladly after the alleged title character of the hymn "Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear." I've often suspected many children, hearing the chorus of a favorite Advent song about the angel Gabriel's visit to the Virgin Mary, "Most highly favored Lady, gloria," may wonder why Jesus' mother is being called Gloria instead of Mary. Not a song, but church-related: One of our children once asked me whether "salvation" meant "wine." After all, the server offering the chalice at the Communion rail often recites, "The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation." Back to songs, after innumerable exposures to Creedence Clearwater Revival's lyric, "There's a bad moon on the rise," I still can't cure myself of hearing it as "bad moon on the right" (despite the implausibly political implication). WIth the mumbling way they deliver the line, "rise" really sounds like "right" even if I strain my ears.

Creative misinterpretations can be used to good effect in science fiction. For instance, in a STAR TREK episode the Enterprise discovers a planet with the rather silly premise that their societies evolved from a world identical to Cold War-era Earth, right down to the language they misread in their sacred document. (Maybe the Enterprise slipped into a parallel universe and didn't notice?) I once read a story of which I remember nothing except that a distant-future nation was named Tizathee, after their post-apocalyptic interpretation of "My country, Tizathee, sweet land of liberty." And in Jacqueline Lichtenberg's Sime-Gen series, the remains of Ancient highways are called "eyeways," because people assume they're named for the straight view of the landscape they offer.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt.

Gender Pronouns in SF

This week T. Kingfisher's new horror novel, WHAT FEASTS AT NIGHT, was published. Sequel to WHAT MOVES THE DEAD (a retelling of "The Fall of the House of Usher"), it features the same narrator, "sworn soldier" Alex Easton. The language of Alex's homeland, Gallacia, a tiny imaginary country in central Europe, has at least six personal pronouns. In addition to the typical masculine and feminine, they have a pronoun for rocks (and inanimate objects in general, I assume) and one applied only to God. Pre-adolescent children go by a special non-gendered pronoun, which is also used by most priests and nuns. Someone learning the language who accidentally calls a child "he" or "she" must apologize profusely to avoid suspicion of being a pervert. Sworn soldiers adopt a nonbinary identity and the pronoun "ka" (subjective) or "kan" (objective and possessive).

The idea of having a unique pronoun for God appeals to me. It would avert controversy over whether the Supreme Being is masculine or feminine. In much of Madeleine L'Engle's nonfiction work, she uses the Hebrew word "El" as the divine pronoun for that very purpose.

The masculine, feminine, and neuter system familiar to us is far from universal in real-world languages. French, of course, has only masculine and feminine, no neuter. Even "they" is gendered. Recently I was surprised to learn that Mandarin has no gendered pronouns at all. Japanese, on the other hand, has a daunting variety of pronouns with diverse shades of meaning. There are first-person pronouns used primarily by men and others primarily by women. I've read that Japanese women in positions of authority face the double bind of either referring to themselves in the feminine style and appearing weak or using a male-type version of "I" and sounding masculinized.

A chart of Japanese personal pronouns:

Japanese Pronouns

Until the 19th century, their language didn't even include a term for "she." A word was adapted for that purpose to provide an equivalent for the same part of speech in European languages.

As far as imaginary foreign or extraterrestial languages in speculative fiction are concerned, some authors embrace the concept of inventing pronouns, while others actively dislike and avoid it. At the time of writing THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, Ursula Le Guin fell into the latter category.

Le Guin discusses the gendered language she used in THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, on pages 16 and following of this essay:

Is Gender Necessary? Redux

The italic passages on the right sides of the pages express her later, revised thoughts about the topics covered in the original essay.

She critiques her own refusal to invent new pronouns for the alien society in the novel: "I still dislike invented pronouns, but now dislike them less than the so-called generic pronoun he/him/his, which does in fact exclude women from discourse; and which was an invention of male grammarians, for until the sixteenth century the English generic singular pronoun was they/them/their, as it still is in English and American colloquial speech."

This 2020 article by Ryan Yarber analyzes Le Guin's essay in depth, going into detail about the issue of personal pronouns:

Beyond Gender: Exploring Ursula K. Le Guin's Thought Experiment

As for this issue in real life, people have tried to introduce invented third-person pronouns in order to get away from the awkwardness of "he/she" or using "they" as singular. No such system has widely caught on. While languages freely borrow nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs from each other, the basic structural components are far more stubbornly resistant to change.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Decoding Brain Waves

Can a computer program read thoughts? An experimental project uses AI as a "brain decoder," in combination with brain scans, to "transcribe 'the gist' of what people are thinking, in what was described as a step toward mind reading":

Scientists Use Brain Scans to "Decode" Thoughts

The example in the article discusses how the program interprets what a person thinks while listening to spoken sentences. Although the system doesn't translate the subject's thoughts into the exact same words, it's capable of accurately rendering the "gist" into coherent language. Moreover, it can even accomplish the same thing when the subject simply thinks about a story or watches a silent movie. Therefore, the program is "decoding something that is deeper than language, then converting it into language." Unlike earlier types of brain-computer interfaces, this noninvasive system doesn't require implanting anything in the person's brain.

However, the decoder isn't perfect yet; it has trouble with personal pronouns, for instance. Moreover, it's possible for the subject to "sabotage" the process with mental tricks. Participating scientists reassure people concerned about "mental privacy" that the system works only after it has been trained on the particular person's brain activity through many hours in an MRI scanner. Nevertheless, David Rodriguez-Arias Vailhen, a bioethics professor at Spain's Granada University, expresses apprehension that the more highly developed versions of such programs might lead to "a future in which machines are 'able to read minds and transcribe thought'. . . warning this could possibly take place against people's will, such as when they are sleeping."

Here's another article about this project, explaining that the program functions on a predictive model similar to ChatGPT. As far as I can tell, the system works only with thoughts mentally expressed in words, not pure images:

Brain Activity Decoder Can Read Stories in People's Minds

Researchers at the University of Texas in Austin suggest as one positive application that the system "might help people who are mentally conscious yet unable to physically speak, such as those debilitated by strokes, to communicate intelligibly again."

An article on the Wired site explores in depth the nature of thought and its connection with language from the perspective of cognitive science.

Decoders Won't Just Read Your Mind -- They'll Change It

Suppose the mind isn't, as traditionally assumed, "a self-contained, self-sufficient, private entity"? If not, is there a realistic risk that "these machines will have the power to characterize and fix a thought’s limits and bounds through the very act of decoding and expressing that thought"?

How credible is the danger foreshadowed in this essay? If AI eventually gains the power to decode anyone's thoughts, not just those of individuals whose brain scans the system has been trained on, will literal mind-reading come into existence? Could a future Big Brother society watch citizens not just through two-way TV monitors but by inspecting the contents of their brains?

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Telepaths and Language

One panel I attended at this year's RavenCon was about communicating with aliens. I brought up the question of whether a telepathic species would have a spoken language or the concept of words at all, which was then discussed at some length.

Touch telepaths such as Vulcans don't count. A society could hardly exist if people had be touching each other to share feelings or thoughts, so Vulcans naturally have a language. I'm thinking of a species whose members would communicate by short-range thought transmission, needing to be in each other's physical presence or at most within line-of-sight. In my opinion, they would have no evolutionary reason to develop language. They wouldn't need words, let alone speech, because they would form mental images of whatever they're "talking" about. Somebody on the panel raised the issue of what kind of environment would cause them to evolve telepathy as their chief mode of communication. It would have to be a world where both hearing and vision would be unreliable for that purpose.

Stipulating such an unusual environment, why would they develop words? People wouldn't even have names; they would identify each other by mental images of the person they're "speaking" to or about. If they eventually encountered interstellar travelers from Earth, the telepaths would probably consider our mind-blindness a pitiable handicap.

In order to develop science and technology, however, this species would have to invent language sooner or later, if only a written one. A society beyond the hunter-gatherer level requires keeping records, communicating at a distance, and transmitting information to future generations. One panelist suggested a universal mental "cloud" all members of the species could tap into, like a worldwide telepathic mainframe. Such a phenomenon, though, would go far beyond the short-range, person-to-person telepathy I'm considering. A species such as the latter couldn't create what we'd think of as civilization without writing or the equivalent. That step would be harder than simply inventing the alphabet would have been in our world. In a society without spoken language or even the concept of speech and words, the invention of written or electronic communication might require a genius on the level of the creator of algebra or calculus in Earth history.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Communicating with Pets

Netflix has a new series called THE HIDDEN LIVES OF PETS. Although it sounds as if it should reveal what our pets do when we're not watching, it actually deals with the intelligence, sensory perceptions, etc. of domestic animals. Dogs, cats, and birds feature prominently, of course, but also such creatures as rabbits, small rodents, turtles, and even soccer-playing goldfish. The episode about communication between people and animals includes a lot of video footage about a dog named Bunny who has become famous for learning to use electronic push-buttons to "talk." This system goes way beyond the battery-operated collars that attempt to translate canine barks and body language into verbal messages (prerecorded and linked to various dog behaviors by the owner):

Petspeak Collars

Here's an article about Bunny, who became the subject of a research project at UC San Diego after she and her mistress, Alexis Devine, amassed millions of TikTok followers:

Bunny the Talking Dog

This dog communicates by pressing buttons on a floor mat, each activating a prerecorded word. As the article mentions, this system is similar to the experiments in which apes learn to select symbols on keyboards to express their wants. At the age of 15 months (in November 2020) Bunny had mastered 70 buttons, including terms such as "scritches," "outside," "play," and "ouch." More problematic words such as "more," "now," "happy," and even "why" are included. While watching the video clips on the Netflix program, I wondered whether an animal could really grasp an abstract concept such as "why." Our dog responds appropriately to quite a few words in addition to the basic commands, such as "upstairs," "downstairs," "inside," "outside," "food," "leash," and "plate." All those refer to concrete objects or actions, though.

Scientists at the Comparative Cognitive Lab "comb through" the Bunny videos rather than checking only a sample. “We want to make sure we’re not just getting cherry-picked clips.” They also watch for the possibility that the dog might be reacting to subtle cues from her human partner instead of recognizing what the buttons represent. And could she "understand" words at all in the sense we mean it? Even Bunny's owner believes she's "made an association between pressing a button and something happening" rather than learning language as we do. On the other hand, human infants start by simply associating sounds with objects, too. Fitting the words into the brain's inborn grammar template comes a little later.

The Petspeak collar and Bunny's button mat remind me of the "voder" the Venusian dragon in Robert Heinlein's BETWEEN PLANETS uses to "talk." Since the highly intelligent dragons don't have vocal organs suitable for human speech, the dragon character wears an electronic device that converts his communications into audible English sentences. It doesn't duplicate the STAR TREK universal translator, being programmed only for dragon-to-English conversion, but in the distant future something like it might be used to communicate with extraterrestrials.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Types of Telepathy

In reading THE SCIENCE OF STAR TREK, by Mark Brake, I'm naturally reminded of Vulcan telepathy (not discussed much if at all in this book, though). I don't recall the scope and nature of Spock's telepathic power being strictly defined in the original series. For complete access to the consciousness of another, Vulcans must perform a mind meld. From the episode with the alien Horta, we know language poses no barrier. Spock comprehends the thoughts of aliens through mind melds even if the other species aren't humanoid. However, he seems to exercise some limited form of telepathy without melding; in one later episode, we witness him silently "making a suggestion" to a humanoid antagonist who's not mentally on guard. The "Empath" episode introduces a young woman whose species, if she's typical, is mute. Rather than truly telepathic, they're empathic, sensing emotions but not thoughts. It seems unlikely that this species could have a technologically advanced culture, with no ability to communicate precise concepts, especially abstract ones.

Some theories of telepathy assume the participants must share a language for mutual understanding. Others postulate a universal mental "language" so that access to someone's thoughts automatically allows total comprehension. The title character of "The Mindworm," C. M. Kornbluth's classic psychic vampire tale, can hear the surface thoughts of everybody near him but can understand them only if the subject is mentally verbalizing in a language he knows (a limitation that proves his undoing when he clashes with Eastern European immigrants who recognize him from their native folklore).

Does a telepath "hear" only what the subject is thinking of at the moment or delve at will into all the contents of the person's mind? If the former, can you mask your secrets by deliberately thinking of something else? The telepath in Spider Robinson's VERY BAD DEATHS, so sensitive to the clamor of other people's minds that he lives as a hermit, picks up only surface thoughts. In Robert Heinlein's TIME FOR THE STARS, the telepathic twins "just talk," communicating silently in much the same way they do aloud. Trying to open themselves totally to each other's minds produces chaotic confusion, like being inside someone else's dream, so they don't bother.

On the other hand, some fictional telepaths can rummage through people's minds and quickly learn everything about the subject's past and present. Trying to conceal anything from a psychic with this power by simply thinking of pink elephants would be futile.

Here's a big question that I've never seen addressed, except implicitly in the STAR TREK "Empath" episode: Would a completely telepathic species have a language at all? It seems to me that they wouldn't have a reason to evolve it naturally. On the other hand, for any kind of advanced civilization to develop, surely they would have to invent language sooner or later. They would need a system of writing in order to keep records. They would need a way to communicate at long distance. Even if they got along without speech, surely written language would be a prerequisite for complex societies and any but the most rudimentary technology. It wouldn't evolve naturally, however. Geniuses among them would have to create it, as cultures on Earth invented mathematical notation. A first-contact premise of interstellar explorers from Earth meeting extraterrestrials whose only form of language is written, to whom audible speech is an alien concept, would make an exciting, challenging story.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Verbicide

The final chapter of C. S. Lewis's STUDIES IN WORDS shifts from the narrowly focused topics of the rest of the book (each chapter delving into the history of a particular term and its relatives) to a general overview of what he calls "verbicide," the degradation of the meanings of words. Not that he expects words to stay frozen in their original denotations. As he says somewhere else, expecting a changeless language is like asking for a motionless river. What he objects to are changes that empty words of meaning. Most words now used as insults or compliments began as descriptive, neutral terms. "Cad" is short for a reference to boys or young men, surviving in the golf term "caddie." "Villain" originally meant a peasant and eventually became derogatory when it grew to emphasize the alleged boorish, thug-like traits of the typical peasant. (That's almost certainly how Richard III uses it in Shakespeare's play; he plans to act like an uncouth brute, not a mustache-twirling incarnation of evil.) Now it just means a very bad person. "Gentleman" denoted a man of a particular social class before it gained the connotation of someone who displays the fine manners and honor expected of that class. By now it has lost all connection with class status and simply means a polite man or, even more vaguely, a man the speaker approves of. To call someone a good Christian, in Lewis's day, had come to signify a favorable opinion of the subject's behavior rather than a statement that the person belonged to a certain religion and believed, at least theoretically, in its doctrines. Lewis deplored the trend of turning previously useful words, which at least implied specific grounds for praise or condemnation, into yet more all-purpose synonyms for "good" and "bad." "Awful," which originally meant "awe-inspiring," evolved to mean "very bad." "Fantastic," which implied wildly imaginative or incredible, came to mean "very good." I shudder to think how Lewis would react if he visited our era and discovered "awesome" has morphed into a substitute for "very nice."

Speaking of "very," it has changed from meaning "truly" to a general intensifier that writers are advised to avoid. Mark Twain famously suggested that we replace every "very" with "damn." The editor would delete all the "damns," to the great improvement of our writing. (Not that this trick would work nowadays, when few editors would blink at that once-unprintable word.) As for "damn" itself, it has little more content than a snarl. To echo Lewis again, someone who trips over the furniture and exclaims, "Damn that chair!" doesn't really expect it to be endowed with a soul and condemned to eternal torment. "Literally" has become, for many casual speakers, another content-free intensifier even in statements the diametric opposite of literal.

Then there's the phenomenon of euphemism creep. Valiant attempts to replace taboo or insulting words with less offensive equivalents sooner or later result in the euphemism taking on the stigma of the word it replaces, so a new alternative has to be invented. "Retarded" originated as a euphemism implying a little slow rather than feebleminded. During my teen years, "idiot," "imbecile," and "moron" had already served as insults in popular speech for a long time, but high-school lessons on mental health taught us they still had sober scientific meanings in reference to precisely defined IQ ranges. In my youth, "colored" and "Negro" were the polite words for Black people; now they're considered at best old-fashioned, at worst offensively patronizing (except in the names of organizations such as the NAACP). Long before I was born, "toilet" shifted from a personal hygiene ritual to the room where it was often performed, then to a particular plumbing fixture in that room. As a result, in my teens I found the older use of "toilet" in Victorian novels puzzling, and at that age we were apt to snicker at the label "toilet water" for a type of perfume.

Writers can't stop language from changing, not that we'd want to. Nor can we hope to stem the flood of verbicide. What we can do is try to avoid the latter in our own prose. Aside from dialogue, where current slang such as "awesome" for "very nice" may fit the character, we can take care to use words in their proper context with precise meanings.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Gender Pronouns

Several years ago at a con session on the fantastic Pixar movie INSIDE OUT, starring personified emotions, someone in the audience asked why characters representing feelings had to be identified as male or female. Why did they need genders at all? The answer didn't occur to me until later: English doesn't have a neuter pronoun for a living, sapient creature. Since the characters of Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust in the film couldn't be called "it," they had to be labeled either "he" or "she." French, Spanish, etc. classify all nouns as masculine or feminine, not just those that refer to living creatures, with pronouns to match. Some other languages such as German and Latin have masculine, feminine, and neuter. However, as I discovered more recently, this requirement to distinguish the sexes by grammatical gender isn't universal among Earth languages.

I was surprised to learn that many languages have no gender pronouns to identify male and female, e.g, Tagalog, Turkish, Estonian, and some Chinese dialects, among others. Some have grammatical gender categorized by traits other than biological sex, such as animate and inanimate. Here's the Wikipedia article on this topic:

Genderless Languages

The Wikipedia page on the broad subject of gender-neutral pronouns in languages with sex-linked gender distinctions, such as English:

Gender Neutrality in Languages with Gendered Pronouns

A detailed overview of grammatical gender, citing several examples that classify nouns according to criteria other than biological sex:

Grammatical Gender

An English speaker's mind is apt to be boggled by the vast number of personal pronouns in Japanese (mine certainly was upon my first exposure to this fact). Many are distinguished by degrees of formality. Not only third-person but first-person pronouns often have masculine or feminine connotations. Some are used predominantly by a particular sex but not always. And some are gender-neutral.

Japanese Pronouns

I don't hold with the Newspeak premise in NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR that language controls thought. (And I don't think many professional linguists nowadays accept that position.) However, available vocabulary does make it easier or harder to talk about certain concepts. I do wonder how American society might be different if English had no gender-specific pronouns. Would people who identify as nonbinary have an easier time if they didn't have to choose invented pronouns or the awkward singular "they"? Would transgender people have it easier if relieved of one difficulty, persuading others to refer to them by their preferred pronouns instead of the "dead" ones? I wonder how language affects such issues in countries with gender-neutral personal pronouns.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Taboos as Time Goes By

I've been musing over the past couple of days about social taboos, particularly constraints on language. The latter especially affect writers; there used to be words that were labeled "unprintable" and seen on the page only in pornography. Norman Mailer's novel THE NAKED AND THE DEAD subsitutes a similar-sounding nonsense term for a common four-letter word frequently uttered by soldiers. An oft-repeated anecdote claims Dorothy Parker once said to him, "Oh, you're the young man who doesn't know how to spell f--k."

In everyday polite interaction, there are still some taboo conversational topics. We can hold forth at length about the excellent dinner we ate at a restaurant over the weekend. Among relatives or close friends, it's okay to "geeze" about one's bathroom-related physical problems. But we can't remark that we had great sex over the weekend, except to the person we had it with (or possibly in intimate, alcohol-fueled same-gender gatherings). That's never an acceptable topic for general conversation.

Taboos change over the decades, generations, and centuries, of course. Eighteenth-century novelist Laurence Sterne includes what appears to be a perfectly sober, respectable mention of the four-letter word for excrement in his TRISTRAM SHANDY. Radical shifts have occurred within my own lifetime. The "unprintable" F-word for sexual activity and S-word for excrement are now printed and spoken freely with (in my opinion) regrettable frequency. On the other hand, we're well rid of a term that was commonplace, although not considered polite, in my youth and is now so taboo that published works never show it written out, except sometimes in fictional dialogue—the N-word for Black people.

Consider the film of GONE WITH THE WIND. It gives the impression that the director made numerous concessions to be allowed that single "damn" in Rhett Butler's final line of dialogue. In the book, Prissy objects to being sent to look for Rhett at a "ho'house." In the movie, she has to say something like "Miz Belle's place." Earlier, we don't hear Scarlett's whispered question about the woman Rhett compromised; in the novel, it's shown as, "Did she have a baby?" When Rhett and Scarlett have a furious quarrel during her last pregnancy, Clark Gable says, "Maybe you'll have an accident," instead of using the word "miscarriage" as in the book. Most absurdly, when Rhett angrily tells Scarlett in the novel, "Keep your chaste bed," the movie rephrases the line as, "Keep your sanctity." Mentioning chastity is borderline obscene? LOL.

Non-verbal taboos, naturally, change too. In the 19th century, exposed feminine ankles were considered risque. Yet in some tribal societies, women routinely go bare-breasted in public. Film-makers used to be forbidden to show a man and woman in a bed together, leading to the notorious twin-bed arrangements of married couples on old sitcoms. Although I lived through part of that era, it still jars me when I watch old movies and TV shows and witness almost everybody casually smoking EVERYWHERE. And, to cite a custom not grounded in either health considerations or sexual mores, in my childhood a woman wouldn't be dressed correctly if she showed up at church without a hat or shopped at a department store in slacks instead of a dress or skirt.

Robert Heinlein casually drops references to changing social taboos into his novels. The protagonist of twin-paradox interstellar adventure TIME FOR THE STARS returns to Earth after almost a century of near-light-speed travel (still a young man) to be shocked that decent girls and women are no longer required to wear hats in the presence of unmarried males. After thirty years in cryonic sleep, the narrator of THE DOOR INTO SUMMER wakes from suspended animation to find that in the year 2000 a formerly innocent word, "kink," has become an unspeakable obscenity. In some subcultures in the far-future universe of TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE, nudity is perfectly acceptable at mixed-gender social gatherings.

For a fascinating exploration of why certain apparently irrational taboos and other "bizarre" customs have rational origins and serve pragmatic social purposes, check out COWS, PIGS, WARS, AND WITCHES (1974), by anthropologist Marvin Harris. Also recommended: His follow-up book THE SACRED COW AND THE ABOMINABLE PIG (1985), more tightly focused on food-related taboos and customs.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Talking with Aliens

When extraterrestrials visit our planet, or vice versa, will we be able to communicate with them? This article discusses the issue of learning alien languages:

If We Ever Came Across Aliens...?

Many linguists and psychologists maintain that the human brain is hardwired with a universal grammar. All human languages we know are built from variations on a few basic structures. Would intelligent beings who evolved on other worlds share the same innate grammatical structures we've developed? If not, an unbridgeable chasm might exist between the two species. The other theoretical framework, the cognitive view of language, places more emphasis on meaning—concepts and semantics—than on sentence structure. In that case, we might expect any sapient creatures to share certain "building blocks" of meaning. The difference between these two theories brings to mind the two main SF approaches to telepathy. In one view, mental conversation works like silent talking. The people communicating telepathically have to understand a common language. So there's no possibility of immersing oneself in another's mind and learning things he or she doesn't want to reveal. In the other approach, whole concepts are transferred from one brain to the other, and the receiver "translates" the transmitted thought into terms he, she, it, or they comprehend.

The article mentions the possibility that inhabitants of other planets might communicate in sound ranges inaudible to us. However, we might find more radical differences. Suppose the aliens' language consisted of flashing lights, bands of color, carefully modulated odors, or hand (or tentacle or pseudopod) signals? They might not recognize our mouth noises as attempts at communication. In CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR, an incident in the early life of orphaned Cro-Magnon child Ayla illustrates problems that might occur even between two human subspecies. The Neanderthal shaman, trying to teach Ayla the Clan's language, worries because she's so slow to catch on. Maybe she's mentally impaired? Meanwhile, Ayla wonders why he keeps waving his hands around, distracting her from hearing his words. The breakthrough occurs when she realizes hand signals constitute the core of the Clan's language, with oral speech in a secondary role.

The classic story "A Martian Odyssey," by Stanley G. Weinbaum, features a friendly alien whose language doesn't contain words with any fixed meaning. Every sentence is unique. While I can't quite visualize how that would work in practice, it's a fascinating idea. In one of the most thought-provoking episodes of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION, Captain Picard deals with a species who converse in metaphorical allusions to cultural myths and legends. (As I've heard someone mention—probably Jean Lorrah—this mode of discourse can't be their only language; at the least, there must be a children's dialect for communicating with offspring too young to know the metaphors. Also, in my opinion they have to possess a straightforward denotative dialect for scientific and technical use.) In Robert Heinlein's BETWEEN PLANETS, the highly intelligent dragons of Venus wear electronic devices that translate their mode of communication into grammatical sentences in a Terran language. (In the case of the dragon who becomes a friend of the hero, it's English, of course.) I have faith that no matter how aliens converse, we'll figure out ways to bridge the linguistic gaps.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Canine Conversations

A speech language pathologist, Christina Hunger, claims to have taught her dog, Stella, to "talk":

Can That Dog on Instagram Really Talk?

The communication method depends on a soundboard like those used by some apes, with the animal pushing buttons that stand for words. They produce sound recordings of words such as "outside" and "play." According to the author of the above article, Jane C. Hu, a cognitive scientist, there's little doubt that Stella "understands" the meanings of some buttons in the sense that she knows certain actions, in terms of choosing a button to push, cause certain results. Was she deliberately combining words to form a message when she pushed "outside" followed by "Stella"? Maybe. I'm highly skeptical, however, that she combined "good" and "bye" to make "goodbye" or that "'Later Jake' (Jake is Hunger’s partner), in response to him doing a chore, meant 'do that later'," and Hu seems to agree. Granted, it would be big news to discover "a dog could plan future events and express those desires," but does Stella's performance prove her capable of abstract thought to that extent?

I'm neither a cognitive scientist, a linguist, nor a zoologist. Reacting as an interested layperson, though, I don't go so far in the skeptical direction as a critic of ape communication I read about somewhere who dismissed an ape's situation-appropriate use of "please" as the animal's having been trained to push that particular key before making a request. How is that different from a toddler's understanding of "please"? He or she doesn't start out knowing what the word "means." It's simply a noise he has to make to get adults to listen when he wants something.

Another catch in interpreting Stella's dialogues with her mistress, as pointed out by Alexandra Horowitz, a psychology professor and expert on dog cognition, is that the dog's "vocabulary" is limited by the available buttons. Also, it's possible that Stella, instead of acting independently, may be responding to unconscious signals from her owner. Yet we know dogs do "understand" some words in the sense of associating specific sounds with things, people, and actions. A border collie (recognized as one of the most intelligent breeds) named Rico is famous for his 200-word vocabulary. After being ordered to go fetch any one of the objects whose name he knew, he could get it from a different room, a procedure that eliminated the risk of his picking up cues from a human observer:

Rico

Psychologist Steven Pinker, author of THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT, takes a dim view of attempts to teach animals some form of human language, as if learning to "talk" would prove the animals' intelligence. He maintains that rather than trying to induce apes and dolphins to communicate like us, we should focus on understanding their own innate modes of communication. He may have a point. If IQ were measured by how many different odors one could distinguish, how would our "intelligence" compare to that of dogs?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Afterthoughts Part 3 - Grimdark in Genre Fiction

Afterthoughts

Part 3

Grimdark in Genre Fiction 

Part 1 

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2021/04/afterthoughts-part-1.html

Part 2

https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2021/06/afterthoughts-part-2-good-and-evil.html

I found a question posed on Facebook in Fantasy & Science Fiction Writers Group by Jonathan Russell on May 5, 2021, "Is anyone else sick to death of Grimdark in genre fiction?"  

----Wikipedia quote-----
Grimdark is a subgenre of speculative fiction with a tone, style, or setting that is particularly dystopian, amoral, or violent. The term is inspired by the tagline of the tabletop strategy game Warhammer 40,000: "In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war."[1][2]
---end Wikipedia quote-----

I responded as follows.  

Art requires contrast.  

The problem with "Grimdark" genre fiction is not the presence of ugly-underside-of-human-nature, or even the thematic statement that life is hopeless, Evil Always Wins. 

Those elements are present in the real world, and thus have a place in works of art such as Genre Fiction.  However, as in "reality" the whole point of there being "darkness" is that it showcases the "light."  

Light without darkness is just blinding and meaningless.  

Our current problem stems from an absence of "light" not the presence of "dark."  

This historic origin of this "Grimdark" view may be a shift in our daily vocabulary, likely due to popular self-help books trying to buck up the dejected.  

It was suddenly recommended, as a prescription to fix society, that strong demands for performance in any situation were responsible for an epidemic of depression.  Therefore, no employee should be required to do more than they "can." The employee got to decide what they can or can't do - where the limits to their efforts should be. 

As a result, it became "politically correct" to explain one's failures as "I'm doing all I can."  Which declaration immediately let you off the hook because you weren't responsible for doing something you obviously can't do.  That was an entirely NEW concept in American culture, peopled at that time with the "Can Do" Generation.  

Promises and guarantees went from "I'll do it," to "I'll do all I can" which morphed into meaning under no circumstances will I enlarge my inventory of what I can do in order to accomplish what I've promised.

We accepted limits imposed from without (or within) as "real" and the violation of those limits as "wrong."  We must stay within limits.  

Under no circumstances may you do what you can't.

THAT IS NOT THE ATTITUDE OF A HERO.  

Science Fiction is the literature of ideas -- and adopted that idea, that heroism itself is wrong because to be a hero you must do something that is beyond your ability, and beyond the limits of the possible.  

Going faster than light was (is) considered impossible. Science fiction presented many visions of what we could do if we could break the "light barrier" as we once broke the "sound barrier."  Breaking the sound barrier was deemed impossible.  We did it. Getting into orbit was deemed impossible. We did it.  And so forth -- life was lived for the purpose of doing what you can't.

Today it is deemed anti-social to transgress limits set by others -- you must only do what you can.  You are never responsible for succeeding if it means doing what you can't do (thus changing where the "here be dragons" line lies on your psychological map.)

Science fiction like all fiction and all art reflects the audience's view of reality.  Writers are spokesmen for those who can't craft words to describe what they feel.  

Is Elon Musk only doing all he can?  

Marriages fail when one party refuses to do something they can't do.  Marriages succeed when both parties ignore their limits and do whatever it takes, regardless of any previous limitations.  

Every first novel ever written was an exercise in doing something you can't do -- before writing that novel, you "can't" write a novel.  You change reality by doing what can't be done. '

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com 

Hacker Ways And The Decline of Language

Decadent thought leads to decadent language, which leads to even more decadent thought... and a vicious vortex of decay and corruption ensues. Is the process accidental or deliberate?

In "Politics And The English Language", George Orwell compares sloppy language to a sloppy drunkard.

"A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." 

 

In 1945/1946, Orwell seemed to believe that the decline was reversible and clarity of thought and expression could be revived if writers and speakers made an effort and followed simple, critical rules such as:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/

 

Today, public speakers appear not to know the difference between a benefactor and a beneficiary, or between an expletive (noun) and something that is explicative (adj).  Badly written advertisements don't say what the advertiser intends: "Like you, my hands mean everything to me." "Report your allergy to your doctor."  "As a scientist, my dog..."  How supportive of vaccine acceptance is it for one Medicare coverage provider to be advertising, "With all the uncertainty of the virus AND VACCINE..."?

 

The one-time service to help copyright owners remove infringing copies of copyrighted works from the internet, MUSO writes about the predictive value of piracy , based on a study conducted in Europe.

They describe pirates as a bellwether, and explain (approximately) what a wether is... while decorously omitting the difference between a ram and a wether.  In a nutshell, a wether is castrated.

 

If one has to explain ones metaphor or simile, and if one cannot explain it fully, perhaps the metaphor is dead and the imagery stale. That said, I dropped the "nutshell" knowingly.

 

While MUSO  may or may not be pivoting to a marketing business,  the authorities in Canada seem to have less use for intellectual property pirates.

Legal bloggers Ken Clark and Lawrence Veregin  representing the combined intellectual property team of Aird and Berlis LLP and Aird and McBurney LP predict the beginning of the end of online piracy in Canada, and describe how Take Down and Stay Down will work --in Canada-- via real time site blocking.

https://www.airdberlis.com/insights/blogs/thespotlight/post/ts-item/the-beginning-of-the-end-of-online-piracy-in-canada

On hacking, Mary B. Ramsay and Grant P. Dearborn of  Schumaker Loop and Kendrick discuss the devious ways of Hackers and the risk from phishers phishing. Never give your email address and PW in order to open an attachment, even if it appears to have come from your better half or significant other.
 

There is a story involving far greater effrontery than that shown by all those young men who make telephone calls to seniors in the hope that the senior victim will find it plausible that he or she has a grandchild in immediate financial distress... but with access to Bitcoin or Western Union.

Lexology link
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=06214f43-8b53-46d1-9281-076a4569a61a

Original link:
https://www.shumaker.com/latest-thinking/publications/2021/06/client-alert-the-risk-from-phishing

The news has covered the Colonial Pipeline and the JBS meat packer hacks but less has been said about the hacking of iConstituent, perhaps because the latter is less inconvenient to the public.

Apparently, according to at least two sources, sixty members of the US Congress have been hacked or phished, and as a result they lost their access to iConstituent.  If you notice a pause in the begging letters and emails, you might infer that your Congressperson's internet hygiene is --or was-- substandard.  Maybe if your trusted Congressperson sends you an attachment or link, you should not open it or click through.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/congress-ransomware-attack-internet-latest-b1861759.html

https://www.techtimes.com/articles/261214/20210608/new-ransomware-targets-congress-members-complete-breach-iconstituent.htm

On that happy note...

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/  http://www.rowenacherry.com

EPIC Award winner, Friend of ePublishing for Crazy Tuesday   

 

Me Tarzan, You Jane

Recently I've watched several Tarzan movies, including two of the classic Johnny Weissmuller films. It's always annoyed me that this version of Tarzan is so inarticulate, speaking in broken English although he seems to understand the nuances of standard English as spoken by Jane. The 1984 production GREYSTOKE: THE LEGEND OF TARZAN, LORD OF THE APES portrays him as eventually learning to speak grammatically, although he remains reserved and laconic. In Edgar Rice Burroughs' novels, Tarzan not only learns French and English in the first volume (TARZAN OF THE APES) but also becomes fluent in multiple other languages over the course of the series. Moreover, while still living with his ape tribe, he teaches himself to read English from children's picture books found in his dead parents' abandoned cabin. Which of these representations of Tarzan's language acquisition is more realistic, though?

Real-life "feral children"—those who've grown up with limited or no normal human contact—seldom acquire fully developed language skills in later life. (From my cursory skim of Wikipedia entries on the topic, possibly some do, but that's uncertain.) The majority consensus among linguistic scientists maintains that human children have a critical period for learning to speak normally. The innate "language instinct" needs material to work with during that window. Everyone knows the story of Helen Keller's childhood and how she learned language from her "miracle worker" teacher. Keller, however, didn't become blind and deaf until the age of nineteen months, so she had been exposed to the spoken word and had probably started learning to talk. Therefore, she didn't totally miss the "window" of the critical period. In recalling the moment when she realized the meaning of the sign for "water," she wrote that she experienced "a misty consciousness as of something forgotten — a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me." The concept of language, then, wasn't completely new to her but came as a "returning thought" of "something forgotten."

With these principles applied to Tarzan's development, does he have the required exposure to a template for language during the critical period of infancy and childhood? In Edgar Rice Burroughs' original novel, Tarzan is orphaned when too young to start talking to any meaningful extent. Since he's about a year old when his parents die, however, he would have heard conversations between them and begun to recognize some words, maybe even say one or two. So, like Helen Keller, he's exposed to language during the early imprinting stage. After his adoption by his ape mother, he grows up learning the speech of the great apes—the Mangani. It seems likely that the Mangani aren't any known variety of ape (certainly not gorillas, as in the Disney animated movie, because gorillas are explicitly mentioned as different from Tarzan's tribe) but rather, as Philip Jose Farmer suggests, an almost extinct "missing link" species. As portrayed in TARZAN OF THE APES and its sequels, they have a language, but a rudimentary one. It seems to consist entirely of concrete rather than abstract words, have a simple grammatical structure, and focus on present needs. The limitations of Mangani speech, however, wouldn't necessarily prevent Tarzan from learning fluent English as an adult. He might be compared to the children of pidgin speakers (people with no language in common who invent a simplified mode of communication, a "pidgin" dialect). In many known cases, those children have used their parents' speech as the basis for a fully developed "creole" language. Tarzan's achievement of teaching himself to read with no prior knowledge of what books are might strain the reader's disbelief, but as we can tell from how easily he picks up new languages in later life, the author portrays him as a natural linguistic genius.

In the Weissmuller movies, Tarzan's ape friends are played by chimpanzees, which wouldn't have a true language. Therefore, it actually makes sense that this version of Tarzan might learn to comprehend standard English without ever gaining the ability to speak it fluently. He missed the critical window. In GREYSTOKE, he communicates with the apes by sounds and gestures, but there's nothing to indicate that they're speaking a language in the human sense. So it seems improbable that he'd master English as thoroughly as he does in this movie, especially since he looks well under a year old when his ape mother adopts him. Personally, though, I prefer an articulate Tarzan even if suspension of disbelief has to be stretched to accommodate him.

Robert Heinlein's STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, of course, reverses Tarzan's situation. The biologically human "Martian," Valentine Michael Smith, grows up among creatures MORE intelligent than Earth-humans, with a more complex and nuanced language. Mike, like Tarzan, has to learn to become fully human, but from the opposite direction.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

An Ethical Duty of Civility?

The National Conference of State Legislatures publishes a magazine called (appropriately) the STATE LEGISLATURE MAGAZINE. Their July/August 2019 issue contains an article titled, "Is There an Ethical Duty to be Civil to Our Rivals?" My spontaneous answer is, "Yes, of course, you betcha." And, indeed, one recent survey finds that 93% of Americans believe our nation has a "civility problem." So, if the vast majority of Americans think we need more civility, why do we have a shortage of it? The article points out that inflammatory remarks and "negative campaign strategies" often backfire, causing the public to react against the perpetrators of "uncivil attacks." When this kind of behavior becomes too prevalent, it not only lowers the general tone of political discourse but tends to damage "the public perception of government and public officials overall." The article does suggest, however, that sometimes a "middle ground" between civility and "extreme incendiary language"—flavoring one's assaults on the opposing position with a dash of snark—can be effective for winning support.

Granted that the past is a different country, nevertheless I feel a certain nostalgia for the historical eras—if they actually existed—when even men preparing to kill each other in duels exchanged challenges in unfailingly courteous language. It costs nothing to be polite instead of rude, and claiming the high ground makes one's opponent look worse in comparison. Does this constitute an "ethical duty"? I think so, because a pervasive attack-mode verbal culture may lead to concretely harmful actions. Ben Shapiro, by the way, makes a distinction between "inflammatory" speech (which, he acknowledges, is still wrong) and speech that actively incites to violence. This strikes me as a valid distinction in principle, but in practice it seems that drawing the line between the two would be difficult and delicate.

Maybe the unpleasantness all too prevalent in political discourse arises from a version of the Prisoners' Dilemma, which you've probably heard of. Here's the Wikipedia explanation of it:

Prisoners' Dilemma

In short (if I understand the setup correctly), the prisoners will achieve the best outcome for both of them if both behave generously. Since they aren't allowed to communicate, though, if each assumes the other will turn informer then betrayal appears to be the optimum strategy. Do politicians and pundits fear that if they're the first to act nice to their opponents, they'll place themselves in a position of weakness?

What would highly advanced extraterrestrial visitors think about the behavior of our public figures? Imagine a society like that of Vulcan, or what Vulcan at least claims to be. Its purely rational citizens would argue the merits of each controversy on logical grounds, and theoretically the discussion would reveal the obvious solution to the problem, which rational beings would naturally agree to carry out. A hive-mind species would presumably have no trouble reaching consensus quickly, because they would all have the same factual knowledge and complete access to each other's opinions and motives. Klingons, on the other hand, would probably wonder why we don't settle political disagreements through trial by combat. Now, although that wouldn't be rational, it would certainly make election campaigns more exciting while not necessarily discourteous.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Unjust Deserts

This opinion piece is not about a miscarriage of justice in the dunes, but about the destructive power of repetition of a particular word: "deserve".

A purveyor of a skin care regimen says that if you have breakouts, you "deserve results" so you should use its products.

A Medicare Advantage plan spokesman querulously says, "I wasn't getting all the benefits I deserve..."

An eloquence of  lawyers promise to "fight for the compensation you deserve", or "the settlement you deserve," or the "results you deserve", or most blatantly, "the money you deserve". One offers representation for "deserving victims".

(For a compendium of collective nouns such as "eloquence of lawyers", look here: https://7esl.com/collective-nouns/ )

A laser surgery provider claims that viewers "deserve the difference..." that that provider makes.

"Get the relief you deserve," boasts a circulation boosting product.

"The justice you deserve," promises a body camera marketer.

"... women are standing up for what they deserve..." which turns out to be vaginal lubrication jelly. Ouch.

"You deserve" = "You are entitled".

Why is anyone entitled to flawless skin, silver sneaker gym membership, compensation, relief, the right to video record strangers without their knowledge or permission?  The answer is, one is not entitled. One "deserves" that for which one pays. Those who do not shell out, are by implied definition "undeserving". If some victims are "deserving", by what criteria are other victims not deserving?

Netflix told us, perhaps tongue in cheek, that Frank Underwood was "the leader we deserve". Until he wasn't.  This point was made in a fascinating NY Post article that charts the migration of "deserve" language from product hype to political language.
https://nypost.com/2016/01/16/what-americans-deserve-how-politics-copied-advertising/

Well, slogan writing is writing. Speech writing is writing. Awareness of words, their power, and how they are used is the bailiwick of the writer. A writer should be curious and inquisitive. Is the popularity of "deserve" mere imitation, laziness, a tried-and-true signature tag of one advertising house, or could one float a conspiracy theory?

If writing the backstory of a dystopian novel, would one include the concept of "deserve" or something similar to divide and rule, to overthrow and subjugate and stir discord?

Does hearing "you deserve..." tend to make discontented those who cannot afford to buy that (product) which they allegedly would deserve, if they did buy it.

Words, like water, have power to undermine, to create sinkholes, to wear away stone. In this age of television, film, internet, social media, the old saying, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me," is no longer true.

If you do a search for "Deserve", you will find some pretty ugly posters.

By the way, of the new "words" added to the dictionary last year, perhaps the saddest is TL:DR (too long, did not read).


All the best,

Rowena Cherry

Telepaths and Language

I've been reading the early books in the Honor Harrington series. The one I'm into now, ASHES OF VICTORY, includes a conversation about the possibility of teaching the intelligent, telepathic treecats American Sign Language so they can communicate with humans. (A few have empathically bonded with human partners, as in the link between Honor and her treecat, Nimitz, but even so the content consists of emotions and impressions, not language.) One of the greatest difficulties mentioned is that treecats, as a fully telepathic species, don't have a verbal language of their own.

This isn't the first place I've encountered the assumption that telepaths wouldn't develop language. (Those who "speak" freely with members of their own species mind-to-mind, that is, not touch-telepaths like Vulcans or others for whom mental communication depends on a personal bond.) But is that necessarily true? Granted, they wouldn't need to evolve language if they possess fully developed mental communication. Wouldn't they eventually have reason to invent it, though? Once a civilization becomes complex enough to require long-distance communication, it seems that a language composed of words or analogous symbols would be vitally needed. Furthermore, it's hard to imagine how a civilization could advance beyond a certain level without a means of recording information in a permanent form. Also, technology arises from science, and science needs mathematics. Math is a language of a sort. So by the time we made first contact with a society of telepathic aliens, it seems they would probably have a concept of language in some form; they would therefore be open to the concept that we "handicapped" mind-deaf Earthlings need that kind of medium to share information.

The dragon character in Heinlein's BETWEEN PLANETS belongs to a species whose vocal apparatus can't produce the sounds of human languages. He wears an electronic device that translates his speech into English. Something like that might work for telepaths. If their culture is advanced enough to have invented math, they should be able to understand the purpose of a device that shapes thoughts into audible or visual code.

In one STAR TREK episode, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy get captured by highly advanced aliens (again!) and meet a young woman who's empathic and mute. Her innate lack of speech suggests that her species communicates solely through mental channels. We can't tell whether she understands the human characters' thoughts or simply feels their pain.

What do you think? How hard would it be for a telepathic species to grasp the concept of words and syntax, then learn to use them for communication?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The Problem with "They"

Nowadays it's not uncommon to meet people who don't identify with either pole of the standard "he" and "she" binary. "It," our only singular neuter pronoun, doesn't work for sentient creatures. "They" is often used as a gender-neutral pronoun in these cases. My elementary school and high school teachers hammered into our heads (and your teachers probably did the same to you if you're close to my age) that singular "they" is ungrammatical and should never be spoken or written by literate persons. Those who hold the contrary position point out that singular "they" for subjects of unknown gender has been around for at least 600 years. I can grit my teeth, defy my early training, and accept that usage in a case like this:

"Somebody left their car keys in the lounge."

That sentence refers to a hypothetical or unidentified person. This example, however, seems fundamentally different to me:

"Lee left their car keys in the lounge."

A pronoun that's nominally plural applied to a single, known individual just sounds weird. The one exception that comes to mind, the "fusion" characters in the animated series STEVEN UNIVERSE (made up of two or three individuals temporarily fused into a composite person), isn't likely to be met in everyday life.

If we don't want to say "they" in place of "he" or "she," though, what do we do? (Well, aside from asking what pronoun a given person prefers, as the page linked below suggests.) The phrase "he or she" might work in writing but would be cumbersome in speech. Besides, as mentioned, some people don't identify with either one of those. We could repeat the proper name every time instead, as some church liturgies do to avoid assigning a sex to the Supreme Being (including the odd compound "Godself"). Madeleine L'Engle often refers to God by the ancient Hebrew word "El" instead of "He" or "She." In ordinary conversation, though, constantly repeating a person's name sounds awkward. What about inventing a neuter or inclusive pronoun, which has often been tried?

This page discusses gender-inclusive and gender-neutral pronouns, with a brief historical overview of these words and a chart of gender-neutral pronouns that have been coined and used in some speech communities:

Gender Pronouns

There's a surprising variety of neologisms proposed to solve this problem, and no consensus term has been adopted in popular speech. As linguistic scholars tell us, the basic building blocks of a language resist change. In the course of its development from Anglo-Saxon, English has freely adopted such parts of speech as verbs, nouns, and adjectives from Latin, Greek, French, and many other languages. A familiar joke declares, "English doesn't borrow from other languages. It mugs them in dark alleys, rummages through their pockets, and takes what it wants." Structural elements such as pronouns, however, are a different matter—with some little-known exceptions mentioned on the page cited above.

The languages of aliens with more than the two sexes displayed by typical Earth mammals would include other gender pronouns. Writers who create such aliens can invent words to match. Transforming languages actually spoken in our own cultures isn't so easy.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Reviews 27 - FOREIGNER SERIES by C. J. Cherryh #16 and #17

Reviews 27
FOREIGNER SERIES
by
 C. J. Cherryh
#16 Tracker
#17 Visitor 

C. J. Cherryh has structured her very-very long series of Foreigner novels into trilogies.  I'm going to discuss #16 and #17 here, and no doubt will return to this series again as we expect one more novel in this 6th trilogy in the Foreigner Series.

It is a study in worldbuilding as well as Relationship driven plotting.

Here is the complete Kindle collection up to #16 on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Foreigner-Series-16-Book/dp/B0159KHS5A/

Here are the books so far, in publication order:

Foreigner, DAW Books, 1994.
Invader, DAW Books, 1995.
Inheritor, DAW Books, 1996.

Precursor, DAW Books, 1999.
Defender, DAW Books, 2001.
Explorer, DAW Books, 2002.

Destroyer, DAW Books, 2005.
Pretender, DAW Books, 2006.
Deliverer, DAW Books, 2007.

Conspirator, DAW Books, 2009.
Deceiver, DAW Books, 2010.
Betrayer, DAW Books, 2011.

Intruder, DAW Books, 2012.
Protector, DAW Books, 2013.
Peacemaker, DAW Books, 2014.

Tracker, DAW Books, 2015.
Visitor, DAW Books, 2016.

If you haven't read #1-15 of this series, you can still read #16 and #17 easily and understand what it is all about because the salient facts of "what went before" are filled in where needed.

C. J. Cherryh would never be considered a "Romance Writer" -- but if you are writing Science Fiction Romance, studying her works will give you all you need for springboards and themes that morph the typical Romance into real Science Fiction.

Of course, you can't just copy what she's built.  But you can see how she's brought her real-world education and background into the process of worldbuilding to create a convincing environment for stories that inspire study of her favorite topics.

To understand how she's used her background to generate her sprawling and complex Universe (the envelope title is "Alliance-Union" Universe), you do need to know something about her, and to read most of her novels.  Cherryh's professional background is in Languages, especially Latin, and her interests encompass all human history, pre-history, and cultural anthropology.

Her Aliens are Alien because she knows what "human" is, where it comes from, and how humanity develops and uses language.  That is the science behind her science fiction that produces such believable Aliens.

Here are some reference pages where you can see the sprawling, complex, background universe she's built for her Characters to explore.

http://www.cherryh.com/www/univer.htm

And here's Wikipedia on the Foreigner Series:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreigner_universe

In the Foreigner Series, we have a human linguist confronted with an Alien language based on Alien physiology that is treacherously close to human biology.  That closeness leads to inevitable errors in understanding because of the human trait of taking assumptions as facts.

Originally, such misunderstandings led to a human-alien war, which was resolved by a bit of more accurate communication.  Two hundred years pass after that war, and the FOREIGNER series starts with a linguist trained in that long tradition now tossed into the Alien culture which is thirsting for human technology, and resisting that technology for religious reasons.

Over the coarse of these novels, Bren, the Linguist, brings his world, humans and aliens alike, into a space age, then takes them out into interstellar space where they meet a new alien species that has space-ship mounted weapons and is not reluctant to shoot first and ask questions later.

Why are they not reluctant?

These two novels, Tracker and Visitor, begin to answer that question in a way that makes the Kyo (the new Alien species with big guns) seem easily comprehensible.  It is so easy to assume the obvious answer is true that one grows suspicious.

Also, over the coarse of these 16 novels, there is a kind of love-story woven into the linguist's life as Bren is isolated among Aliens.  And yes, he starts sleeping with the female whose personality bonds easily with his own.  They have a physical relationship, and a mental one, but emotionally  not exactly satisfying since these Aliens can't "love."

They trust each other. They seem to communicate well.  In Tracker and Visitor, they are at the "taking for granted" stage in a settled Relationship.  But the Alien female does not quite follow human conversations.

Think about the ideal Romance, the Soul Mate Couple meets, fight their attraction, reach an understanding, have their good times, have some bad times, and finally reach an HEA.  By then, every reader understands why these specific two people need each other, and why the world is better off because they are together.

The key to crystallizing a Soul Mate Relationship is communication.  Beyond that comes emotional satisfaction built on Trust.

Marriages can function without much overt communication as long as there is Trust.

The Relationship between Bren and his Alien lover (who is also one of his Security Guards) exemplifies and personifies the essence of Trust.  His life is literally in her hands, daily.  Her strength and reflexes, and her Will to place herself between him and danger, are at the root of this Relationship.

Their trust in one another is mirrored, thematically, in the growing trust between the human community stranded on the Atevi planet and the Atevi themselves.

Part of the appeal of the first 15 novels is the gradual unraveling of the Atevi language, and how it is at odds with (and yet akin to) any language humans use.  Since there are factions of humans, there are several human languages to keep matters churning.

Getting deep into the Alien mindset via language is actually very Romantic.  In any standard Romance, the key to keeping reader interest is how the writer unfolds the intricacies of the other's way of thinking.  Hence the Romance with conflicts rooted in misunderstandings and secrets.

In Tracker and Visitor, Cherryh new secrets that Bren must keep (or not) as he finds out what the Kyo are doing here, why they shoot first and ask questions afterwards, and then (in typical Bren style) acts to change the Situation.

His action, in this instance, is to commission (without the authority to do so) a new Translator, giving that individual the few clues to Kyo language and mindset he's figured out and turning this hapless individual loose to fend for himself among Kyo.

Any reader will see immediately that Bren's action has altered the Balance of Power in the Galaxy in exactly the way his prior actions in this series have altered the Balance of Power on the Atevi home-world.  Is it Luck or Fate that he's still alive after all the crazy things he's done either without permission, or against prohibitions.

In short, C. J. Cherryh's Alliance-Union universe novels, which may (or may not) co-exist in the same universe of the multiverse with each other, all exemplify the various principles we have explored on this blog.  The world is built around a bundle of Themes, and a bigger bundle of related sub-themes.  Various characters live out their personal Stories learning the lessons of those themes by running afoul of the driving force behind them.

The master Theme behind all the Alliance-Union novels may be about the Nature of what it is to be Human.  Communication (usually via language) is a key element.  Commerce (in ideas, goods, technology) is another.  Put Communication and Commerce together and Civilizations get Created and also Crumble.  The shards of dead civilizations become the fertilizer for new ones.

One of C. J. Cherryh's areas of knowledge (and opinion) is real-world Politics.  On Facebook, she often explains current Events in terms of the underlying principles overlooked by most media commentators.

In the Foreigner novels, she has created political situations around centralized governments that work out (sometimes explosively) in very logical, and often relentless ways.  The politics driving various (crazy) decisions that affect planets and interstellar affairs, are composed of Communication, Trust, and Commerce based on that Communication.

These vast, impersonal, ambient forces, historical currents and massive principles, are exactly mirrored in the close, personal Relationships the Characters use to make decisions.

The Aliens are truly Alien because biology and brain configure language to represent the concrete world in ways different from how a human would see that same world.  We know because we see the Aliens through human eyes, and (as a child Alien grows up) we see the humans through Alien eyes.


The Aliens are believable because the vast, impersonal forces shaping the non-concrete world follow the same "laws" that human History and pre-History seem to follow.  A well educated reader who is widely read and well informed will see these congruities immediately.  To others, the Aliens may seem unique -- until the reader makes the acquaintance with human History (and pre-History) and discovers how fiction mirrors reality.

If you are studying writing craft, look at the vast, gigantic, immense tapestry behind the Alliance-Union Novels, and then read just one of the Foreigner novels.  Note how a tiny chip off the edge of the Alliance-Union universe provides a huge, deep, wide canvas upon which to show how personal Relationships work out on a planetary scale.

The writer's ability to focus tightly on just one Character, who knows almost nothing about the universe he lives in, needs to be studied and replicated.  It is the cornerstone of all Romance because that is our own everyday reality.  We don't even know how ignorant we are.

The essence of the Romance Novel is the focus on the significant other.  While reading a good Romance, everything else blurs and vanishes into the mists as the significant other becomes more vivid, three-dimensional, and consequential.  The hot-ness of the Romance is proportionate to the tightness of that focus.

Each Series within the Alliance-Union saga has that kind of focus, and that kind of pair of characters who become "everything" to each other.  Not all hot relationships are sexual or romantic.  C. J. Cherryh rarely deals, square on, with Romance, but her plots are always driven by searingly intense, pin-point focused emotion.

Study how she achieves that effect.

The "science" in her science fiction is linguistics.  The fiction is derived from human history and anthropology. The Conflicts are "ripped from the Headlines."  The experience of "life" especially in what it's like to think in two non-cognate languages, is exactly as I experience it.

I particularly love the Foreigner series because, while Bren's crazy decisions and crazier actions, are driven by emotion, those emotions form as a result of careful study of a massive amount of data.  He knows what he's doing -- he simply doesn't know that he knows.  That is how real humans function in our everyday life.

C. J. Cherryh gets this effect with Space as her canvass, necessarily including Time as a property of Space.

Robert A. Heinlein did it with the multiverse, using Time itself as his canvass, necessarily including Space.

How will you do it?

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Theme-Plot-Character-Worldbuilding Integration Part 6 - Fallacy, Misnomer and the Contradiction by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Theme-Plot-Character-Worldbuilding Integration

Part 6

Fallacy, Misnomer and the Contradiction

by

Jacqueline Lichtenberg 

Previous posts in this series:
Part 1 -
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/04/theme-plot-character-worldbuilding.html
Part 2 -
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/04/theme-plot-character-worldbuilding_14.html

Part 3 - index to Monthly Aspectarian Reviews
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/04/theme-plot-character-worldbuilding_21.html

Part 4 - Sidewalk Superintendent
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/05/theme-plot-character-worldbuilding.html

Part 5 Murderer In The Mikdash
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/05/theme-plot-character-worldbuilding-part.html

These 4-skills posts are advanced material.  But that doesn't mean you can't start reading them first.

December 1, 2015, we started discussing ways to depict Wisdom, an abstraction, and we have to tackle the issue of how to depict a Wise Character.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2015/12/depiction-part-13-depicting-wisdom-by.html

That post has a link at the top to the index post for the depiction series.

A "Wise Character" -- a Yoda or a Gandalf, (note not usually a Point Of View Character) a teacher of ancient wisdom or a role model to emulate -- is a feature of most novels that live from generation to generation.

Often the character, or his/her name, will become part of a quote bandied about by future generations who have no idea where that quote came from.

Creating a character to ignite the thirst for wisdom in the other characters, perhaps even in the reader, is easy.  Getting the character you have created down in a text based story is very hard.

What seems like Wisdom to one human, seems like Folly to another.

Brain researchers may have nailed the reason for the Wisdom/Folly flip/flop in point of view.  They have found why one single person can see, hold, articulate, and advocate two incompatible points of view at the same time.

The capacity to believe six impossible things before breakfast is rooted in the linguistic faculty of the brain.  It's just science.

Philosophers have known and used this (as have poets and artists) for thousands of years.  Suddenly, it's a scientific discovery!

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-language-changes-views-of-the-world-2015-8

--------Quote From that article-----------
Just as regular exercise gives your body some biological benefits, mentally controlling two or more languages gives your brain cognitive benefits. This mental flexibility pays big dividends especially later in life: The typical signs of cognitive ageing occur later in bilinguals – and the onset of age-related degenerative disorders such as dementia or Alzheimer’s are delayed in bilinguals by up to five years.

Read more: https://theconversation.com/how-the-language-you-speak-changes-your-view-of-the-world-40721

-----------END QUOTE------------

The article goes on to point out the different ways German-only speakers and English-only speakers describe a short-video.  Then it describes how a bilingual German-English speaker describes that same video, first when the observer is thinking in German, and then when that same observer is thinking in English.  The article concludes:

----------QUOTE---------------
People self-report that they feel like a different person when using their different languages and that expressing certain emotions carries different emotional resonance depending on the language they are using.

When judging risk, bilinguals also tend to make more rational economic decisions in a second language. In contrast to one’s first language, it tends to lack the deep-seated, misleading affective biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived. So the language you speak in really can affect the way you think.

Read more: https://theconversation.com/how-the-language-you-speak-changes-your-view-of-the-world-40721#ixzz3hxuczPys
-----------END QUOTE---------------


This article and the science behind it are vital to any writer of Science Fiction Romance who wants to depict a relationship between a human and an alien blossoming into love.

In this science article you find the origin of the fallacy, the misnomer, and the contradiction, all rolled into a brain function.

And once again (and again and again) this classic visual image is worth a thousand words on the subject of language.  Consider it while reading the article on German-English speakers describing a video.

The gist of it is that when thinking in German, the description of the video includes the goal of the depicted action, but when thinking in English ONLY THE ACTION BY ITSELF is considered relevant to a description of the video.

That's just one difference between two cognate languages, and a small one at that.

But the research shows what the brain is doing when parsing a moving image using different language frameworks.

It's a good article because it brings to the surface a principle that Romance novels working to convey not only the bonding love between Soul Mates but also the novel-generating, super-heated conflict that drives the plot.

In a great Romance, there has to be an obvious affinity between the individuals forming a couple, but also an even more obvious reason why "it will never work."  And then a not-at-all-obvious pathway to how to get it to work, and not only to work but to lead to the stable, renewable, and eternal Happily Ever After Ending, our prized HEA.

At least half the general public believes firmly that life can not ever deliver an HEA.

It may be that in "real" life, we are not integrating our life's Theme with the Plot of our life, with our Character, and with the world we have been thrust into willy-nilly.

Humans in such a disintegrated psychological condition can't believe that their real life has an HEA -- a sweet-spot that can be attained by hard work and the right life-partner.

If that's true of humans today, does that have to be true of your Aliens?

Or what if your human character could firmly envision the HEA she wanted, but your Alien character was speaking a different language and knew for a fact that there is no such thing as an HEA?

If you have studied anthropology, you know that there really is such a thing as women's language and men's language.  It's not just a joke.  It's a very real thing.  Nobody knows the reason for that (yet), but there are a lot of theories.

Some say it's culture that divides the genders and forces them to learn different ways of speaking.  Some say it's biology that shapes their language.

Study of how humans (and Bonobos and Dolphins etc) use language is absolutely essential for any writer, but especially a writer of Paranormal Romance, or any Romance story built around the odd or different bit of science.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33731444

That story is about Bonobos using squeaks for language.

The more we learn, the more we see that animals and humans are built on the same platform, and just have different apps installed.

Who's to say Bonobos don't have Wisdom?

As a writer, spinning a yarn about love, you need to figure out what you think Wisdom is.

Romance stories are about how just plain right life feels when you finally encounter that singular individual who lights up your world, reveals the best part of yourself to yourself, and responds to you by revealing their own best part

We experience love through another Character, see through their eyes, learn their language, and flip-flop between our own language and theirs.

The HEA comes into possibility when you meet that special someone who, when you tell them how you feel, they understand what you said.

Whether the HEA exists in your world -- or not -- depends entirely on language.

Just as with the German-English experiment, the language inside your head reveals one world, and the languages you have learned reveals other worlds.

That idea -- that language shapes perception -- is a THEME element.

The idea that perception creates Wisdom is a THEME element.

What exactly Wisdom might be is a THEME element.

What exactly a Wise Character might say is a CHARACTER element (discussed also under DIALOGUE).

What exactly a Wise Character might do (or resist or refrain from doing) is a PLOT element.

The problems that such a Wise Character might encounter that would trigger such a speech and action (Theme-Plot-Dialogue Integration) are the WORLDBUILDING elements.

You can see from this German-English experiment that the Character, the Wisdom-Theme, and the Plot are absolutely integral to the WORLD element.

How you, as the writer, present the world you have built depends on Point-of-View (PoV) -- from which Character's eyes is the reader "seeing" the world you have built, and the "languages" your world features.

The research is regarding established, living languages, shared by many.  Narrowing like that is essential to Science, but not necessarily to Art.

An artist or writer can think of it all another way.  The language you invented before your parents taught you to say mama and dada, before your brain developed synapses to connect cause and effect (you drop your bottle; it falls DOWN every time!) so you could build an image of the world you had been born into, is your Native Language.  All the rest are added.

Each language you add lets you perceive the world around you with different emphasis, different value-systems, different ideas of what is real and what is not-real.

Each THEME you use as the foundation of a romance novel bespeaks one such set of values, and excludes others.

That's embedded in the fundamental definition of Art: Art is the Selective Recreation of Reality.

The operative word is "Selective."

You must select the perception embedded in the "language" of your Characters.  What is real to them will be real to your reader, no matter how alien to your reader the idea might be, if you teach your reader the language that Character is thinking within.

Most writers do this subconsciously, intuitively.  You have this fully realized world and its Characters in your imagination, and it really is good!  The difference between what you imagine and what your reader imagines can be narrowed by craft skills, but never eliminated.

The point of Art is not to argue, but to illustrate and experience.

A romance story can evoke the language of love so powerfully that a reader sees the real world differently -- at least for a while.

The suspension of disbelief can dissolve the mental barriers that prevents us from seeing the whole story of something like that German-English experiment video.  The HEA can be seen by the reader as the Goal of all the busy action in the romance.

Romance and Science are both all about Language.

Bonobos may have sex, love, even bonding -- but not Romance which is rooted in the hypothetical and extrapolates into a possible future that wasn't possible "before."

And so far as we know, Bonobos don't have Science.

When you dissect and examine the anatomy of a Romance scientifically, you get science fiction romance.

Let's explore an example - a novel to write.

THEME: Home For The Holidays

PLOT: Gretchen Wilder brings her boyfriend Mark Underwood home to meet her somewhat religious parents.  Unknown to them, she's 7 months pregnant with a child that is not Mark's and he knows that.  Can their Love Conquer All without an abortion?

CHARACTER: Gretchen has lived the life of an apostate, and firmly believes a woman has a right to make her own reproductive health decisions.  Mark, raised by Atheists, thinks he has fully internalized that value - it's her decision - but he's worked as a Medical Technician and knows it's a baby human.  He's now plowing through medical school, and can't afford a child disrupting everything.  Gretchen has just been laid off when a company went bankrupt.

WORLDBUILDING: 2016 USA. Gretchen's parents are staunch Catholics (but used birth control and see no reason women can't be ordained priests).  Gretchen's siblings run the gamut from atheist to devout, and a few cousins and in-laws may be Hindu, Jewish, Confucian, maybe Native American, even Muslim?, a nice variety.

Everyone is gathering at the Parent's house to cook, clean, decorate, and party because the father has survived his first heart attack.  They are doing all the work for the parents as a present.  They run the gamut of the political spectrum, and at least half of them feel the recent election turned out all wrong.

INTEGRATION: the writer's job is to DEPICT all these clashing points of view in such a way that the reader's emotions resonate to each one.

Get the reader believing in and agreeing with each in turn, feeling the urgency of the decision that must be made soon (to have the child, put it up for adoption?, go for an abortion, get married, not get married, in the Catholic Church?)

You have a wide variety of Characters, each of whom may speak different languages, parse situations in different ways.  Some may arrive late, others leave early in a huff.  Some are staying in the house, others in a hotel.  They all have smartphones.

Perhaps one present the children are giving the parents is a wireless speaker system throughout the house for TV, Radio, Netflix, podcasts, intercom, so there's the ongoing tech issues across generations.

There's the HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS theme manifesting in LANGUAGE - computer language, app language, Apple vs Android, etc.  What language you speak shapes your perceptions -- "home" is a perception and has its own language, the language of Nostalgia.

CONFLICT: all these tense undercurrents and roaring disputes are taking place in a household where an Elder has just had a heart attack -- medical advice is for calm, warm-friendly family interaction.  (Ever gone home for the Holidays?  You know the odds!)

Your job is to depict a Character thinking in one language, then thinking in another language, and seeing "both sides" of the problem in different ways.

This multi-language Character should be your Wise Character.

Usually, the Wise Character is not leaping into every conversation with opinions, ideas and solutions to everyone else's problems.  But Wisdom sharpens the ability to detect lies.

One signature behavior of the Wise is that they don't say much, especially not when others are yelling.  Thus the Wise Character is your source of the zinger one-liners that will be remembered.

So you take your reader on a roller coaster ride from one end of the spectrum to the other and back again with regard to the problems posed in our society today regarding abortion.

For example, some of the family may be Progressives, proud of that label and absolutely convinced that the Progressive agenda coincides with the very best values of Catholicism.  In other words, you can't be a good Catholic unless you are a Progressive.

Progressives are dedicated to kindness to animals, gentle treatment of the Earth's resources and human environment, healthcare for all, raising the minimum wage so the least among workers can live decently, and can argue persuasively that every ethical point in the Catechism is found in the Progressive Agenda.

A woman's freedom to choose is a natural and necessary extension of the highest Values ever promulgated among humans.

That's an absolute that is beyond question.  Therefore anyone who questions it must be against everything good that humanity has ever known.

That thinking is built into the English language -- just like the focus on ACTION to the exclusion of DESTINATION as illustrated by the article on German vs English.

English is an amalgam of many historic languages, very largely derived from Ancient Greek and Ancient Latin.  Modern American English has many structures and borrowings from other languages brought to the U.S.A. by immigrants.

One perception feature of English is the reliance on either/or paradigms, the zero-sum-game, or in sports the Winner vs Loser.

In English, "There Can Be Only One" (from the TV Series HIGHLANDER) is easily believed.  All the action in that Series was predicated on the assumption that you couldn't change that Rule.

The T.V. Series BEAUTY AND THE BEAST -- not the current one, but the 1987 one with Linda Hamilton and Ronald Perlman ...

http://www.amazon.com/An-Impossible-Silence/dp/B0126NA4V8/

...also used a premise that declared the couple could never be together.  That premise was not challenged.

Your current readers have been conditioned for generations not to question premises.

So when, in our example romance story, the devout Catholic parents get wind of the possibility that their pregnant daught does not plan to marry the boyfriend she's just brought home, and is wondering if she should have an abortion so that they can get married -- oy veh!

The parents in this scenario have also been conditioned not to question the premises of their very existence, their life and practice of their religion.

Gretchen knows their attitude.  She expects support from her siblings.  She assumes she has Mark's support, no matter how she decides.

Your job as a writer is to depict Gretchen gaining an understanding of her Parents' attitude that is deeper than the Parents' understanding of their own attitude.  You may need to add the local Catholic Priest character -- who might be a young replacement of the Parents decades long confidant, a young man who is not the Wise Character yet.

Your Wise Character in the family has to be able to teach the language of Souls, Eternity, Mysticism, and the non-falsifiable hypothesis of a Creator and how that hypothesis can lead to the conclusion that abortion is a very dicey choice.

For example, the Wise Character might be a High School History teacher bemoaning Common Core to anyone who will listen when he's been tippling a bit -- or maybe he's just pretending to tipple so people won't think he's pontificating.  He might refer the customs of the Ancient Greeks and Romans of "exposing" unwanted babies on "the wall" (of the city).  Some such babies were "rescued" or "adopted" for good or nefarious purposes, but their fates were never known to the parents.  In any event, the Progressives are actually Regressives in freedom from reproduction.

 He might take a dig at the Progressives by noting that the advocacy for "the woman's right to control her reproductive health" gave government another increment of control over reproduction (via who pays for the medical procedure).  Government control of the individual is tyranny - regressive.  Being fair, he'd point out that before tyranny of Kings and Oligarchs or Theocrats, there was Anarchy, a kind of freedom from government some today advocate.  In an Anarchy, you can murder people if you can get away with it.  Revenge rules.

Control of reproduction, he would pontificate as a historian, is the central ingredient in "domestication" -- breeding animals for a particular trait - which he can see government doing to today's women by skewing their values.

You can just imagine how well that would go down in this mixed family (don't forget to include at least one Gay -- maybe someone willing to adopt this baby).  The prescribed calm-happy-reunion for the Holidays honoring the parents and celebrating the father's survival would be out the window in two seconds flat.

At that point, even the most Wise of Wise Characters might be incensed enough to keep on talking.  (silence is the signature of Wisdom, remember?)

So he/she might note that, given the way psychologists have developed the mathematics of controlling the behavior of large masses of people (PR) to get them to buy a particular product (or vote for a particular person), perhaps large numbers of women were being swayed toward a particular opinion with regard to unwanted pregnancies and what to do about them.

In other words, Gretchen's opinion and decision might not actually be her own -- not a choice her Soul is making, but imposed by distant dictators trying to gain control of humanity. (of course, maybe Aliens -- at least one of the family or in-laws should instantly be thinking Aliens trying to control humanity.)

Someone would surely whisper in her ear that her parents' God was that sort of control freak, so she shouldn't listen but make her own decision.  That whisperer would couch the suggestion in the Language of Religion -- putting another perspective on the scene, just as the German-English Video experiment did.

Learning the language of Religion as a "second language" as the article on German vs. English discusses, the family will be able to discuss alternatives in a risk-assessment framework different from their usual thinking.

It's the 'second language' aspect that makes alternatives possible that were not possible with only one language to think in.

Spirituality has its own jargon which is so obtuse that it has to be regarded as a "language" by the artist if not the scientist.

As the German speakers always noted the goal of the action in the video, the Spirituality speaker will note the goal that is utterly invisible to those who do not have that language.

Do not confuse Spirituality (the awareness of a non-physical component to the human being) with Religion which defines one or another causative force and a specified creation-paradigm through which one must view reality.

Each Religion has its own "language" too.  Imagine if this Mark Character was raised Muslim. Imagine him at Midnight Mass with the family he ever so much wants to join.  Suppose he fears rejection over the decision Gretchen is making.

In the novel outline of Gretchen & Mark, you have dramatic potential all the way up to and including pure Soap Opera -- another heart attack, a near-miscarriage, the old family Priest having been a boy-molester, or Mark raised Muslim and converted to Catholicism being murdered during Midnight Mass by his righteous father.

There is plenty of material from which to spin a plot to go with the story of "must decide if abortion is an option."

Pick point of view characters according to whose story you want to tell, and imagine how this multiplex modern family might work through this issue while interacting with the Holidays.

The glue that holds plot and story together with Character and the world they live in is THEME.

That's why I write so much about THEME as a craft element.  It is the hardest of all to master because it requires being "multi-lingual" or polyglot.  The writer must be able to see why this Character can not see what that Character sees, then explain that reason to the reader in show-don't-tell.

The best way to show-don't-tell is to build the theme into the world, then turn the Characters loose to live in that world.

Here are posts on Fallacy and Misnomer:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/05/index-to-theme-plot-integration.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2012/09/theme-worldbuilding-integraton-part-2.html

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2014/04/index-to-theme-worldbuilding.html

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com