Urlanguage as it used to be

[jsburbidge]

 

In the 18th Century (and before) the dominant European model for human history was that of a long decline, from which we had started to pull ourselves up, but were at best just catching up to the Ancients. The template for this was a mixture of the Adam and Eve story and the Greek/Roman myth of a Golden age, the reign of Saturn.

It was also a period of great curiosity about (among other things) language. The century ends with Jones developing the hypothesis of Indo-European, and the basis for a grounded historical understanding of linguistic development. Before that, however, and trailing on for a long time, there were alternative streams. One was theorizing about an Ursprache.

In its naive form, this was simply taken as "the language spoken before the flood", related in some way to that of the angels themselves, and it's this naive form that I want to briefly look at for its SFnal influences.

Such a language, lost at Babel, would, it was thought, have a direct correspondence to the world. Using the language would allow one to act upon the world directly as a result of those correspondences.

This is the background of the "Enochian" which is a frequent feature of occult novels.  Tregillis' Bitter Seeds and Stross' s Laundry Files novels both make use of this trope, as does Tim Powers' Declare.

Of course, speculation about such an ideal language led to it looking more and more purely divine, or at least far beyond human capacity. An exact relation to the world would require that every single thing would have a distinct word for it - every noun is a proper noun, the Name of the thing to which it corresponds. Absent the existence of universals, i.e. if you were not a realist, but rather a nominalist, there would be no common nouns, as categories would be extracted from, not inherent in, individual things.

Miéville gives the Language of the Hosts in Embassytown many of the traits of this speculative language. It is inborn, not acquired; the hosts cannot lie, use metaphor, or even use similes which do not have as their term an actual thing or person. He then points this up by having one character - a linguist, to boot, who would be aware if the theoretical background - who believes that the Hosts are unfallen and thst learning to speak metaphorically will cause them to fall.

So the linguistic underpinnings of Embassytown share a lot with the magical languages of Lovecraftian and occult fantasy.