Christina's Thoughts

( Previous books )
24. Foundation by Isaac Asimov
25. Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov
26. Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov
27. Foundation's Edge by Isaac Asimov
28. Foundation and Earth by Isaac Asimov

It's been a long time since I read the Foundation series. And I have to say that, upon rereading them, I was rather less impressed than in the past. Oh, there are some interesting ideas, certainly. Extraordinarily weak characterizations, but interesting ideas.

The idea of Psychohistory is an interesting one. And I think it is, in general, quite plausible. We can already make some crude statistical predictions of human behavior. I think it's reasonable to suppose that one could predict the behavior of entire worlds and interstellar unions, at least in the short run. However, several problems exist in Asimov's idea of psychohistory:

( lengthy rant )

Also, another rant, more general to a lot of sci-fi, but present also in the Foundation series. The idea of a single galactic language. There are thousands of languages on Earth, including dozens with tens or hundreds of millions of speakers. I cannot believe that only one language would leave Earth. Speakers of many languages would leave Earth, especially once space travel became relatively cheap. The first wave would probably only have a few major languages, such as English, Spanish, Chinese, maybe a few other European languages. But other languages would follow. The earliest planets would almost certainly be multilingual. In the early days of space exploration, there would be few suitable planets available for colonization. And the first colonies would be small in number. I cannot believe that the first colonists on a planet would be able to stake a meaningful claim to the entire planet. There would be a number of independent settlements. Later on, as space travel became easier and the number of colony worlds grew, you might be able to have colonies staking a claim to their entire planet, so later worlds might be monolingual, but different worlds would have different languages. Some would speak English, some Spanish, some Chinese (probably several different Chinese languages), Japanese, Hindi, Swahili, German, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and a whole host of other languages. Even small languages like Icelandic might find worlds of their own. Furthermore, even if somehow only a single language left Earth (all but one language had died out by that point? Don't believe it. I could buy the number of languages declining to a few dozen, but not to one), over the 8,000 years that had been said to have passed between the origins of hyperspatial travel and the rise of the Galacti Empire (and the 12,000 years between the rise and fall of the same), there'd be plenty of time for each world to evolve its own language. The Indo-European family of languages, which includes languages as distinct as English, French, Russian, Farsi, Hindi, is descended from a common ancestor generally believed to have been spoken somewhere around 6,000-10,000 years ago. 20,000 years would be enough to turn a single language into descendants unrecognizable as being related to each other (at least, under current linguistic understanding; but given both intermixing of languages and the obscuring tendencies of linguistic changes, I suspect that it would never be possible to reconstruct a family stretching back that far). There could be no "Galactic". At best, there'd be a dominant language, such as "Trantorian", known and used throughout the Empire, in the same way as English is often used in our world by non-native speakers. Even Star Wars did better than Foundation in that regards! C-3PO was said to be "fluent in over six million forms of communication"!

On the linguistic problems of "Darmok" (the Star Trek:TNG episode). Total agreement on that.

Great line, from the end: Still, it's not a bad bit of sci-fi TV.  That's due in large part to Patrick Stewart, who seems to have the mutant ability to take any script, even one which doesn't entirely make sense, and infuse it with sincerity and meaning.  ("That's why they call it acting.")  This helps some, but for me, it's not enough to save "Darmok" from its flaws.

Interesting study on how gender in language can influence speaker's views of inanimate objects.

When asked to describe a "key" -- a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish -- German speakers were more likely to use words such as "hard," "heavy," "jagged," "metal," "serrated" and "useful." Spanish speakers were more likely to say "golden," "intricate," "little," "lovely," "shiny" and "tiny."

Hmm ... for those of you interested in Japan and/or linguistics, this article is rather interesting.

And in a somewhat-related article: the city of Kyoto offered free public transport to anyone wearing a kimono. That was back in '05, though. :-)