Babel-17

by Samuel R. Delany

“I prerecorded some messages and I’m sending them out now. Maybe they’ll get through.” She stopped the first tape and started a second. “I don’t know it well, yet. I know a little, but not enough. I feel like someone at a performance of Shakespeare shouting catcalls in pidgin English.”

“Apparently your automatic James Bond ran berserk,” Rydra told Ver Dorco. “…Bond?” “A mythological reference. Forgive me.

Sixteen cases to the Finnish noun. Odd, some languages get by with only singular and plural.

Imagine, in Spanish, having to assign a gender to every object: dog, table, tree, can opener. Imagine, in Hungarian, not being able to assign a gender to anything: he, she, it all the same word.

Words are names for things. In Plato’s time things were names for ideas—what better description of the Platonic Ideal?

Words were symbols for whole categories of things,

an individual was a type of thing for which symbols were inadequate, and so names were invented.

was three equally tiny phonemes that blended at different musical pitches: one, an indicator that fixed the size of the chamber at roughly twenty-five feet cubical, the second identifying the color and probable substance of the walls—some blue metal—while the third was at once a placeholder for particles that should denote the room’s function when she discovered it, and a sort of grammatical tag by which she could refer to the whole experience with only the one symbol for as long as she needed.

Thinking in Babel-17 was like suddenly seeing all the way down through water to the bottom of a well that a moment ago you’d thought was only a few feet deep. She reeled with vertigo.

had a face like brown rock cut roughly and put together fast.

What’s the three ping-pong balls in the mosquito netting? Tarik says it’s a Çiribian ship. Long as it’s on our side, baby, it’s fine with me.

I ask cold air, “What is the word that frees?” The wind says, “Change,” and the white sun, “Remember.”