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April 21, 2006
'practical alien linguistics could be pretty essential soon'
Yes, Suzette Haden Elgin has finally inspired me to read The Embedding by Ian Watson. It’s a linguisticsy science fiction novel in which self-embedding sentences** play an important role. The article in which she mentions it is ‘Waterships All The Way Down’ in Rebecca Wheeler’s ‘Language Alive in the Classroom’ where she passes on some suggestions for using science fiction to teach linguistics.
B-)
**like ‘fish cats dogs chase eat swim fast’ (which means ‘fish that get eaten by cats that get chased by dogs swim fast’), or, to take a comprehensible one, ‘the game those boys I met invented resembles chess’ (as mentioned in Neil Smith’s 1989 book ‘The Twitter Machine’)
Posted by Billy at April 21, 2006 7:05 PM
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