Tongues Of Angels II

Dimble asks Ransom what he should say to Merlin:

"'What shall I say in the Great Tongue?'

"'Say that you come in the name of God and all angels and in the power of the planets from one who sits today in the seat of the Pendragon and command him to come with you. Say it now.'

"And Dimble, who had been sitting with his face drawn, and rather white, between the white faces of the two women, and his eyes on the table, raised his head, and great syllables of words that sounded like castles, came out of his mouth. Jane felt her heart leap and quiver at them. Everything else in the room seemed to have been intensely quiet; even the bird, and the bear, and the cat, were still, staring at the speaker. The voice did not sound like Dimble's own: it was as if the words spoke themselves through him from some strong place at a distance - or as if they were not words at all but present operations of God, the planets, and the Pendragon. For this was the language spoken before the Fall and beyond the Moon and the meanings were not given to the syllables by chance, or skill, or long tradition, but truly inherent in them as the shape of the great Sun is inherent in the little waterdrop. This was Language herself, as she first sprang at Maleldil's bidding out of the molten quicksilver of the star called Mercury on Earth, but Viritrilbia in Deep Heaven."

-CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength IN Lewis, The Cosmic Trilogy (London, 1990), pp. 349-753 AT CHAPTER 11, p. 587.

 

That is a very helpful exposition of what is not the case. "...Language herself..." is Platonic, the antithesis of scientific. No meaning is inherent in any syllable in the way that the Sun is reflected in a drop of water. Intelligent beings give meanings to syllables by their communicative skill and preserve meanings in their traditions. There is no "Language herself" on any uninhabited planet. No deity bids it to spring from an inanimate environment.

 

Poul Anderson wrote some mythologically based fantasies but, in his hard sf, he speculated about how intelligence might really emerge on other planets - by natural selection, not by special creation. Ythrians learn to communicate through sounds and feather movements. Their Old Faith might include a god of language but, if so, then he is just another myth creatively imagined by an already linguistic community.