Arinnian of Stormgate/Christopher Holm has translated Ythrian works into Anglic (this must mean works in different Ythrian languages, not just the dominant Planha);
Arinnian wrote "A Little Knowledge"
Hloch and Arinnian wrote both "Day of Burning" and "Lodestar."
Although I said here that I thought that Technic AI would be able to translate satisfactorily, I also know that there is no such thing as a single definitive translation of any given text. Thus, both AI's and sophonts like Arinnian would make their different translations.
A guy who attended our meditation group was making his own translation with commentary of the Buddhist text, the Dhammapada, because he, a scholar of the subject, thought that no existing translation was satisfactory.
I overheard a conversation in which it sounded as if someone thought that the many translations of the Bible meant that the Churches could not even agree on which was the single correct translation!
I think that there are also people who think that Old Testament Hebrew was translated into Greek which was translated into Latin which was translated into King James English which is translated into modern English instead of, as is the case, OT Hebrew and NT Greek being directly translated in English and other modern languages from the oldest available manuscripts.
Will extra-solar intelligences even have spoken or written languages? How anthropomorphic and terrocentric are we being?
10 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I fully expect practically all non-human species to have both spoken and written languages. How else could they communicate with each other or transmit knowledge if they did not? Unless we are going to assume some races have hive minds communicating via mass telepathy.
Ad astra! Sean
One can speculate about organisms with firefly-like light emitters, that use them to communicate as elaborately as human speech, rather than use sound.
Kaor, Jim!
I agree something like that might be theoretically possible.
Ad astra! Sean
In my Roman time-travel books, the time-travelers have to translate the translations that their AI makes of modern text-books, because the translations would be meaningless to speakers of Classical Latin and Koine Greek -- the vocabulary of both has been modernized.
This involves -long- explanations for things.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I remember that, esp. the need to laboriously explain concepts and terms not known in the Greek/Latin of Marcus Aurelius' reign.
Ad astra! Sean
I can imagine myself trying to give an 'elementary' explanation of the basics of chemistry to a smart person whose knowledge level of science is at the level of classical Greco-Roman civilization. It would help that they have at least heard of the idea of 'atoms'. Still even knowing where to start would be difficult. I wonder at what point it would be helpful to show a copy of the periodic table of the elements. Also at what point to hint at subatomic structure.
BTW for a Trivia contest a few months ago I included a question 'what was the earliest use of uranium?' which is for pottery glaze (a yellow color). I had known this for decades but when I checked I found that the earliest example was on a pot found at Pompeii. I would guess the uranium oxide used was from what is now Czechia.
Kaor, Jim!
Yes, but Artorius and his grad students had the Herculean task of trying to explain almost at once nearly 2000 years of slow and then rapid increases in knowledge to Antonine age Romans. That simply can't and won't be done easily or quickly.
Ad astra! Sean
True.
Which is why I wrote "Still even knowing where to start would be difficult."
Similarly when discussing history with my friend who complained about never having been taught history, I find myself back tracking to explain something that happened centuries before the topic being discussed, that is needed to understand the later events.
Well, Antonine Romans had a number of "scientific" explanations of things, some versions of which were (by inspiration or chance) closer to the actual facts. Those could be used -- for example, a minority view held that the earth revolved around the sun. With a telescope, you could prove that to anyone who wasn't blindly committed to a geocentric viewpoint.
But it would take a long time, yes.
You could explain germ theory, once you had a microscope. "Bacteria are like fleas and lice, except much smaller and living -in- your body."
Galen gets the credit, and of course he stops (using smallpox vaccination which the time-travelers helpfully supply) the Antonine Plague which gives him massive prestige. He's widely thought after that to be semi-divine -- a son of Aesculapius. That gives his opinions extra weight.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
A pity Claudius Ptolemy was not alive to be stunned by the revelation that his entire system of geocentric astronomy was a huge mistake!
I was esp. amused by how you had some Romans, once they understood bacteria and the germ theory, becoming paranoic hypochondriacs and living as recluses in remote locations and shunning all contact with other people.
Actually, that's sad and pathetic.
Ad astra! Sean
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