[Fic: SG-1] A Long Drawn-Out Breath and an Impossible Sky

[draegonhawke]

Title: A Long Drawn-Out Breath and an Impossible Sky
Author: magistrate
Rating: T
Genre: ...slipstream. :|
Beta: 1 cuil: if you asked me for a beta and I gave you a raccoon.
Continuity: Nothing blatantly canon-defying, so far as I can tell. Some point in canon when they have naqahdah reactors. And Daniel.
Summary: I DON'T KNOW
Disclaimer: I am

Comments

[draegonhawke]

My first introduction to de Saussure was actually through an African-American Religions course, because I had a professor who assigned the introduction from Charles Long's "Significations". It opens with the quote "The bond between the signifier and signified is arbitrary," but examines it in the light of one community signifying another. The introduction makes a very good essay in and of itself.

Also, I would totally advise you to take a linguistics class. ...because I am a linguistics geek, and find it fascinating.

There was a lot of weird rewriting in this to get the pacing right and see if it could gain some sort of internal logic, even if it still feels mostly handwaved to me. (And it still bothers me that the first scene is one tone, all the middle ones are a different one, and the last scene is a different tone still. But that might be an unavoidable consequence of what the hell is going on.) ...I also edited it about thirty times so I could futz with derivational changes, and I'm still not happy with the explanation for "irreconcilable". But I couldn't figure out what the hell "cilium" actually meant. (Wiktionary gives me "A hairlike organelle projecting from a eukaryotic cell" or "eyelid".)

Buuut yeah. As it turns out, representing the feeling of meanings becoming unattached from their signifiers is Not That Easy To Do In Prose. I still don't feel like I quite hit it, but it's good that something is coming through on a visceral level. ^_^

Writing is hard. Let's punish it. Never underestimate the value of writing stuff with no expectations for it. It helps, it keeps you in practice, and sometimes you come back and discover that the stuff is either better than you thought it was or has more potential than you thought. Honestly, there are weeks when that's the only sort of writing I can get out, and it lives in a little GMail conversation that only I will ever see. But, you know, it's writing, and I enjoy it, and that's all that really matters.

[draegonhawke]

Broadening horizons is good. If you wanted something a bit lower-focus and lower-stress than a course, you could check out Steven Pinker's book "The Language Instinct," which was the book we used for my non-technical Introduction to the Study of Languages class. It's a fun read. And you will, I believe, learn the best sentence in the world, which is about buffalo. (If it's not in that book, you'll still definitely learn fun things about garden-path sentences.)

What I like most about linguistics. That's... an interesting question. I should probably start out by saying I'm a classic INTP, which means I love studying systems and how they work - syntax, computer language, etc. I was one of the kids who loved algebra and hated geometry, because algebra was all about rearranging things and seeing how that affected larger patterns. Being able to break language down into pieces - morphemes are units of meaning, like "re-", "con-", "ab-", "-ion", "-ate", "bound", "see", "berry", "think," so on, so forth - all the things that combine to form words, and how they change words from type to type. (Think, a verb, changes to a noun when you add the suffix -er: thinker. And so on.) It can be a lot of fun, and more complex than you might assume. I remember an exercise our professor gave us one day about seeing a can of unpeeled peaches, and saying he didn't know what that really meant: "I mean, I know what a peach is, and I know what it means to peel something, so I get how you could have peeled peaches. But how do you unpeel one? Does that mean you put the peel back on?"

And then there are just... weird and cool things about languages. Like how children acquire language so rapidly so early, and then lost that rapid-acquisition ability. And how children who don't acquire language (feral children, for example) can never acquire a grammar if they don't get at least one in that timeframe. And how all grammars seem to share certain features, or seem to go back-and-forth on pre-defined toggles.

Or, here's a cool one: people in contact/doing commerce/cohabitating/etc. in a place where a lot of languages are used will develop a pidgin - an unstructured, more-or-less grammar-less (in that there aren't grammatical rules that apply to the pidgin itself, though people will generally use the rules from their parent tongues) mode of communications which draws on the vocabulary, fixed phrases, etc. of all the parent languages. If there's more than one generation that uses the pidgin, though - if kids grow up in the pidgin-speaking culture - those kids will begin to form/impose a grammar on it, resulting in the creation of a creole. And all creoles, regardless of origin, seem to share a lot of grammatical features - features which they often don't share with their parent languages.

(There's a book on the development of creoles which I'm trying to remember the name of, but which I can't at the moment. If I can, I'll tell you. It's a good read.)

[draegonhawke]

Or how's this one: fun times with recursion. Take something like "bulldogs fight" - a straightforward English sentence. You can stick it inside itself, to make "Bulldogs bulldogs fight fight," which is a less-transparent, but still valid, English sentence. "Bulldogs which are fought by other bulldogs also fight," basically. Do it again - "Bulldogs bulldogs bulldogs fight fight fight," and you've apparently got a Yale cheer. ...but it's still an English sentence. You can diagram it out and untangle the meaning - "Bulldogs, which are fought by bulldogs which other bulldogs fight, also fight," or something. But after a point, the human brain can't parse it.

And that just hits on a lot of specficcy levels. The idea that language, which we think of as a human invention, can encapsulate meaning beyond the capacity of our brains to decipher. Not to mention the nearly-magical evolution of grammars out of pidgins, and the fact that grammar spontaneously arises out of things like deaf children signing to each other in an environment where no sign language was available for them to learn... and we're not just talking convention. Grammar is an extremely powerful thing. (Get into the fact that languages evolve and change, and have 'bloodlines' and things by which you can trace their heredity - we can look at parts of grammar we get from Germanic languages, vast quantities of morphemes and the like from Greco-Roman ones, and you should look into the histories of the words cow and beef at some point - and I still want to write a story where languages are symbiotic living organisms, with their own form of sentience - it's just not a sentience we can easily understand.)

And there are thought experiments like colorless green ideas, and this interesting one: why is it that we can say A big blue balloon, but saying A blue big balloon sounds awkward? And, you know, it will generally sound awkward to any native speaker of English.

And there are things which, while not universally true, tend to be true in broad swaths: things like, with a few notable exceptions (big, small), words denoting size tend to have vowels with a larger articulation cavity - o and a and u - for the large words (enormous, humongous, vast, massive) and tent to have vowels with small cavities - i, often - for the smaller ones (tiny, miniscule, itty-bitty, diminuitive).

(Oh wait, thought of the book! Bastard Tongues.)

In short, if you're like me, language is an endless source of fascination.

...ANYWAY.