Carys Davies's little novel Clear (2024) is gentle and mysterious, surprising and loving. Some critical plot elements are difficult to accept (obvious examples omitted here, to avoid Spoilers). As it wrestles with words, however, Clear shines a brilliant light on how people communicate, and how diversely they slice the universe into concepts. An example from Chapter 26, as one character (John) learns vocabulary from another (Ivar) in Norn, a now-extinct tongue on the islands north of Scotland:

There was still a lot of repetition and pantomime and charades and back-and-forth between them, lots of trial and error and head-shaking and bouts of incomprehension and frustration, but there were also moments of clarity and understanding, and in the evenings John Ferguson sat down with his rough penciled lists and made a fair copy of them with his pen and what was left of his ink in the metal writing tin.

Certain words delighted him utterly. The one that described the condition of a ball of wool, for example, when it had just been started; that described its innermost beginning when a fine thread of worsted was being wound. Liki. When the thing was at the very start of what it would become.

At the round hill, Ivar pointed to the first peat he'd cut that had been damaged by the late frost. There was a word, he said, for this outermost, frost-damaged piece of peat that was different from the word for a piece further in and undamaged by the frost, and John Ferguson clapped his hands and said, laughingly, in English, "Of course there is!"

... and then there are further examples of how "for every new word Ivar gave John Ferguson, there always seemed to be another one that described a slightly different version of the same thing but which all too often—to John Ferguson—looked like exactly the same thing."

Languages as lenses on the world!

_{(cf Babel-17 (2015-10-20), ...) - ^z - 2024-07-22}