Friday, June 15, 2012
SF Blog: Season of the Red Wolf
Recently discovered this blog about the politics of the science-fiction community, which I found rather interesting. In particular, the author has documented considerable anti-Semitism to be found there, much of it taking an "anti-Zionist" form (holding Israel to insanely higher standards than is held any other nation on Earth, the better to condemn her). I recommend it to one and all.
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You're kidding, right? Season of the Red Wolf is one of the worst blogs on the entire internet.
ReplyDeleteI'm not kidding in my support for Season of the Red Wolf, and you need to be more specific regarding your critique if you expect it to be influential. I suspect much of it comes from your own anti-Zionism, and probable anti-Semitism, but if you were communicating effectively, I wouldn't have to make guesses about your implicit arguments.
ReplyDeleteI tried to read his China Mieville saga a while ago, especially that part where him and some other pissant on the blogosphere say that he won't let his books be translated into Hebrew, without offering any evidence. Even he can't believe it that much, so he starts talking about Hebrew as if its alphabet was an ancestor of Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic, and as if it was as much an influence on English as Native American languages.
ReplyDeleteHebrew isn't a direct ancestor of the Greek alphabet (which is a direct ancestor of the Latin and Cyrilic alphabets), but Hebrew is a close collateral ancestor. The lineage is
DeleteDemotic
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|___________
| \
Phoenecian Hebrew
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Greek
|___________
| \
Latin Cyrillic
The influence of Hebrew on English is, of course, through the Old Testament, from which numerous Hebrew words have entered English parlance. There are also influences from Aramaic and Greek via the New Testament. (Aramaic is a West Semitic tongue and thus a cousin of Hebrew). Since the whole Anglosphere is primarily Christian or Jewish, this is a rather widespread influence.
The influence of Amerindian languages on English is mainly via American English, for the obvious reasons. Some of this has spread from American to other English dialects, some hasn't: I'm not sure for instance if your typical Englishman or Australian would know what you meant if you said you wanted to hold a "powwow" or needed more "wampum."
I'm not sure whether it's been more or less influential on English than is Hebrew: that would require a word count, which I neither have the linguistic knowledge nor the current inclination to perform. It would also be nice to weight the word count and see the relative influence of each language on different parts of the English vocabulary.
I can't find a defininitive answer on the question of whether China Mieville refuses to let his work be translated into Hebrew. I did notice in my brief perusal of Mieville's politics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Mi%C3%A9ville#Politics
that he is not only an explicit Marxist and hence believes in the transfer of wealth through forcible confiscation and reassignment of said wealth through political processes, but worse, he explicitly opposes the "rule of law"
However, he argues, just as the symmetry of commodity exchange conceals class division and exploitation, the symmetry of law conceals violent power relations. Law is structurally indeterminate as applied to particular cases, and so the interpretation which becomes official is always a matter of force; the stronger of the contesting parties in each legal dispute will ultimately obtain the sanction of law. Therefore, he states: "The attempt to replace war and inequality with law is not merely utopian but is precisely self-defeating. A world structured around international law cannot but be one of imperialist violence. The chaotic and bloody world around us is the rule of law."
which means that he essentially wants to replace it with a system of justice based on favoring groups he likes over groups he doesn't like. This makes a mockery of the concept of justice itself, and if follows would make peace and justice forever impossible.
Which is, actually, a far more monstrous attitude than mere anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism would require the subjection or destruction of one ethnic/religious group, while Mieville's philosophy would require the subjection or destruction of all peoples who did not agree with Mieville's whims regarding differential justice!
Sorry, I couldn't format the table correctly. The Phoenecian and Hebrew alphabets are sibling descendants of the Demotic alphabet; the Greek alphabet is a descendant of the Phoenecian; and Latin and Cyrillic are sibling descendants of the Greek.
DeleteIt's like saying that mammals evolved from archosaurs.
DeleteMaybe they wouldn't recognize powwow or wampum, but they'd recognize tomato, potato, pecan, persimmon, chili, chocolate, or cayenne. Or shark, tapir, piranha, macaw, raccoon, toucan, moose, jaguar, coyote, or skunk.
Decently good analogy, and you make a very good point regarding Amerindian languages. OTOH, "Amerindian languages" is a very broad category (it includes three separate linguistic superfamilies): even if you are limiting yourself to the one descended from Paleoindian (in other words, excluding NaDene-Sioux and Inuitoid tongues), the equivalent regarding Hebrew would be all Semitic and Hamitic languages (aka "Afro-Asiatic"). And I would wager that the linguistic influence of all Afro-Asiatic languages on English is at least as great as that of all Native American languages put together.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, this is a fairly minor and technical quibble: is this really your main problem with Season of the Red Wolf?