User:Barce

I am budding novelist and writer.

Tagalog is my mother tongue which I speak poorly but comprehend with near fluency. I grew up in California so my English sounds perfect. I have Arabic speakers in my family - I picked up some Arabic from them as a child and while selling beer in New York, and meeting all the Arabic speaking Bodega owners.

My favorite sci-fi novels have a unique linguistic style. The novels of Frank Herbert, Arkady Martine and Stanisław Lem are examples of this. They immerse you in a different world by using language that has certain linguistic tropes.

Herbert uses old words, italicizes them and coins them into new ones. This gives the feel of code switching. E.G. "He mouthed her strange words: Gom jabbar…Kwisatz Haderach." Herbert, Frank. Dune (p. 5).

Arkady Martine dives into linguistics in order to give one the feel of the foreigness of a new planet: "He said it in the Teixcalaanli language, which made it a tautology: the word for world and the word for the City were the same, as was the word for empire." Martine, Arkady. A Memory Called Empire (Teixcalaan Book 1) (pp. 19-20).

Lem in his phenomenal Solaris wrote invoking an old Sanskrit word, "For some time one popular view, eagerly disseminated by the press, was that the thinking ocean covering the whole of Solaris was a gigantic brain more advanced by millions of years than our own civilization, that it was some kind of cosmic yogi, a sage, omniscience incarnate, which had long ago grasped the futility of all action and for this reason was maintaining a categorical silence towards us."

I study languages in the hopes of developing some sort of linguistic trope that can be used to immerse the reader in the worlds that I make up in my imagination. In that study, I use wiktionary very often and try to contribute where I can. I used the phrase "make up" earlier for aren't words as fiction just really a cosmetic on the reality that is the world?