Books and Audiobooks

Is your drift really all that strange? When I read Stephenson’s Anathem, it seemed to me that he depicted a majority of those who lived outside the monasteries/universities (i.e. a majority of the population) as formally illiterate, albeit highly sensitive to oral and visual culture (i.e. moreso than those who lived within the monasteries/universities). This did not strike me as being the least bit strange or left-field.

How can you spare the time? I get incredibly frustrated with audiovisual presentation- because I can red text SO much faster than I can listen to it, and my audio processing retains far less.

Emma: I have it on good authority that John listens to audiobooks on the bus during his long commute, and while doing other tasks such as practicing bar chords on the guitar. I find them crazy-making for the reasons you describe (but then, I take the taxi everywhere.) I look at the length of the soundfile and just think “talk. FASTER!” John believes I’ll eventually come around, and he may be right, but not yet. You would think that my being confined to bed for long periods of looking at the underside of a pillow would really have been the audiobook’s moment to shine in my life…

At the same time, no seems to have ever introduced Yoda to the concept of grammar, something we presume to be absent from whatever his native language is

His grammar seems fairly rigid, actually – object-subject-verb, object-subject-verb. (Or rather “Fairly rigid his grammar seems. Hmm?”) It’s just wrong for English. It to the sentence structure of a German who English has learned similar seems, or at least to the sentence structure of a stereotyped German in an out-of-date comedy sketch appearing.

I don’t really see how widespread illiteracy explains the weird linguistic set-up described by Scott Martens. Put another way, why isn’t Basic more basic? Historically, the usual consequence of the extension of a single political system across diverse cultures has been the adoption of a version of the language of the dominant group as a lingua franca (e.g. Greek in the Macedonian successor states, Latin in the western half of the Roman empire); prior to that, you’d normally find only a limited group of traders and other travellers able to communicate with lots of different peoples in different regions.

It’s as if everything has very suddenly and recently become jumbled up, and everyone is having to make the best of it, e.g. through the use of translator droids – which reminds me, am I remembering correctly that various sorts of agricultural machinery speak a separate language from other robots? The entire universe seems to have been set up to refute the concept of transaction costs…

It is clearly a sign of my complete lack of a sense of humour, or that I’ve been reading too much German recently, that I want to correct ajay’s sentences so that they properly conform to German syntax…

ajay, the Yodic corpus actually shows very little syntactic consistency. Consider:

“The fear of loss is a path to the dark side”

or

Only a fully trained Jedi Knight, with the Force as his ally, will conquer Vader and his Emperor. If you end your training now – if you choose the quick and easy path as Vader did – you will become an agent of evil.

Neither fits an OSV or OVS structure well. The best feasible analysis is that Yoda has some kind of weird topic-comment model a bit like modern Chinese, except sometimes he utters a totally correct, consistent SVO sentence in Basic.

Now, a rational person would point out that Yoda sounds remarkably and perhaps uncoincidentally like the voice of the man who invented “bork, bork, bork” and called it Swedish, so perhaps a sound notion of linguistics might be an irrational expectation. But since we’re already down this road this far, there’s no point in going rational now.

So, let me propose an alternative explanation: Yoda has received an informal and unstructured education in Basic through adult exposure and as result has little conscious control of his register choices, much like the Chinese grad student who uses four-syllable technical terms all the time but cannot master the English tense system for love or money and has no idea what function the word “the” serves. That a Jedi Master who sits on the Jedi Council has never been forced to go to Berlitz and learn to talk properly strongly suggests that there is no Berlitz to send him to.

Neville: The elite of the Roman Empire used a written language at sharp variance to spoken norms. This is commonly the case in fast imperial expansion by literate states. What you’re proposing is that Basic is like the Vulgar Latin of the Roman army, but if so, where is the “High Galactic” that corresponds to literate Latin, and why do we see exactly none of the many aliens for whom Basic must be a second language ever using it? When Britain built an empire, it educated local elites in “proper English” and never paid a second thought to the street patois’s (patoises?) it left in its wake. Much the same for the Romans and Greeks and Chinese. These empires were only literate at the very highest levels.

I think we can make a credible case that the most logical explanation for the lack of a “High Galactic” in Star Wars is that it either does not exist or is not a significant factor in most people’s lives, otherwise, we have to explain how come Yoda can rise so high in society when he clearly does not know it. And, of course, we have to explain how Jar-Jar Binks can become a major staffer to an Imperial Senator with such poor standard language skills.

Jawohl! Donner und Blitzen! usw.

I was an early-adopter of audio books (I’ve been with audible for almost a decade). I’m not convinced I’ll like the A/V combination (haven’t tried it yet) since I choose very different books for audio (mainly fiction) and text reading (non-fiction). Mysteries and thrillers make great background for household chores, and the iPhone application allows me to speed the book up if the narrator is slow, and do a 30-second re-wind when my attention wanders.

Now I have an image of Yoda saying “Hande hoch, Englander pig-dog!” like the comic book Germans of my youth.

Count me among those who have no (well, not much) use for audiobooks. Not because of the speed so much — I am a pretty slow reader — but because of the retention. Likewise books-on-screen. I like to turn pages and I associate strongly an image with the page it was read on. I am happy to make my annotations on the paper with a pen. (One audiobook which sure was great however: Beowulf read by Heaney.)

What you’re proposing is that Basic is like the Vulgar Latin of the Roman army, but if so, where is the “High Galactic” that corresponds to literate Latin, and why do we see exactly none of the many aliens for whom Basic must be a second language ever using it?
In fact, I am not sure that we see so many aliens who are in situations where they would use literate Latin. We must remember that the literate Latin was a literal construction even in the Imperial times, used mainly to show off one’s education. Cicero wrote it in his everyday correspondence, but I believe that very few people actually used it in their real life. I strongly doubt that even the emperors of the 2nd century used literate Latin in their everyday speech. Definitely, the emperors of the 3rd century would have been unable to do it, as they were usually career soldiers of agrarian, non-Latin origin.

Thus, very few aliens we see would be using the literate register, even if they were capable of it. It would be quite as socially awkward as using scientific writing style in one’s everyday speech. (Please remember that vulgar Latin and koine Greek were full languages, not pidgins. The New Testament was written in koine, not in classical Ionian Greek.)

Two theories on the star wars thing: physiological incompatibilities, as between Han and Chewie, are or were the norm among different species, so it becomes habit that they do the each speak your own language thing. Eventually people forget why this is the case and just do it all the time even two species are compatible enough that they could learn a shared language – it’s just the normal way for two species to interact, and they’d consider Han speaking Huttese as weird as we’d consider two people doing the speak-your-own-language thing. Supplementary and in line with Scott’s suggestion, maybe a lot of species actively deny that outsiders can speak their language accurately, unconsciously exaggerating the difficulty of understanding their accents.

OR

They have some kind of babel fish thing and hear each other as speaking in their own language. The subtitles represent this effect for us.

I love my Kindle — it enabled me to reread all of Trollope last year on my commute, over thirty triple-deckers which would have taken the whole year to listen to. I’ m lucky enough to be able to read on the train or bus without getting motion sick, although I can’t read in a car. That’s the only place audiobooks are useful to me.

How did an illiterate like Han Solo ever learn to repair his rocketship?

I’m surprised at people finding cross-speaking of languages unusual – I’m a primarily-English speaker living with a Dutch woman, with both of us understanding the other’s language, and we’ve always each spoken our primary language at each other, because of the gap between active and passive language competency mentioned. I presumed this was standard in bilingual households.
As for Han’s inability to read, the linked article suggests that there’s probably a set of complex pictograms for annotating control panels and presumably technical schematics also, which seems plausible – provided you have a numbering system you can go a long way with clever pictures in instruction manuals

These heroic efforts argue around the functional illiteracy of George Lucas are really very well done.

I believe that the printed book is a blip on the history of the human race. A tool for the elites to transfer rarefied knowledge amongst themselves. It’s unnatural and uncomfortable for the majority of the human race to isolate themselves, and to devote the concentration necessary to read a book.

For a true human communication tool– the smartphone/Facebook. The only voluntary writing that non-college-bound humans will perform is texting phonetic, non-grammatical, utterly banal remarks to friends and family. For learning and narrative– video/television/movies.

In a multilingual environment, like Star Wars, emoticons are more useful to communicate between different species. All the human emotions & reactions are covered.

I’m very glad to hear about these new options.

About half the books I’ve read in last two years I’ve actually listened to instead of reading. The other half I’ve read on my phone. I still buy hardcopy books just in case I might also decide to look at them later. I have a twenty two minute commute. It’s too hectic to listen to books on way to work, but perfectly wonderful on my drive home, so I can potentially read several books a year that way. Often, however, I choose to listen to same book over a few times. Just one listen does not give the same kind of mental access as reading, but several listenings comes close.

I have liked best buying books on CD or CD MP3. That’s the most convenient for car use, though in principle I can also plug phone into car audio, it’s too much hassle to mess with phone before driving. With a CD in the car player, I just start car and go.

Audible requires by default that you use an electronic device. If you need CD’s, you need to do some downloading and burning. Such is my advanced level of disorganization that in the past two years I’ve purchased two Audible books but never got around to downloading and burning either one. I would never buy anything more from Audible but for many books they are the only audio choice.

In fact availability is really the big problem. Most books simply aren’t available in audio of any kind. I was hoping to solve this with a 2nd gen Kindle. I liked the idea that Kindle would let me listen to books if no audio was otherwise available. Unfortunately, the Kindle voice was so poor, it was basically useless. You could often not tell if you were beginning a sentence, paragraph, or chapter. I recall better sounding voice in my 1991 Amiga computer, or at least it wasn’t any worse.

@Thalia #33: “In a multilingual environment, like Star Wars, emoticons are more useful to communicate between different species. All the human emotions & reactions are covered.” Really? I would have thought that the potential for fatal misunderstanding and faux amis was greater than for linguistic communication (written or otherwise), where it’s clearer that you don’t know what the other person is saying. Surely we can imagine a species where ‘big smiley mouth’ means ‘I intend to eat you’ – and why should many species recognise a circle as a head? All seems rather humano-centric to me.

Anderson @31 hits the nail on the head and then spectacularly misses it @32 — the Falcon isn’t a rocketship anymore than the Antietam was a battleship* — it’s not clear how the propulsion actually works but the pictures in my Star Wars Encyclopedia indicate it is powered by fuel cells and features “ion flux stabilizers” — considering that the “TIE” in TIE fighter stands for “Twin Ion Engine” it’s likely to be some form of ion thruster.

*too soon…?

Perhaps one reason you rarely see fictional characters reading is that it isn’t usually very interesting?

It happens fairly often. Robert Harris, to pick an obvious example, has written four thrillers (Fatherland, Enigma, Archangel, The Ghost) in which the climactic scene of the entire story consists of the hero sitting down and quietly reading something.

re: talking books. I listen to them when driving, occasionally when cycling (though more usually I’ll listen to music) and when I’m ironing. I do all the ironing in our house, so I have plenty of time. I listened to the whole unabridged War and Peace ironing, 2010-2011. The only downside is that I now ineluctibly associate Tolstoy and the smell of laundered clothes being ironed.

William @26: “I also hate that they’re so damned expensive” Don’t buy them from shops. Download them from the free site, Librivox [http://librivox.org/]. It’s all volunteers reading, and the quality varies, but I’ve generally found it fine and occasionally it’s very good. Since it’s free it’s all out-of-copyright texts, too: but there’s decades worth of masterpieces there.

Speaking of free e-books, Humble bundle just released what I think is the first e-book bundle they have done. (Very cool system, is the humble bundle) I am waiting for playback through kindle to become sufficiently natural sounding that I can put up with it, because I do not want to buy books and audio-versions. I don’t think I have ever managed more than a fraction of an audio-book, for the reasons mentioned by many in this thread; it is so slow, compared to reading.

Emma made an excellent point which is nearly never discussed. Many of us read so quickly that we find audiovisual presentations boring. Most of our fellow humans, however, read at best as fast as they can speak, so they google Youtube when they want explanations.

Yet somehow, when academics complain about the shortcomings of the fresh crop of disappointments, the question of reading speed is seldom referenced, even though it can be easily measured and its relevance is hard to ignore. Any given reading load will be an impossible burden for a considerable contingent.

Many of us read so quickly that we find audiovisual presentations boring. Most of our fellow humans, however, read at best as fast as they can speak, so they google Youtube when they want explanations.

Really? A bit of googling shows average English reading speeds around 200-300 words per minutes and average speaking speeds around 100-150 (150wpm being apparently the standard for audiobooks).