Grammar
Four grammars. Four ways of describing what cannot be described.
Part of The Substrate Series — Book 4
The substrate speaks. The problem is that it speaks in a grammar that no human language was designed to receive.
Grammar is the fourth book in The Substrate Series — the book in which the work of translation begins. Four scientists, working in four different disciplines — physics, linguistics, neuroscience, and mathematics — attempt to build the grammar that will allow the conversation to continue.
The book is structured in four voices, four registers, four ways of approaching the same impossible problem. It is the most formally ambitious book in the series, and the most intimate — because the problem of translation is always, finally, the problem of being understood.
For readers of Ted Chiang, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marilynne Robinson.
Opening
The first thing you learn about translation is that it is impossible. The second thing you learn is that you have to do it anyway.
Dr. Amara Osei had been a computational linguist for fifteen years. She had worked on machine translation, on endangered language documentation, on the specific problem of how meaning moves between systems that were not designed to communicate with each other. She had thought she understood the limits of translation.
She had not understood the limits of translation.
The substrate did not communicate in words. It did not communicate in symbols. It communicated in patterns of quantum coherence that had no analogue in any human language and no precedent in any communication system that had ever been studied.
The Science Behind the Story
The Substrate Series is built on real physics. These posts explore the science at the heart of the books:
More in The Substrate Series
- Wherever It Leads — Book 1
- The Instrument — Book 2
- Contact — Book 3
- The Oldest Conversation — Book 5