Grammar
Four grammars. Four ways of describing what cannot be described.
The fourth book in The Substrate Series. Four scientists. Four languages. One conversation that is older than the species having it.
For readers of Ted Chiang, Richard Powers, and Andy Weir.
Description
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.
For Readers Of
"For readers of Ted Chiang, Richard Powers, and Andy Weir."
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An Extract
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. It was not that the grammar was unknown. It was that the grammar was, in some fundamental sense, prior to grammar — a way of meaning that preceded the distinction between meaning and not-meaning.
Amara sat in her office and looked at the data and thought about what it would mean to build a bridge between this and anything human beings could understand.
She had no idea where to start.
She started anyway.
