posh.wiki

I found Omnilingual while browsing Project Gutenberg for a recent project. It's a short story, originally published in 1957 in the magazine known at the time as Astounding Science Fiction.

It follows an archaeologist named Dr. Martha Dane as she participants in an archeological expedition to uncover the ruins of a Martian city in 1996, 50,000 years after the extinction of the Martian people.

I really loved the aesthetic and the world building. Mars seemed exciting and peaceful and slightly eerie all at the same time. The characters were also compelling, each with their own interests and motivations.

The theme of archaeological xenolinguistics was really interesting to me, as someone who wanted to go into the study of linguistics and would love to visit another planet.

Of course, on Mars, there's no obvious Rosetta Stone, as we're often reminded. Comparative linguistics and elicitation via interaction are also non viable for a dead language that evolved on another planet. There's hints of structural linguistics, but what really stood out to me was the lack of distributional analysis. Perhaps Piper wasn't aware of the technique, or perhaps he did not imagine it applicable to this problem, writing before computers were so widely used.

I've added this book to my "read" list in my book comparison algorithm, so perhaps I'll read one of its recommendations next.