I picked up [b:Native Tongue|285563|Native Tongue (Native Tongue, #1)|Suzette Haden Elgin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348446358l/285563._SY75_.jpg|2866090] while browsing the library and am surprised I’d never heard of it before. It’s one of the SF Masterworks series that I’ve read avidly and has a fascinating conceit. The setting is 23rd century America, where women have the same inferior legal status as children. Humanity has made contact with many alien species and relies upon a small number of secretive families to act as translators. The linguist families raise their children, male and female, to speak many human and alien languages. The narrative loosely follows Nazareth, a highly gifted linguist, through her gruelling career, terrible marriage, and retirement. Once linguist women can no longer have children they move into ‘Barren Houses’, spaces away from men that allow some independence and even resistance. The narrative doesn’t just focus upon Nazareth, though, but also follows others connected with the linguists in various ways.

The social world-building in [b:Native Tongue|285563|Native Tongue (Native Tongue, #1)|Suzette Haden Elgin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348446358l/285563._SY75_.jpg|2866090] is effective but, not to put too fine a point on it, grim as fuck. These are the thoughts of Thomas Blair Chornyak, head of the linguists, about a nurse that he’s having an affair with:

They were frail reeds, women, especially in the hands of an experienced man like himself, and a man who was – as he was – a master of the erotic arts. If he’s had any doubts about that mastery, due to his advancing years and Rachel’s dutiful lukewarm attentions, Michaela’s rapt ecstasy at even his most casual efforts would have swiftly dispelled them. She was never in any way indelicate, never demanding, never lustful – lustfulness was abhorrent in a woman, and had she shown any sign of it he would have instantly dispensed with her. […]

An entirely satisfactory woman, this Michaela Landry. As nearly flawless a woman as he had ever encountered. Under the circumstances, he was willing to forgive her inability to resist his advances and live up to his earlier expectations. It is unjust, he reminded himself, to expect of a female more than her own natural characteristics allow her to accomplish.

Michaela is a wonderful character. She isn’t a linguist, so acts as an outsider perspective on them when she joins the household to nurse Thomas’ elderly father. She has perfected the skill of lulling men into a false sense of security then murdering them. Her first husband and Thomas certainly do a lot to earn it. I appreciated her guilt when realising not all linguists are evil, though. Her role in the plot is to be an angel of death with a conscience, in contrast to the government scientists who murdered her baby. The denouement in which Thomas realises what the women of the Barren House are plotting and rants to Michaela about it is brilliantly tense. He thinks she is completely harmless, while she immediately grasps the danger the female linguists are in and kills him to save them.

It’s the linguistic elements that really stand out, as the antifeminist dystopia isn’t as original. One narrative thread follows a group of morally abhorrent government scientists who murder babies in the process of trying to dislodge the linguist families' oligopoly. They are trying these appalling human experiments because attempts at computer automated translation have so far failed. I found Elgin’s angle on this amazingly prescient, given the novel was published in 1984. The quote below is essentially still applicable 38 years later:

The only way there is to acquire a language, which means that you know it so well you never have to be conscious of the knowledge, is to be exposed to that language while you are still very young – the younger the better. The infant human being has the most perfect language-learning mechanism on Earth, and no-one has ever been able to replicate that mechanism or even to analyse it very well. We know that it involves scanning for patterns and storing those that are found, but that’s something we can build a computer to do. But we’ve never been able to build a computer that can acquire a language. In fact, we’ve never even been able to build a computer that can learn a language in the imperfect way that a human adult can learn one.

We can now automate translation via machine learning, but the computer certainly doesn’t understand the language. Would machine translation be trustworthy for vital international treaty negotiations? I don’t think so; it’s just replicating patterns ‘learned’ by crunching vast amounts of data created by humans. [b:Native Tongue|285563|Native Tongue (Native Tongue, #1)|Suzette Haden Elgin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348446358l/285563._SY75_.jpg|2866090] examines the ways that languages can be oppressive but also liberatory. During their minimal spare time, the linguist women work on an experimental language that would allow them some freedom. Thus a generally depressing plot ends on rather a hopeful note, which made me keen to read the other two books in the trilogy. Although [b:Native Tongue|285563|Native Tongue (Native Tongue, #1)|Suzette Haden Elgin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348446358l/285563._SY75_.jpg|2866090] is hard to read in places due to relentless oppression of women and cruelty to babies, it is rewarding and interesting in its treatment of linguistics. ( )

Minu jaoks mitmel moel väga raputav raamat, ja just eriti pärast Kuangi "Babeli" lugemist, kuna temaatika on sama, aga hoopis teise nurga alt. Keele väest, maagiast ja sellest, kuidas keel loob maailma, milles me elame. ( )

This is my all-time go-to feminist sc-fi read ( )

This is a feminist dystopia written in the 1980s, set in a future in which women's rights have been taken away and they are completely subservient to men. In this future, linguists are very important as they communicate with the many, many alien species that have been encountered to negotiating trading contracts and space colonies. The main events of the story take place 200 years in the future and follow the household of one of the 13 linguist families, whose children are trained from birth to acquire alien languages.

I had such mixed feelings about this book. For one thing, it took me so long to get into it, for two reasons. First, I didn't think it was plausible that all of women's rights would be taken away in the 1990s by constitutional amendments just because one paper was published positing that women were biologically not as intelligent as men. As someone who was alive in the 1990s, this just does not seem feasible. I can't imagine that even if 38 states had ratified these amendments, that our country would have remained whole after that.

Second, everyone talks like someone in a parody of a stiff 1950s television show. Sometimes, it was laughable. And the men are so ridiculous. I kept getting angry every time I picked this up to read and had to take breaks. Granted, there certainly are men who think this way about women, but in this book, it's ALL of them. And there is no romantic love, or even lust. Really? I get tired of misogyny too, but this goes against everything I know and have experienced of male-female relationships.

But I started getting more into it as I read. The baby-exploding caught my attention. That was a bit of horror I wasn't expecting. Too bad that plot line wasn't developed much more, but I gather that was probably left for the sequels. Then the character of Michaela, the one woman who's mad as hell and isn't going to take it anymore. I really liked her and all the bits of the book she was in. This story required an outsider character to give it some perspective, and she was it.

Overall, the writing was stiff and awkward and aggressively feminist, of its day. It did remind me a lot of The Female Man, in that sense. But it has interesting ideas to present in the guise of science fiction. Overall, I'm glad I read this, if not for the plot or characterization, but rather for the ideas and for it being a kind of artifact of a very particular time in the feminist movement (again, like The Female Man). ( )

Kind of interesting but I got to a point where I couldn't be bothered to finish it. ( )