We’re not talking to you, we’re talking to Saturn
Nick Richardson: Lingua Cosmica, 18 June 2020
Extraterrestrial Languages
by Daniel Oberhaus.
MIT, 252 pp., £20, October 2019,978 0 262 04306 9 Show More
by Daniel Oberhaus.
MIT, 252 pp., £20, October 2019,
“... The hero of The Man in the Moone, a novel written in the late 1620s by the Anglican bishop Francis Godwin, is carried to the moon in a sky chariot pulled by a flock of wild swans. He spends the next few months among the peaceful ‘Lunars’ and gains a measure of fluency in their language, which ‘consisteth not so much of words and letters’ as of melodies ‘that no letters can expresse ... ”