Don’t let today’s Big Idea fly by you. Dive into author R. B. Lemberg’s Big Idea as they walk you through the construction of their newest novel, Yoke of Stars.
R. B. LEMBERG:
Two years ago, in a Big Idea essay for my Birdverse novel The Unbalancing, I talked about canceling parts of speech. I got to do just that in my newest Birdverse novella Yoke of Stars. I cancelled verbs.
The idea first occurred to me as a graduate student at UC Berkeley, studying cognitive linguistics with my mentor Dr. Eve Sweetser. I also met and was influenced by Dr. Dan Slobin, a famous Berkeley psycholinguist who dedicated his life to the study of motion verbs. Motion is a cognitive category which is fundamental to how humans experience the world. We dream about movement even when we ourselves cannot walk or run. We use motion metaphors when we say that a joke flew over our heads, or a zoom meeting ran over. An egg can be runny without any ability to move unassisted. As humans, we love motion so much, we keep adding cartoon legs to things which do not have them. (We love perception just as much: drawing eyes on things is an ancient impulse.) Motion is a basic cognitive category, and the world’s languages tend to express it through verbs.
So what about a language with no verbs? What kind of cognitive reality would it describe, what kind of culture would it produce, and most importantly, how could I describe such a thing using one of my own languages, all of them rich in verbal expressions even if they all describe motion differently?
This was the big idea behind the first-ever story I wrote, set in a kind of proto-Birdverse. It never saw the light of day, and I’m happy about that, because I had no idea, in those early days, how to do justice to something like that. Yoke of Stars is that book. I am a kind of neurodivergent writer who loves to think about the same thing over and over for a very long time until it coheres…
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Source: The Big Idea: R. B. Lemberg
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