New short story! · 11:00pm Nov 13th, 2015
Normally I don't post stories this short as their own entry -- they just get added to my short story collection. But Babel did manage to take first place in a recent Writeoff, and people really seemed to enjoy it over there. So it's getting its own post, and I hope folks will enjoy it as a quick, thoughtful and uplifting read.
Once upon a time, everypony spoke the same language.
Then came Discord, and everything changed. Was it a malicious prank? Boredom? An attempt to teach everypony a lesson? We can't ask him, because he's gone, and who knows when he'll be back.
If language is the glue that holds society together, what happens when it turns to sand?
And now, some backstory:
Babel
The idea for this story came from a strange place.
Every few weeks I'll get a massage at a Thai place in my Tokyo neighborhood. For those of you who've never had a Thai massage, it's, uh... well, it can be uncomfortable. It focuses a lot on stretching and manipulation as much as just kneading and pressure, like Western massage. But, despite this, it has relaxing parts when they're resting between attempts to tear my legs off.
The employees there are Thai, and they chit-chat in Thai with each other. When they speak with me, we usually use Japanese. On the radio, in the background, they play cheesy English love ballads, because Asian people love those (seriously).
I remember thinking how neat it was, that three languages were all being used in that little space. I had mine (English), they had theirs (Thai), and we spoke to each other using a third language we had each learned (Japanese). And at some point I started to wonder what it would be like if everyone in the world had their own language. How would that work?
In the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, the people of the world, who all spoke the same language, came together in the land of Shinar to build a city for themselves and build a tower to reach the heavens. When God and the angels saw what the people of Shinar meant to do, they went unto them, and confused their language, and scattered them to all the places of the world. And that is how, according to the Bible, all the world's languages came about.
But would that happen today, in America or Japan or Europe or wherever you may be? Call me an optimist, but I think something very different might happen – we might overcome such a curse, and while our lives and civilization might change or fall, we would not abandon each other. We would adapt, as we always have. And, as I keep saying in my stories, love would triumph over all.
This is one of the only stories I read for that Writeoff (I missed the entry by ten minutes or so), and I'm very glad to see "Babel" here on Fimfiction. It has a wonderful message and is even better than its original version. Thanks for writing, CiG.
You're the freakin' man Cold in Gardez!
I never took you for such an incredible optimist... What I see whenever I turn on TV or hear over the radio rather supports the opposite fact: that despite some groups of people still share a common language, they mostly bond together to inflict violence towards those other groups.
I had an experience a little like that! Was meeting relatives in Korea; I couldn't speak Korean and none of them could speak English. I felt kind of isolated, until one of them asked if I could speak Spanish, which I did know a little. Even though we exchanged just a few basic sentences, it was such a wonderful feeling to be able to communicate again, breaking through that barrier. And in our third language which nobody else at the gathering could understand.
Idioglossia. Mark Handley wrote a play with that name....