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I'm currently halfway through Babel-17 by Samuel Delany. It's the first of StoryGraph's "Find a Book" recs that I'm trying. It was probably recommended because of my fondness for books about or featuring linguistics, like Cherryh's [I]Foreigner[I] series, A Memory Called Empire, Embassytown and the popsci works of Nicholas ostler, Guy Deutscher, David Crystal etc.
Language really IS central to Babel-17, but I'm already seriously thinking of dropping it because of this howler:
" No way to say warm in French. There was only hot and tepid. If there’s no word for it, how do you think about it? "
Of course , there's a way to say "warm" in French, putain! The idea that "no (1) word for" equals "no way to say" is one of my biggest turnoffs in matters linguistic, bringing up memories of all those STUPID "untranslateable" word lists on the internet which then proceed to translate said words.
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