In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novel Small Gods, Deacon Vorbis righteously tells the Archon of Ephebe, “‘Slave’ is an Ephebian word. In Omnia we have not even a word for slavery.” The Archon ripostes, “No doubt. No doubt fish have no word for water.”
It is a striking metaphor (and plants seeds of unpleasant doubts in Brutha’s mind), and one I’ve often seen used elsewhere – but is it flawed? After all, we humans walk on the earth and live in the air, and we know it, and every human language, AFAIK, has words for earth and air. If fish were sentient, why would they not be aware of the water? And if fish had a language, why would it not include a word for water?
Perhaps someone can suggest a better metaphor that means the same thing as the above metaphor intends?
I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know if Omnia has what we would name slaves or not. So I’ll offer two possibilities. If there are no slaves there, the metaphor should have been No doubt fish have no word for air (since, by and large, they never encounter it.) If there are slaves there, and that’s the point being made, it should be No doubt fish have no word for wet (any more than we have a word for “flesh in contact with air.”)
I’ve read Small Gods but don’t remember this passage. I think you’ve misunderstood the comment, BrainGlutton. I can see two interpretations of the Archon’s intended meaning: “You are lying; I find your statement as plausible as the idea that fish wouldn’t have a word for water,” or perhaps "“Fish don’t understand their own condition, and neither do you.”
I’m assuming you intended this thread to go in Cafe Society, so I will move it there.
Haven’t read the book but from the context given it sounds like he is saying, “Slavery is so ubiquitous in your culture you haven’t bothered to name it.”
To put the quote in context, Omnia is an extremely inflexible theocracy, where the standard punishment for heresy (which encompasses pretty much everything the ruling clergy don’t like, and several things they do like) is being burned alive. So the Archon of Ephebe (a nation based on classical Greece) is definitely not saying “Of course you don’t have a word for slavery, since you don’t have any”.
Of course, Vorbis was particularly weird for the Discworld, in that he seemed to be very nearly an atheist. That is, he seemed to have a bit of amusing doublethink going on which let him be both burningly devout and ice-cold materialist at once. And the entire story’s conflict was largely driven by the actual god getting lazy and not doing his job, resulting in his religion’s corruption.
People somettimes spend time in the water and most of the time on land, so we have words for both fluid media- “water” and “air”. Fish (usually) spend their whole lives underwater- er, wait, let me correct that. Some fish never go near the surface and as such they wouldn’t have the concept of “moving through something other than water”. That is to say, angler fish and other far down ocean bottom dwellers… er…
It’s not like fish have any words in the first place, so you can make up whatever you want about their language, right?
Can we just take the Tyrant’s statement at face value and read on?
Also, what’s with this “Archon” business? Wasn’t he called the Tyrant?
I was under the impression that it actually took humans a while to come up with the concept of air. Unfortunately, I don’t have a cite, but it’s not so surprising a concept when you think about it – while humans are generally exposed to substances other than air (water, rock, etc.), it takes a bit of science and experimentation to discover the notion of air itself and also a lack of air. Presumably wind was its own separate phenomenon, and they didn’t realize that it was connected to this ubiquitous gas sustaining their lives.
If fish were intelligent but not particularly advanced, I’d expect any notion of water would be synonymous with reality and “physics” to them. They wouldn’t realize they’re breathing water, they’d just know that the substance on the other side of the shiny ceiling makes them choke. Similarly the notion of swimming would just be the way movement and gravity works. They wouldn’t necessarily conceive of the impossibility of their movements in a less dense environment.
Air is one of the four classical elements, so it’s been around for a while. I’m pretty sure the process of respiration clued people into the concept of air pretty early on. What took longer was the recognition that air is a form of matter, and more specifically, the existence of an element named “oxygen” that is vital to animal life. But the idea of air itself has been around pretty much forever.
Right. So the metaphor works: it’s not a proposition that fish wouldn’t have a word for water, it’s a comment on Vorbis’ failure to understand. Vorbis says his people “have not even a word for slavery,” as if the fact that they don’t call it slavery proves it does not exist in their society. That’s what the Tyrant is mocking.
Of course they’d have a word for water. They’d have a word for the ground that is beneath the water, and the air that is above it. Why not the water itself? It’s not different than people having a word for the earth beneath us, the air around us and space above the air.
A fish would have a word for the stuff that goes into its gills.
A fish most certainly would NOT have a word for water. Do you know just how stupid they are? It’s a wonder they can figure out that when that shadow goes past their tank then there’s a possibility that food will appear above them.
Fish talking? Piffle! Except this little catfish my wife realized was too mean to be with her fish. I netted it and you shoulda heard him! Okay, I don’t speak Fish, but I could tell from his tone just what he thought of me.
Even so, in that context “air” is described in the context of being a different element from the other three; it’s the fact that a distinction is being made. Most fish would have no concept of any such distinction.