Here's my take as a person with two linguistics degrees, one of which had a big computational focus on historical change:
The person who constructed the languages eschewed using the literary influences because he didn't believe that the phonemic inventory would be consistent over tens of thousands of years due to prior information that we have about diachronic change in language families.
What he fails to take into account is the fact that the wide availability of audiovisual distribution of language has a conservational effect that we've not really seen before. So for instance, while there is a large variety of English dialects in the US, "Broadcast English" and "General American" are quite stable and broadly available.
What they've done with the constructed languages of Dune would be like if they made a new Clockwork Orange movie without any of the Nadsat dialect. It robs something from the original text, all so a hobbyist can make something internally consistent that he's personally satisfied with and that may be marketed to future consumers. That sucks.
David Peterson is paid to make languages for a living and has made many. He’s excellent at it. More importantly, he doesn’t get to do whatever he wants. Sometimes, he’s told to keep to source material, and other times he isn’t. In the end, however, he’s delivering a product to a paying customer. I met him once a linguistics conference, and he’s a sharp guy from what I gathered.
Before making claims about what he did or why he did, you should look him up. He too has degrees, but that shouldn’t make a difference. He’s created a wide variety of languages for many different projects, he founded the language creation society, and in general he gets extremely familiar with the source material for each project in which he’s involved. He’s not a huckster, and he definitely doesn’t focus on marketability of his work beyond his direct customer (though his customers may, but that ain’t on him).
He's not a huckster. I know some of the conlang crowd including him.
What he is, is obsessed with a particular idea of how realistic the process of creating conlangs must be. And in what sense that process must be realistic. Instead of creating languages that please the audience, he creates languages that please the hardcore conlang community. I get it. As a language geek the results are pleasing.
As a Dune fan he did the book and fandom a great disservice and that sucks. He also made a crappy political choice to remove Arabic against the authors very clear intent which hides the true meaning of Dune. Sometimes realism makes something feel more real and tangible. But at other times it makes it feel pointlessly inaccessible. What's better? One kind of realism for language geeks or the integrity of the author's vision for the story? There's a clear answer for him.
You can only appreciate his work and his choices if you dig deep. And virtually no one does. Even hardcore fans.
There are also countless ways he could have justified keeping Arabic in. For example, by saying the Koran ensured that there would be little linguistic drift, or at least that the drift would have some limits to it. Just like say Hebrew. Or he could declare that it became a liturgical language like Latin or Vedic Sanskrit and so remained unchanged. But that's not language geek fun.
Also his example of Beowulf is, as someone who has published many papers and also taught linguistics, just stupid. That didn't happen to Hebrew or Greek or many other languages. English went through a massive lexicon, grammar, and pronounciation shift right after it. That was an abrupt non linear change in the language. In any case, with just a little practice you can read it far better than you might think.
It's also just false that words can't be observed long periods. Reconstructions of proto-indo-european show that very likely quite a few words hardly changd.
It's really sad that so many projects are picking only him, just like countless movies pick only a few musicians for their scores. The community is large and there are a lot of curious viewpoints and ideas out there.
> He also made a crappy political choice to remove Arabic against the authors very clear intent which hides the true meaning of Dune
To be fair, Frank Herbert wasn't his client here, the filmmakers were. Occam's razor suggests how the language turned out is in line with the filmmaker's intent.
> There are also countless ways he could have justified keeping Arabic in. For example, by saying the Koran ensured that there would be little linguistic drift, or at least that the drift would have some limits to it.
That's even Frank Herbert's own justification in one of his appendices. Herbert seemed to have dabbled in conlangs a bit more than his contemporaries and put a lot of thought into it and picked the language smashes he did for thematic reasons, but with something of a semi-studious hobbyist eye for language drift. He detailed a lot of those notes in appendices. Given how much JRRT contributed to the conlang field in appendices, it seems surprising a conlang enthusiast would have missed some of the salient points in Herbert's appendices.
It's obviously a political decision to remove the Arabic from the movies, especially as it deals with religious war and extremists. The linguistic explanation is dress-up.
The Fremen in Dune are clearly inspired by Muslims but not necessarily Arabs. They are more closely modeled on Chechens. Fremen words like "sietch" and "kindjal" are from the Caucasus.
Not sure about that, there is a lot of overlap with bedouins. The harsh desert planet in which they have learned to thrive is now highly desired by outsiders because of the spice (oil).
Buddhislam and the teachings of the Zensunni Wanderers. I can understand the film producers not wanting a Fatwa over their heads, and 'cultural appropriation' is a hot issue these days, but it's a sad state of affairs to be in.
> It's obviously a political decision to remove the Arabic from the movies, especially as it deals with religious war and extremists.
Which is absolutely ridiculous given how much they've taken from MENA countries visually—the most shallow kind of appropriation when it comes to movies.
Ofcourse they were inspired by MENA people considering many of them live in the desert too with traces of tribalism and colonialism...
One mans "Cultural Appropriation" is another man's "Cultural Appreciation". I'm guessing you're just another Caucasian liberal living in Seattle or California who's acting insulted on behalf of MENA people?
Yes, of course, what do you think I'm contrasting the current situation to? Adopting the aesthetics of a people but not their actual culture is a fairly common understanding of what cultural appropriation is. Frank Herbert at least had some fairly interesting commentary about culture that is easily confused with endorsing fetishization of cultures at first glance, but if you read all the books it's clear he meant it as damning criticism.
I'm excited to see the movie—this is incredibly bland criticism compared to what other have to say about the movie. Still, if you love something, you're honest about it.
> One mans "Cultural Appropriation" is another man's "Cultural Appreciation".
Uh, sure, if you just want to throw the entire concept of discourse out the window.
Interestingly, there is an audio-visual device being used by Paul in the first movie. Thinking Machines were destroyed (and anything like them, to a degree), but humans still needed to communicate and travel to planets. The Butlerian Jihad was not about destroying all technology.
The most devastating effect of the movement, was that most planets were largely governed by AI or less commonly cyborgs (cymeks). Rejection/Destruction of these machines left populations in utter chaos, from their managed state. Starvation, brutalism, etc. Imagine if any large country just stopped following a political and legal structure, eliminating anyone and anything who happened to support it. This was the cost of freeing humanity (according to the doctrine).
This was my thought as well. Why are we assuming they'd even have access to many preserved audio recordings knowing that they destroyed all computers? The Butlerisn Jihad was thousands of years before the events of the movie.
On the other hand, the characters in Dune have almost no information about Earth. Over the mindbogglingly long time scale between our present day and the events in the books/films, it's not only possible but likely that almost all of those audiovisual aids have been lost.
Not necessarily lost, but certainly diluted by the content produced later. The lack of AI or even sophisticated computing creates a further problem in keeping that content indexed in ways that preserve its relevance and allow it to be surfaced.
Another consideration is how suppressed previous knowledge was during the time the AI ruled over humans and how much was really lost during the Butlerian Jihad.
I'm not sure the Dune universe is fully elaborated from our days, but I would assume that every early human colony established by sleeper ships or embryo carriers would have a curated subset of human culture selected for maximising colony success. With that kind of redundancy, it'd be difficult to completely eradicate such information.
> What he fails to take into account is the fact that the wide availability of audiovisual distribution of language has a conservational effect that we've not really seen before. So for instance, while there is a large variety of English dialects in the US, "Broadcast English" and "General American" are quite stable and broadly available.
Is this true? I don’t think it is. Go watch or listen to some audiovisual records from not even a century ago, like a classic Hollywood film or one of the old WWII training films on YouTube for instance. If you listen for it, you will hear a dialectical drift.
Compare to Chinese, where dialects that separated a few hundred years ago are not mutually intelligible. I mean like, different Hakka dialects that arose two hundred years ago are not understandable to each other.
1800s English is Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, etc. Imagine the language changed so much you can't understand any of it
English also has mutually unintelligible dialects that arose within the past few hundred years. That’s an entirely different question than the question of whether a native speaker of a “standard” dialect can understand older “standard” dialects.
True this. In the 1990s I visited California and I had to walk out of a sandwich shop because I could not make out a single word the kid behind the counter was saying (Brit with a BBC English accent). There's not one American accent, there are dozens of them, and some of them are very challenging for me. To be fair though, part of that could be influence and merging with other languages brought in my immigrant communities from Europe over the last few hundred years.
Yes, but they are categorized by phonetic mergers and splits. Once you understand which vowels tend to merge with each other (like the back vowels), it's not so hard
The most difficult ones are Scottish and Irish English, but they split earlier with some sound changes happening in the south of England in the 1600s that didn't happen in the north.
Standard Southern English and Standard American are mutually intelligible, modulo local slang
We're crossing one century of audio reproduction now, and... it really seems pretty conservative. Play a radio show from 1920's middle America and there are almost no linguistically significant changes from modern American English. Almost all the change has been superficial stuff like idioms and choice of vocabulary. No vowel shifting, no new grammar (or lost grammar), new added or removed articles or prepositions, no new ways of expressing tense.
I'm not a linguist, but over any other four generations you'd surely expect to see a lot of this stuff change.
There has been tons of sound change over the last 100 years. In old radio broadcasts you hear lots of sounds you don't hear any more, especially in regional dialects that have either changed or been levelled out of existence. Check out this spellbinding speech from Calvin Coolidge in 1924: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfF-xv7rc20
We've got...
* Non-rhotic dialect with "earnings" as [əjnɪŋz]
* Final /ɪ/ as in British English, not /i/ as in modern American English. "Country" is [k@ntrɪ].
* /p/ is clearly unaspirated
* "paid" is [pɛ:d], not [peɪd] as in modern American English
* "grant" is [grɑnt] not [grænt]
As another example, the Northern Cities vowel shift (for example "Chicago" pronounced [ʃɪkægo]) only really got going in the 1960s.
Coolidge was born in 1872, so you're looking at more like 5-6 generations from the most modern forms. And I don't see that picking on accent specifics is all that interesting? It's true this isn't the accent that you hear most commonly on the streets of San Francisco, but it's a real one and it and variants still exist today in New England, where he's from.
Again, I'm not saying there is no change at all, I'm saying this change is trivial when compared with language from people born c. 1750's. And that this seems to be reasonably due to the presence of audio recording technology.
A century isn’t that long a period of time, and there are actually tons of small but noticeable changes in dialect between today and those old radio dramas that you probably just aren’t hearing.
Any examples? Again historically languages change much faster. Three and a half centuries were enough for a transition from Middle English (not remotely intelligible) through Chaucer (requires translation but you can see why it's the same language) to Shakespeare (we all read it as kids, merely "funny sounding").
Shakespeare died over 400 years ago and, as you point out, he’s still mostly comprehensible. And Chaucer wrote in Middle English so I don’t know what you mean by that.
If you want to focus on spoken language, as per the claims about sound recording, Simon Roper and Dr. Geoff Lindsay both have videos on YouTube about dialectical changes over time. My impression is that the difference between 1924 and 2024 seems about as big as the difference between 1824 and 1924, despite the invention of sound recording. And this is exactly what I would expect. I don’t think you could name ten pre-1940 films that most Americans have seen, for instance.
Shakespeare is only comprehensible because English spelling has fossilized to not resemble the spoken language. There's a ton of rhymes and puns in Shakespeare's writing that are just not there anymore in modern pronunciation.
> I don’t think you could name ten pre-1940 films that most Americans have seen
Conversely, I don't think I know any Americans who haven't seen The Wizard of Oz (1939). And again with the sole exceptions of superficial idiom and vocabulary (and some really minor pronunciation changes that are as much theater affectation as they are language) there's absolutely no change at all from the stuff you hear from a 15 year old member of the High School class of 2027 (I live with one). Again, I really don't think that's normal historically.
If you're going to dismiss dialectical features of old films as "theater affectation", that's also going to work against your thesis that old films and speech recording in general exerts a conservative influence on dialect change, isn't it?
And I mean...actually listen closely to these people's accents. You're really going to claim that there's "absolutely no change at all" between them and your teenager? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amclN9RG49c
They may have seen it, but how much does it influence their day to day language? I think there's an argument audio-visual recordings will promote comprehension of older spoken language forms.
I'm sure a lot of modern English speakers have a much better ability to comprehend dialogue in English Circa 1700 due to familiarity with Shakespeare than they would otherwise, but influencing modern usage is a very different thing.
Specific to the early decades of radio in North America, a good example might be the Mid-Atlantic Accent or Canadian Dainty, both falling out of favor around the early 1950's, about the same time the last nail was hammered into the radio drama coffin, by my listening. These are accents though (not dialects) and consciously learned ones at that, but widely used during their short existence, then fizzled out quickly as broadcast media became more widespread.
A century is 100 years. Dune is 26000 years away. 260x of those 100 years. Just listening to this recording https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfF-xv7rc20 it's a bit hard to hear what he's saying through the dialect in my opinion. That shift times 260 would be devastating to understanding.
I think it's less that they're listening to old earth recodings on arrakis and more that having high quality linguistic capture like that allows linguistic forms to persist in a way they didn't before. They're listening to audio from 100 years ago, that sound like the audio from 100 years before that...etc.
Assuming some thought was given here, I wonder if the Mandarin Chinese used by Yueh in the first movie was meant to be movie magic like with the use of English, or was there a conscious decision to keep it completely frozen over the millennia?
But then again there is the Mentat language that we hear Thufir Hawat use in the Lynch version. Has anyone bothered to analyze this and maybe expand upon it ?
>one of which had a big computational focus on historical change:
Is this by any chance the 'clock' of phonetic change in a language, and its use in predicting what an ancient language may have sounded like? I.e. Proto Indo-European? I'm a total linguistics amateur but fascinated by the field and bits of knowledge I pick up.
> What he fails to take into account is the fact that the wide availability of audiovisual distribution of language has a conservational effect that we've not really seen before.
We can observe in English that this sort of effect has happened with the advent of the printed word - I've certainly read before that Shakespeare effectively codified the English language, not just by giving us lots of words and sayings, but by causing a de-facto standardisation by becoming widespread.
And while the language has moved on since then, and added a multitude of new words and phrase, the structure appears to have moved more slowly than it did before this time.
> It robs something from the original text
Eh, it's a while since I've read the original text, but Villeneuve's adaptation of part 1 left me cold anyway. It's a shame, this might be the last big-budget attempt at making a Dune movie, but to me it was hollow and dead. So if they've changed the language the Fremen speak, it's one of the lesser flaws.
"Of the Arabic excisions in the new “Dune” films, two in particular stand out. One is of jihad, Herbert’s term for the fervent crusade led by Paul Atreides with the Fremen against the oppressive interstellar regime. Herbert saw jihad as the embodiment of messianic and religious passion—a force that is socially transformative and potentially liberating, but also dangerous and to be feared: “The ancient way, the tried and certain way that rolled over everything in its path.” Though now the word is overwhelmingly associated with Islamic extremism and terrorism, the original “Dune” offers a nuanced consideration of the concept that goes beyond simplistic and negative portrayals."
I do not think the original Dune books did not portray the jihad in a good way. It was the way that led Paul to triumph over the Imperator, but it was also the path, that lead him to burn worlds and establish a cruel theocracy. Which was only hinted at in the first books, but showed completely in Dune Messiah. Which is why many did not like it anymore as the glorious hero was dismantled.
I read all the books, and in one of the forwards by his son, he mentioned that Frank wanted to make Paul an antihero. He knew his audience wouldn't like it, but that's kind of the point of his books in the first place. Basically, you can't have nice things because that's what it means to be human.
Frank Herbert talked about this in his own words in his introduction to _Eye_ and his son talks about it in more detail in _Dreamer of Dune_. Herbert was fascinated by the power of leaders when followers aren't skeptical of them.
"Basically, you can't have nice things because that's what it means to be human."
But I would disagree to this conclusion. I rather think his goal was (among many others) to show that you cannot have nice things, when your "heros" of the culture stand for glorious war. No matter if it was a "good war" at first.
I think it's not really possible to have a black and white analysis of Paul's character, because the timescale matters - which is better explained in the books.
How could one choose between a jihad (bad on short term) and the golden path (good on very long term)? Especially if the golden path requires nasty personal sacrifices?
Paul did not like the choices he had (understandable) but can't say he was clearly a hero or an anti-hero.
> How could one choose between a jihad (bad on short term) and the golden path (good on very long term)?
That's kind of the central question of the books, isn't it? Were the horrors along the way a justification of the ends? They certainly were horrors. They long term good was certainly the rationalization for much of the the horrors.
> Paul did not like the choices he had (understandable) but can't say he was clearly a hero or an anti-hero.
Paul took more of the selfish choices than not and still rationalized to a great deal that he was the hero. Irulan's slash fic of the both of them as great rulers together also didn't help but further rationalize Paul's villainous choices as "heroic" both in universe and for most readers of the early books.
But if timescale matters, and given timescale is such a crucial part of the series, it probably does: on the largest timescales offered by the series and the internal writers with the longest views of history it's almost always said that Paul was one of the worst villains of history. It's a heck of a rug pull, but it is absolutely an intentional rug pull in the series. It's fascinating what the series does with such unreliable narrators. (Among other things, rooting for the "hero white savior" who turns out to be the "genocidal villain" seemed certainly meant to allegorically give a lot of Americans reason to question American ethics in world politics, especially with regards to climate change.)
"Paul did not like the choices he had (understandable) but can't say he was clearly a hero or an anti-hero."
He became the godlike imperator and inquisitors in his name burned people for questioning his new religion. So yeah, the picture is mixed as Paul was not portrayed as someone who wanted this. But he still did it.
There was a quote in the book about the holocaust and how tiny the numbers were, compared to what Paul was responsible for. And speaking of, Hitler was also not proud of massacring children and women, but he thought this was something that needed to be done.
The difference is of course, that in Dune, there was the plot of the fixed fate and Pauls ability to clearly see the future to a certain point and him not really being able to change anything about it.
(But Hitler also thought he was choosen by god/fate)
Mi pensa it was rather under-used; there's tons of scenes with Beltalowda talking amongst each other in English rather than Belter. There's actually very few scenes where people talk Belter rather than English with a few Belter words mixed in.
There's obvious practical reasons for all of this, but I wouldn't call it a "gold standard".
— Oh Stewardess, I speak Belter.
He's in great pain and wants to know if you can help.
— Tili natet 'ratna. Im gonya leta-kom *mediting
detim im bek fo du to gut.
I believe Tolkien's languages remain the "gold standard", but I'm not sure if they're as productive for everyday chat and memes.
(I have heard that Eliezer Ben-Yehuda made a big mistake in not creating any swear words for Modern Hebrew, leading to a substantial overlap in comprehensible swearing between jewish and arabic communities in J'lem. That said, I understand "chinga tu madre ... cabrón" perfectly well, so probably any language communities in close contact will swear at each other perfectly comprehensibly whether they share a vocabulary or not)
I think the show struck a good balance for an English-speaking audience. We see Belters code-switch between "more Belter" with Belter-only crews to "more English" when they gather in groups with other factions or Inners. Public address systems we hear in the background are usually bilingual (Belter+English on stations, Chinese+English on Mars, etc). It feels multilingual without needing lots of subtitles.
I think it's probably the gold standard in terms of the language creation and use in television and movies. I think most, if not all, other television and movies used less of their fictional language than did The Expanse with lang belta. Lang belta permeated the show. Of course, they had to balance that with understandability, so they sprinkled lang belta. But, they sprinkled it everywhere.
They really implemented it so well into the show. Every character actually spoke it and not rehearsed the language like a lot of other shows and movies does.
Neither that, nor Klingon and the work Marc Okrand did on it.
The article is basically about Dune & Peterson, and the work he's done, especially for Dune. It's not too surprising they left off other popular conlangs.
The article mentions several other examples of fictional languages in television and movies, including Game of Thrones, and they spent some time talking about those. So, I was surprised they left of lang belta, which is a pretty well developed fictional language, probably better than any of the examples from the article.
One thing I absolutely loved about the first Dune movie was the incorporation of secret hand signals (covert sign language) from the book. The use of secret hand signal conveys the gravity and peril of the world they live in.
> The article mentions several other examples of fictional languages in television and movies, including Game of Thrones, and they spent some time talking about those.
I really enjoyed the first Dune movie by Villenueve and decided to read Dune for the first time in anticipation the second movie.
Reading the book, I was surprised by the focus on mysticism and Islamic references, which were only a minor background element in the first movie. I do think the religious elements add depth to the story beyond the typical SciFi space opera and is a likely a strong contributing factor to Dune's enduring cultural impact. It's unfortunate the movies shied away from those references despite the potential consternation it may have stirred up.
For those that have recently read the book, this article by Harris Durrani on the probable influence of muslim theological development on Frank Herbert's Dune world is engrossing.
> A typical SciFi space opera wasn't really a thing when Herbert wrote the books.
Huh? Space opera was well established long before Dune[0]:
"Despite this seemingly early beginning, it was not until the late 1920s that the space opera proper began to appear regularly in pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories.[7]: 10–18 [16] In film, the genre probably began with the 1918 Danish film, Himmelskibet.[20] Unlike earlier stories of space adventure, which either related the invasion of Earth by extraterrestrials, or concentrated on the invention of a space vehicle by a genius inventor, pure space opera simply took space travel for granted (usually by setting the story in the far future), skipped the preliminaries, and launched straight into tales of derring-do among the stars. Early stories of this type include J. Schlossel's "Invaders from Outside" (Weird Tales, January 1925),[18] The Second Swarm (Amazing Stories Quarterly, spring 1928) and The Star Stealers (Weird Tales, February 1929), Ray Cummings' Tarrano the Conqueror (1925), and Edmond Hamilton's Across Space (1926) and Crashing Suns (Weird Tales, August–September 1928).[16] Similar stories by other writers followed through 1929 and 1930. By 1931, the space opera was well established as a major subgenre of science fiction.[citation needed]"
Reminds me of a woman I dated in my twenties who had invented a language while in college. She had written a few sentences on a classroom blackboard to show it to a friend but didn’t erase it. A day or two later, she showed up at a linguistics class to hear the professor and one of her classmates trying to grasp the structure of this language they had never seen before.
Is it? Atreides is not a made up word, it directly references the descendants of Atreus from the greek myths -- Agamemnon himself (well, his voice) makes an appearance! "Reverend mother" is a (catholic) religious term. So these particular terms survived, but jihad didn't? Arabic, like op said, didn't? OP made a good point.
I figured just sort of an obvious point that the Arabic wouldn't have lasted but all these other things would have explanation doesn't pass the smell test.
Arabic is problematic for various reasons so they cut it and then figured they also needed to make up a bunch of bull about cutting it, companies got to spin their investment but it devalues the art of the whole to me.
If they had said hey it's problematic for lots of reasons so we cut it, sorry. I'd be like yeah ok. But the explanation is just not believable coming from a language designer of some intelligence who would have had the same thought I did only probably much stronger, quicker, and deeper.
To paraphrase - it's difficult to get a man to make a truthful argument when the big bucks depends on him lying - but he still knows he's lying for pay.
as the article points out, in the book as written, paul (who is named 'paul', a roman family name that became popular with the spread of christianity because of the apostle of that name) and jessica (who is named 'jessica', from shakespeare's 'the merchant of venice') are speaking 20th-century american english. (i assume this is also the case in villeneuve's film, which i haven't seen.) this is clearly implausible; we can explain it as an instance of the common practice of translating dialogues and sometimes even people's names into the language you're telling a story in
but if the entire language they're speaking is rendered in translation, why not 'atreides' and 'duncan idaho'?
I guess I'm a great believer in the original intention of the author being important, and thus am apt to be overly annoyed at these kinds of things, so I guess you might make that assumption from just the text, however the common tropes in genre do not do this kind of thing, in Science Fiction many people can have non English names and those are generally provided, and in fact in the book there are numerous names that are not English or any recognizable language, so all that together makes it seem like we are doing way too much work to explain away a messy narrative decision - if there is an Occam's razor for fiction, which I shall suppose there is having conceived of it, it seems much more reasonable to suppose Paul is named Paul Atreides, and Duncan Idaho is named Duncan Idaho.
Quote the whole thing, your cherry-picked quote removes a lot of context and makes your question bizarre, at best, and disingenuous at worst. It's pretty clear bryanrasmussen is not saying Arabic wouldn't have lasted, but that the rationalization given for erasing Arabic doesn't hold up given the rest of the context.
> I figured just sort of an obvious point that the Arabic wouldn't have lasted but all these other things would have explanation doesn't pass the smell test.
Since (per your other comment) English isn't your native language, a rephrasing:
>> It doesn't pass the smell test to say that Arabic wouldn't have lasted but all these other things would have.
If that's still not clear to you, there's not much helping you.
Science fiction is always really hard, because when you think about it, many of the cultural references of today would be baffling to people 200 years ago. But when we write a story that takes place 200 years in the future, the references can’t be baffling to the reader, first because then the story wouldn’t make sense, but also because nobody is so creative that they can invent 200 years of actual culture. So, they pretty much always use events and themes from current and past events and then re-interpret them in creative ways.
Dune is no different- and I love the book but is there another resource you can think of that is found buried in the desert that is needed for transportation that western powers fight wars over?
All fiction is anchored in "its" time to some significant degree. SF & Fantasy give the author more freedom to place a story, but as you note the author is incapable of entirely divorcing themselves from their context. Intentionally or otherwise, most fiction has allegorical elements reflecting current stories or ideas. Often this is intentional I think, with (some) authors in these genres engaging in ongoing social/political/whathaveyou issues in a way that sidesteps constraints and perspectives you would have in a "present day" setting.
I was thinking about this recently while reading the fourth book in the series and you put my thoughts into words tidily.
Tangentially, I also think the time gap between the third and fourth books (some 3,500 years) necessitated some more creativity with changes to the culture but I got the impression that the author still reused a lot of the same references despite the gap which felt kind of lazy, like humanity was just TOO stagnant for that long. That's when I started thinking that it must be a difficult endeavor to just invent a lot of new culture, especially when you've got to do service to the previous books in the series. The fifth book appears to follow the same trend despite another 1,500 years of time.
Normally I would agree on those timescales, but… the whole point of God Emperor is stultifying stasis, specifically to build up so much tension that humanity explodes outward.
So in this case “language stood still” doesn’t seem particularly out of place.
Either I hadn't gotten to the point where that was explicitly stated, missed it, or I didn't connect it myself (highly likely, ha). Still working my way through #5. I did get that the golden path was basically a kind of progession stasis but not that the point of the thing was the scattering and whatever happens after. That's very interesting, thanks for pointing it out. I love these books anyway!
My favorite kind of sci fi is the stuff that throws you into a new world with new cultural references and doesn’t bother to explain them. Gibson is a good example. It’s a similar good feeling to getting off the train in a foreign city pre smartphone.
The languages of dune fascinated me far less than the blended religious systems.
Author copied pieces of various real world ones & they all interact and somehow it all makes sense.
If anyone came at me with a pitch involving Jesuits, Islamic jihadists and a revolution against AI I'd say that's going to get you incoherent gibberish...but somehow it works.
This is only slightly related but I noticed in Dune (2021) that the Sardaukar spoken language seems dubbed over the actor's voice. I've wondered if it the language's inclusion was a late production choice. It looks like they're saying the English subtitles but we hear dubbed audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWK3nkJhneE.
I do object to calling them languages. They're real languages that happen to have been created for a work of fiction.
If someone in a Dune created a new kind of cookie, and a real baker had actually written a recipe for and baked said cookies, you wouldn't write the article "'Dune' and the Delicate Art of Making Fictional Cookies". You'd write the article "The Controversial Cookie from 'Dune'".
My favourite take on this was by Neal Stephenson in his excellent novel Reamde - wherein we have several pages building up to an argument between a linguist and a fiction-creator about the (mis)use of apostrophe in an online game's fictional language.
"The Apostropocalypse is to the current realignment in T’Rain what the Treaty of Versailles was to the Second World War,” said Richard, deliberately mocking the tone of a Wikipedia contributor in hopes that the others would get it."
Conlangs are cool and all and I haven't seen the new movie yet, but the thing that sort of annoyed me about the first one is that the book is _heavily_ inspired by a non-fiction book called Sabres of Paradise, about an islamic uprising against the Russian Empire:
And the book is _full_ of arabic, persian and russian terminology, and Islamic cultural and religious references, and the director and screenwriter have said that it's basically orientalism and ornament and they've gotten rid of it because it's distracting, but I don't think it's ornament, and I think the Islamic influences on the Fremen are a core part of the story, and it's missing a lot without it.
The book is meant to be about _our future_ and the fact that Muslims still exist and are important in the future isn't just like "flavor", it was an innovative idea at the time in science fiction and still is.
It just seems kind of wrong to expend so much thought inventing new languages for the movie when it had so much context and culture already there to use.
Technically the Fremen aren't exactly Muslim (although they seem to be Muslim-coded) -- they are members of a new religion called Zen-Sunni, which was formed when Zen Buddhism and Sunni Islam merged at some point in the future. And the other major religion Orange Catholicism presumably likewise is a merge of Protestantism ("Orange") back into Catholic Christianity.
I wish there was more background on this. What was original concept with putting Zen Buddhism and Islam together?
Did Herbert have a plan for this combo, or was he just making up some future backstory? Like sometimes happens when authors aren't really sure there will be a sequel at all, and just scatter some future references around.
It was set dressing for a syncretic far future. All of this stuff is in the appendix where it is not very much explored because it's meant to be evocative more than illustrative.
Yeah, and in some sense it actually is Orientalism - a vague exotic reference. And crucially it will have registered completely different for the original audience than it would today - most people in the 60's in western Europe and America had never seen a Muslim, and their knowledge of Islam and Middle Eastern culture could probably be summed up in less than a paragraph. Especially a word like jihad is infinitely more loaded than it was 50 years ago to western ears. (I'd actually wager most people who read it in the first decade or two learned that word from the book.)
Personally I read Dune in my first year of university, when I was doing a course on the Middle East, so it all hits very different to me, and the Arabic in Dune is very important to my personal appreciation of it - but I can see how it's hard to introduce to a contemporary audience due to all the regrettable events of recent decades, so perhaps it makes sense. It seems impossible to make neutral references to Muslim/Arabic culture or history these days, everything becomes some grand political statement for or against Bin Laden or Salman Rushdie...
Exactly. For most scifi/fantasy writers, religion is window dressing. Very few care unless they are writing explicitly and very consciously about real world religions via a thinly veiled allegory.
The ones that come to mind for me are Dan Simmons, Walter Miller, and Philip K Dick. If you remember the Priest's Tale from Hyperion or Mercerism in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, you know what I'm talking about.
To be fair, I don't think religion is window dressing in Dune, it's just the specifics of how society came to be so syncretic that they end up compiling the OC Bible doesn't need to be examined (other than the hazily-sketched out narrative about the Council of Ecumenical Translators in the appendix). Ditto how disparate religions like Zen Buddhism or Sunni Islam (or every single other existing religion) come to mix together. It's just assumed that's what happens because it's so far in the future. What's important is what these far future faiths, at least the ones that aren't throwaway references, do afterwards.
every religion is full of elements from previous religions
zen buddhism can reasonably be thought of as a mix between daoism and buddhism
pure land buddhism is basically christianity dressed in buddhist language
modern hinduism is full of buddhist elements
many central aspects of christian myth can be traced back to things like the resurrection of osiris
many christian practices such as monogamy and christmas are obvious continuations of roman pagan religious practices, and of course 'easter' was a northern european fertility goddess (though she isn't the origin of the festival with her name; the corresponding holiday is called some version of 'pesach', 'passover', in non-norse languages)
in many cases particular saints in syncretic catholicism in the new world can be identified with particular pre-conquest deities
islam is largely judaism, but has clearly integrated a lot of non-jewish cultural elements
and all of that is just in the last 2500 years! so it seems totally believable that in 26000 years things would be vastly more intertwingled
This is both extremely reductive and also totally false. Obviously religions influence other religions, but all your examples don't hold up to scrutiny.
Islam is just Judaism? What?
Christmas isn't pagan. That's a myth. Modern Christmas was invented by German Protestants and then spread to England where it was given a huge shot in the arm by Charles Dickens.
You're wrong about Zen Buddhism.
Syncretism exists, but Herbert is just so lazy. He mashes together two different religions with very little in common other than Orientalism (his greatest vice as a creator).
I guess rather than say religion is window dressing, I'd say Herbert wasn't particularly interested in coming up with a theology or rituals or anything like that. He's interested in religions as a medium for power. Which, to be frank, is how a lot of powerful people throughout history have treated religion. It's just that, when you don't have a sense of how everyday people relate to those kinds of structures, it feels a little fake to me.
I would say that it's untrue insofar that he comes up with plenty of rituals and proverbs and prophecies. Theology definitely appears when it comes to the nature of the space messiah that the Fremen are waiting for. And we definitely see everyday people engaging in that throughout the book!
But I do also grok what you're getting at- ultimately these trappings of religion are part of the medium of power, and covers up the base desires of humanity, even when it becomes transhuman through space spice-psychic magic. Herbert's elaborate spiritual systems then become manifestations of the culture under religion, but don't hold true moral or philosophical significance that religion is supposed to have, because the true moral reality in his setting is ultimately still about power.
I don't know, I haven't read the sequels, this interpretation might be really off-base.
>Herbert's elaborate spiritual systems then become manifestations of the culture under religion, but don't hold true moral or philosophical significance that religion is supposed to have, because the true moral reality in his setting is ultimately still about power.
In the later novels it introduces the concept of "Arafel" a word which comes from the Hebrew word for darkness. It represents the apocalypse (the end of humanity) and the idea is that through the golden path humanity is steered away from Arafel, so there is a thin veneer of a moral justification beyond power..
> it's meant to be evocative more than illustrative
Agree, and those evocative references were one of things I loved when first reading the Dune series many years ago as well as watching the '84 film. I still remember being taken aback at the reference to "Emperor Hitler" and the fact that knowledge of him was (rightfully) lost with time, but also along with most other knowledge of our era.
If i recall correctly zensunni in the book also used/read the orange-catholic bible.
Overall I think the topic of religion stays vague apart from Herbert making use of the trope of a Messiah and using syncretism as a symbol that major shifts happened in the human societies that brought opposing religions together.
In particular the OC Bible was compiled as a synthesis of all the major existing religious traditions of the time after the Butlerian Jihad, which united humanity in revolt against the thinking machines. The resulting total ban on computational devices as heresy lead to the rise of the Spacing Guild’s monopoly on interstellar navigation.
>Did Herbert have a plan for this combo, or was he just making up some future backstory?
It has been a very long time since I read all the novels so I can't recall all the details. It is a major plot point in book 5 "Heretics of Dune" zensunni leads to the alliance between the Bene Gesserit and the Tleilaxian's. The Tleilaxu follow a strict interpretation of the religion in secret and during a meeting between the faction leaders one of the reverend mothers is able to deduce this from their speech patterns and manipulate them into an alliance which has some ramifications.
Considering the Tleilaxu aren't introduced until book 2 (I think) I assume it was planned out ahead of time by Herbert.
The connotations to western audiences carried by Arabic words and imagery in 1965 is vastly different to the connotations conveyed today. It would be incredibly distracting and offputting to modern audiences trying to grasp the core story.
I think this is the strongest reason to avoid it, and I would have done the same. It's just going to lead the audience to weird places and confusion. And distract from all of the other things Dune has going for it. Replicating the EFFECT on the audience of a book written in 1965 is really a big undertaking.
Even if you ignore the rather blunt stereotyping and selective aspects of Islamic cultures that Herbert injected. Or carried over from another story, as was highlighted earlier.
I assumed some of that was because they kept, and highlighted really, the fact that their religion was the result of deliberate manipulation by the Bene Gesserit. I can’t remember if they explicitly say “planted prophets,” but it felt more plain than in the book; I can see how making that statement when the culture is explicitly Arabic and the religion Islam would be more incendiary than science fiction is usually trying to be.
In the book they explicitly say that the Bene Gesserit planted stories and prophecies in populations so they could exploit them, if needed, later. That's what Paul and Jessica do.
But if you take out those connotations, there isn't really much left to Dune. The people who read it as kids and found its word-building novel either never watched Lawrence of Arabia or know nothing about the history of the Middle East.
That's not to say the book isn't enjoyable, or even great. It's just that it mashes together various real people and historical incidents and draws much of its power from them. If you know the real story, it's impossible not to notice the parallels. If you remove the parallels, you lose the story's power.
> But if you take out those connotations, there isn't really much left to Dune.
Hydraulic despotism. The pitfalls of manipulating religion. The trap that both present to those who use them. That’s what most of the book is about.
If you just focus on historical analogies you’re missing some major themes of the book. And that’s ignoring the thematic exploration of precognition and omniscience, the ecological themes etc.
Sure, but those themes are drawn out via the facts of the story which have direct historical parallels. It seems like the Arabic elements are just window dressing and you could swap them out without affecting the story. But because it is drawing on real world events, even if you aren't aware of the history, you lose something if you try to make it more generic.
The proof is the movie version (at least Part I). The fremen feel less like an actual society with a coherent culture because they removed anything that tied them to the Middle Eastern.
I think this is true of fantasy in general, because the progenitor of the modern genre was Tolkien, a huge history/linguistics/mythology nerd. And one can easily argue that he set the precedent of taking history (often the middle ages) and imbuing it with the mythic/religious elements that people told stories about.
Look at GRRM and A Song of Ice and Fire. One of the subplots is basically, "What if Chinggis Khan was a chump who died but he had a blonde child bride that accomplished all the shit that he did in real life." Again, I don't think that makes his books bad, but in my experience, the more you study history, the more you realize how the real creativity of fantasy writers is what pieces of history and mythology they crib and recombine.
All stories of note have historical parallels, but I think it's fair to say that there have been new bits of history since then, that would heavily distract from the meaning of the work, if the window dressing stayed the same. AGOT would hit a little differently if it just so happened that there was a horrifying civil war caused by a poorly planned incestuous relationship sometime in the 2010s.
I've just seen the second film, and I think it does many of the book's messages justice (Great Man in particular). Perhaps you can criticize that removing the window dressing has destroyed some of the setting's cohesion. It's a reasonable argument.
But I do think that the film would lose more if was buttressed with an allegorical context for, uh, more recent world history.
if some social group today finds itself 'put off' by arabic words and imagery, does that make it more praiseworthy to omit arabic words from a story you are telling them, or to emphasize arabic words in a story you are telling them? i would tend more towards the latter; i don't think that kind of thing merits coddling
It's more: does it distract from the story. Did the Arabic bring anything specific to the story? Did the plot change with removal? Does it influence anyone's motivation or story? Not really, so unless you want to double down for pure shock value - removing it makes sense. That's being practical about where the value of that book lies, but coddling.
Quick test: if the original didn't include them, would you notice and say "this story really lacks Arabic words to be great"? If not, it wasn't ever necessary.
also, i find the idea that arabic, one of the world's five most spoken languages, has shock value, to be shocking. we aren't talking about a conlang invented by the manson family
Arabic doesn't have shock value. Arabic in an invented future culture of religious fanatics taking over the universe has a bit of shock value. Doubling down to have more of it and emphasizing it because it's slightly controversial definitely has shock value.
I'm not exactly sure who you're arguing with necessarily, though the acid in your words is quite plain. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental reality that the more capital is invested in the creation of cultural for-profit creation, the more tied the product is to commercial concerns. Books can be created without any sacrifice of artistic vision, Hollywood blockbusters with budgets as they are will never be divorced from the realities of commercial viability. I didn't present this as a "good thing", anymore than it's a "good thing" that my personal well-being is associated in some degree with my own financial outlook.
Ultimately I think Dune is packed with ideas, many of which are really point-in-time, and not everything can make it onto the screen in a coherent way. I thought they did a good job overall when viewed as a whole product.
Your apathy on the issue is a moral judgement. You think it's not a big deal. I disagree. We should not be "adapting" art to fit modern sensibilities. I don't care if they take artistic liberties with the space ship designs, but changing key aspects of how you interpret an old the story is bad. Maybe just make your own movie instead of misrepresenting a key cultural relic.
You sound like a real peach - angry at people for observing the world as it is, inserting moral judgments about them because they're not uselessly raging at pop cultural comfort food. I don't have to give you my bona fides on the ways I try to impact the world around me, but one cannot fight every battle. No amount of righteous anger I display here - not matter how performative it would be to you - would change the fact that a $190 million dollar budget fronted by a for-profit company is going account for commercial concerns of the end product in the society in which we currently live.
Also, "key cultural relic"? That's layering it on a bit thick.
This is not a strong justification. If you switched out "arabic words and imagery" for say "blackface" would it still hold? There was a time where seeing non-white actors in film would have been considered distracting and off-putting, but we seem to have moved past that as a society, so why are we holding on to this justification now?
Moreover, distracting and off putting to whom? This article, in part, is responding to how distracting it is for fans of the books and readers to see the source material changed in a pretty crucial way. As others have said, its not exactly obvious to me that the use of these words and language are even possible to separate from the core story.
I get that this is a film executive's decision looking at the commercial viability of their product if they whitewash the story (or not), but at the end of the day we can't really say what the commercial success would (or wouldn't) have been if this language were preserved. To me this demonstrates more the entrenchment of the people who are in the position to make these choices rather than what audiences are willing to consume.
After all, consider the fact that Dune has remained important enough, despite the claim that Arabic (and specifically Muslim) imagery is used throughout that someone decided to greenlight two feature film adaptations so far.
When we dumb things down for the lowest common denominator, we're just left with slop. I understand the economic incentive to reach the widest audience possible, but I wish our culture was better at telling idiots to go pound sand.
Maybe in the general case, but in this specific case? Inability to look past islamaphobic 'connotations' and prejudices to enjoy something like Dune seems like a affliction of idiots to me.
Could you clarify what it is missing exactly? Genuinely curious as I read the books before watching the movie and I didn't really feel like the movie was missing anything?
> The book is meant to be about _our future_ and the fact that Muslims still exist and are important in the future isn't just like "flavor", it was an innovative idea at the time in science fiction and still is.
Respectfully I think this is reading too deep into it. Herbert borrowed Arabic words and concepts to build a hardy middle-eastern-adjacent culture, it's hardly the focus of the book.
> Respectfully I think this is reading too deep into it. Herbert borrowed Arabic words and concepts to build a hardy middle-eastern-adjacent culture, it's hardly the focus of the book.
I always thought the Arabic references in Dune, and also the desert planet that produces the fuel by which commerce operates, was a downright obvious social commentary on oil and the geopolitics at the time the book was published
Honestly I always thought the metaphor was borderline heavy handed, to the point that I never continued reading after the first book because the metaphor was boring to me
Now I feel positively gaslit. Did I imagine all this?
I’m not sure the timing actually works out for that. Arab oil production was significantly behind the United States and Russia during the Second World War, but represented a major share of oil production by 1973, as seen in the effects of the embargo imposed in response to the Yom Kippur War.
Dune was written in the 1950’s, but the geopolitical metaphors are a few decades older than that; the character of Paul Atreides is clearly a parallel to T.E. Lawrence, which places the geopolitical context firmly within the First World War. That’s a different part of the Middle East (the Levant as opposed to the Hejaz and Gulf), a different strategic value relating to long distance travel (the Suez Canal as opposed to oil), and a much older world of competing colonizers. And not to put too fine a point on it, the Ottomans also had a padishah emperor!
No, the reference to Arabic oil is heavy-handed at least, but Frank Herbert has denied this was intentionally just that, without denying there were obvious elements. He’s claimed they represent a wider yearning for freedom.
opec was formed in 01960; dune was published as a serial in 01963 and as a book in 01965, in the usa, by an author from the usa
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc... says that in 01960 the usa produced 8.11 million barrels of oil per day and consumed 9.80, with net imports of 1.61. (not sure what happened to the other 0.08.) net imports had grown dramatically over the previous decade, and oil was already a significant factor in usa political involvement in the middle east, in affairs such as the iranian coup. also, petroleum was a major strategic resource in the second world war; the usa's naval blockade against japanese oil imports is commonly cited as a major factor in japan's decision to attack the usa
by 01965 us net imports were up to 2.28 million barrels per day, so it was an issue of growing geopolitical importance, but still only a fraction of the importance opec and oil imports would have in the 01970s
Many of the Arabic words used in the books have a distinctively Francophone flair to them (e.g. "bene" rather than "bani"). Now consider that at the time Herbert worked on this books, Algerian War of Independence was an ongoing anti-colonialist war waged by people who were culturally and linguistically mostly Arabic with a significant Berber element...
The Fremen follow the Zensunni religion (exactly what it sounds like), so continuity with real world cultures is a big part of the story. Another example, the Bene Gesserit are called Reverend Mother.
What? No, it's a Latin word, and not a distortion of anything. It's a conjugation of the verb 'gero', which has several meanings - but when put next to 'bene', most likely means 'to behave, conduct oneself, comport oneself'. You can see the conjugation table here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gero#Latin. And it forms part of the legal Latin phrase 'Quamdiu se bene gesserit', or 'So long as he shall behave himself properly'. (https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/978019...).
We don't know what Herbert actually meant by "Bene Gesserit", or even whether it has strictly one meaning, since he never elaborated on that. Given how syncretic everything else is, it is entirely plausible that there are multiple references encoded in the name. The Latin one is fairly obvious given that they refer to each other as "Reverend Mothers".
But then note that Bene Tleilaxu is clearly not Latin, and makes more sense if you interpret the word "bene" ("bani") in its Arabic meaning - "descendants of", in practice often referring to tribes and similar groupings (as in Bani Quraish or Bani Isra'il) - Tleilax being their home planet. If we apply the same to "Bene Gesserit", it would mean "Daughters of ???". One possibility then would be Arabic "Jazirah", "peninsula".
An even more interesting theory along these lines is that "Gesserit" refers to the mythical demon-slaying hero-king Gesser (aka Geser aka Gesar) of the Mongolian and Tibetan folklore. In Mongolian, "... of Gesar" is "Geseriyn". Gesar is the Chosen Son of the Sky God (head of the pantheon), the first man who descended from Heaven to purge the world of evil demons that menace humanity - it sure does make for some interesting parallels with Kwizats Haderach...
Again, to re-iterate, it's entirely possible that all of these are simultaneously true. Herbert liked referencing obscure (to his culture) folklore, so a play on words like this could well be intentional.
> It just seems kind of wrong to expend so much thought inventing new languages for the movie when it had so much context and culture already there to use.
It did all work great in the books, and would certainly have worked in the movies as well. But, the effort and care they've put into this additionally world-building seems totally in the spirit of the original Dune to me. There were a number of things that I had imagined differently when reading the books, but this was a rare case where I think they've done an excellent job bringing their version to the screen.
Amusingly, neither Zendaya nor Javier Bardem are Middle-Eastern, but they can easily play so because skin color works that way. I think the fact that it could just as well be a post-El-Niño Chihuahuan desert makes sense too.
note how the theme of the Nigun Shamil is echoed by cyberpunk computer cowboys:
> "For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh." —WFG
Lagniappe: my current favourite music video performed by caucasians that references (however unintentionally) Lancaster vs York would be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTdXQabTTRg
it's tempting to think that our ways of thinking about mathematical objects such as software and data files—liberation from the contemptible flesh into the bodiless exultation of eternally absolute and changeless beauty, universally accessible but only through the mind, or as https://www.chabad.org/multimedia/music_cdo/aid/1692239/jewi... expresses it in its exegesis of the nigun, "the soul cries and yearns for her former glory, her sanctity now tarnished as she dwells among mere mortals"—represent a secularization of an essentially religious discourse that originally pertained to theism, an absolutist monotheism that identifies the fleshless and changeless with the divine and sacred
but when i read parts of the torah like ספר שופטים, which are mostly about 2700–2800 years old, i don't see any of this fleshless and changeless or universally accessible stuff. people don't consecrate themselves or places by contemplating sacred truths, meditating until mystical revelations present themselves (though angels do make appearances), or experiencing bodiless exultation of any flavor. instead, the sacred is pursued through abstaining from pork, eccentric hairstyles, animal sacrifice, ornamentation with precious metals, carrying around wooden boxes, and spilling torrents of blood in the name of tribal deities; and it is manifested through victory in battle and material plenty. divine and sacred beings are conceptualized as partisan, constantly changing their opinions, and often even physically solid, though immortal; and alignment with them brings not liberation from the contemptible flesh but bestowal of victory and riches on that flesh. texts from that period from other cultures like the rig veda, the mahabharata, and the iliad agree on this, though the avesta may be an exception (there seems to be a significant amount of yearning after bodiless exultation in an afterlife after liberation from contemptible flesh in there)
even in the slightly older rig veda, where agni (for example) is described as undecaying/ageless and everywhere visible (an empirically valid description of the sun), and where mental attention to the gods is lauded often, what the worshippers are asking for is cattle, battle victories, and gold, not bodiless exultation and liberation from flesh, and their means for achieving it is singing songs, sacrificing food and drink, and performing rituals with their bodies
it's about 2500 years ago when we start to see people aspiring to bodiless exultation and liberation from flesh through mental contemplation of eternally absolute and changeless beauty, and we see it in two places: in the tipitaka and in platon, who apparently got it from the pythagoreans. in both places it's coupled with a belief in reincarnation, which, together with the close temporal coincidence, suggests a common historical origin. as for the divine beings of older books, shakyamuni apparently accepts that they are partisan, constantly changing their opinions, physically solid, but denies that they are immortal or worth worshipping, while platon takes the opposite tack, condemning the poets for describing them as partisan and constantly changing their opinions
so perhaps the current ran the other way: cyberpunk abacus and sand-table cowboys had humanity's first encounters with eternally absolute and changeless beauty, universally accessible but only through the mind, and the resulting bodiless exultation changed their outlook forever, and eventually everyone else's?
a great difficulty for this hypothesis is that the tipitaka doesn't contain, as far as i can tell, so much as the simplest seked calulation, much less theorems about angles and prime numbers
> cyberpunk abacus and sand-table cowboys had humanity's first encounters with eternally absolute and changeless beauty, universally accessible but only through the mind, and the resulting bodiless exultation changed their outlook forever
Now that's an interesting idea.
I need to check out the Avesta[0] and track down Platon's Nuptial Number[1] before commenting more, although some obvious replies to your difficulty are that accounting and scribing[2] have traditionally been priesting-adjacent, so there could well be more orally-transmitted relation than we have textual evidence for. (speaking of the latter: my hypothesis up until this point is that even ancient Sumerians had their own geeks who had their own analogies for abstraction, but the reason we now rest the abstract/concrete duality on Platon's broad shoulders is because he was in the first generation[3] who bothered to write their ideas down[4])
[2] the spoken word can certainly provide examples of object-attribute lattices that should bootstrap abstract thought, but maybe it was too closely related to our conscious processes for early human fish to notice the water? By the time one is making arbitrary marks for numbers, or even arbitrary clay blobs for numbers with units ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulla_(seal)#Origins ), it should become obvious that both {Bossy,Daisy,Buttercup} and {Cupcake,Ebony,Fiona} can be mapped to "3 cows". Literacy (where one stamps a number for 3 followed by a sign for cow into the clay) makes it even more obvious?
[3] compare Socrates' complaints about literacy, which remind me of our current arguments about LLMs: "but what if someone reads something which has just been hallucinated"?
[4] which might help explain your "and eventually everyone else's"; before writing, it would be difficult for a small fraction of geeks in a population to remain motivated, but after writing it would be possible for them to think "even if I know no one else from my village like me, there have been others, and there probably will be more..." and decide to participate in the literature?
any chance you could provide me with entry refs for the tipitaka?
The zoroastrian Ahuna Vairya and (especially) Ashem Vohu do seem to contrast following asha with worldly power. (compare med. {bellatores, laboratores, oratores} or PIE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trifunctional_hypothesis )
Given the relative dates, I'm proceeding with the very tentative hypothesis that Zoroaster (who does seem to comment, in stuff I have yet to read, on immortality?) might be the common source for both?
(oddly enough, the "silk road" as such is supposed to be more recent than all three, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road#Chinese_and_Central_... suggest many possibilities for bits to already have been travelling back and forth across eurasia even if trade in atoms had not reached its later heights)
As for the nuptial number: at this point I'm not convinced it isn't just technakos barbar (technobabble)? IIRC elsewhere in the Republic it's argued that the guardian class will reproduce by sending its youth to the ancient greek equivalent of open-air music festivals, where they will camp together letting nature (as with bulls and cows) run its course, so the passage here seems to be a deliberate contrast. (but to what end?)
Edit: think I found it, via source attribution. The speaker of those lines is neither Platon, nor Socrates (whom he supposedly quotes), but the Muses (as "quoted" by "Socrates"): http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...
in which case technobabble makes perfect sense.
[at one point I ran across a Soviet book on religion —because a colleague had relied upon it in the 01960's to follow the Western CS literature and their use of Easter calculation as a running example— and was amazed at how much detail it went into on minor european sects but disappointed in how relatively broad its coverage was for other continents]
Edit: HN can express the sumerian signs for 3 and cow! 𒐈𒀖
While non-cannon (with the writing of the prequels), from The Dune Encyclopedia ...
> The earliest history of the native inhabitants of Arrakis indicates that they were the sole remnant of a people known as the Zensunni Wanderers, originally followers of a "prophet" named Maometh, circa 1381 E.G. The Fremen broke away from the main sect to establish their own religion based on an ultraconservative notion of living life according to "the ways of the fathers." Given the Fremen's roots in such a religion and the particularly life- threatening environment that Arrakis afforded them, the Fremen developed a set of cultural institutions unique in their perfect balance between the philosophical world view demanded by imposed Fremen faith and the harsh reality imposed by Arrakis's nature. These institutions remained stable for thousands of years and are significantly changed by only two events. The first was the arrival of Pardot Kynes as the first planetologist of Arrakis. The second was the transfer of the governance of Arrakis from the House Harkonnen to House Atreides in 10190 and the subsequent emergence of Paul Atreides as Paul Maud'Dib. Kynes expanded the cultures of the Fremen to include the hope for a second flowering of Arrakis; Paul Maud'Dib forever changed that culture, thus, for all intents, the ancient culture of the Fremen ceased with his rise to power.
I've reviewed this kind of Dune background material and I still don't quite get how the Zensunnis and others managed to get to other star systems before the advent of FTL. I've seen no mention of (for example) generation ships.
In this timeline... FTL was discovered in 13004 BG (before guild) and 12200 BG was "The Empire of Ten Worlds" followed by 11200 BG which was "The Empire of a Thousand Worlds"
It wasn't until 7593 BG when I.V. Holtzman was born. 5022 BG was "The Empire of Ten Thousand Worlds".
The order of the mentats was established in 1234 AG. In 2800 AG you have the beginnings of the Zensunni Migration. 7193 AG was Zensunni on Rossak buying passage from the space guild to Arrakis.
Paul Atreides was born in 10175 AG.
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FTL existed before the guild, it was mediated by computers and wasn't entirely safe.
There are about 10,000 years between the founding of the guild (and safe non-computer FTL) and the events of Dune.
Completely agree. Seems like a lot of people are taking this nonsensical complaint of “cultural appropriation” to basically peer pressure people into self segregating. The negative experiences of African Americans during slavery/post slavery when it comes to the specific issue of cultural appropriation really doesn’t apply to most other ethnicities who view someone else adopting their culture with genuine happiness.
The Russian element is interesting, as it stood out to be on my last rewatch of the 2021 film that the main villain (Stellan Skarsgård) is named "Vladimir Harkonnen".
Dune the novel, is where I learned the word "jihad" long before it was commonly known. It wasn't used in the film much, since as noted, the world has moved on.
The Emperor is very obviously coded as the Shah of Iran.
I’m not sure how much Herbert differentiated Persian from Arabic culture —I don’t think he would conflate the two— but at the time of the Shah was seen as the most decadent ruler, independently of religion: in 1971, six years after the first book came out, he threw the biggest party ever (literally). I don’t know if Herbert approved of Salvator Dali as the Emperor in Jodorowsky’s version but that makes more sense to code him as excessive and dangerous because unpredictable (something Christopher Walken will do amazingly well; Jeff Goldblum could have been great too) than conflating him with Muslim references.
The references are beyond specific houses: Jihad is also used for the "Butlerian Jihad" which is started by the viceroy of the League of Noble, and a Harkonen ally, not something coded with the Freemen, who seemingly don’t know about it, or the Emperor who only takes over much later and at Harkonens’ expenses.
The _word_ can't be used casually like that any more. The world has moved on from using the word casually as exotic unfamiliar flavour, without inviting unwelcome ignorant reflexive antagonism. For an example of that, I refer you to your own comment.
I would not say that Jihad was used casually in Dune. But when you read only the first part it looks like the hero is promoting Jihad as something good.
When the truth, considering all parts of this sentence, is way more complex if you read on and even reread it.
I think the studio (execs) just were afraid of having a blockbuster with a hero that promotes Jihad.
> I think the studio (execs) just were afraid of having a blockbuster with a hero that promotes Jihad.
Agreed, they will use an different equivalent term such as "holy war" for the reasons given above.
The meaning of that fictional cataclysm is not casual, but the word choice in Dune the 1965 novel, using an unfamiliar middle-eastern term for it, I think was. These are separate things, and I refer you again to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use%E2%80%93mention_distinctio...
Yes? In the first book, the Harkonnens and the Empire are cartoon character evil and Paul and the Atreides are cartoon character good guys. Things only get more complicated later in the story.
Paul is already very uncomfortable with the role he has to play in the first book - first the whole part where he and his mother (ab)use a religious prophecy deliberately planted in the Fremen culture for their own needs, and then the part where he turns said culture into fanatical warriors. He already dreams of what is about to come in the next book.
I assumed he was talking about the Butlerian Jihad, which is an idea that feels particularly fresh and relevant today. "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind"
Fun fact - a rock band from NZ named themselves "Shihad" after a member had read Dune and got the word jihad wrong. When they tried to break into the US market, they renamed themselves "Pacifier" because, well, you know, Shihad/jihad wasn't a great connotation post 9/11. And the name was appropriate because their music as Pacifier rather sucked.
On the one hand I imagine that Russian and Arabic viewers would find inclusions from their languages very distracting, but then the story is so clearly about Americans and Russians squabbling over colonized Arabic territory, and all of them getting screwed over by ‘larger forces’, that I don’t think changing the language makes a real difference.
A lot of the story and setting is taken almost _word for word_ from Sabres of Paradise, which takes place in the Caucuses, before the soviet union existed and before America got involved in the middle east.
Speaking as a Russian, the only real reference to Russian specifically in the books is Vladimir Harkonnen's first name, which was amusing when it first came up, but it doesn't really seem to play any specific role (and ofc his last name is Finnish, so, like most other things in this universe, if it's a cultural reference, it's very syncretic). There is another reference to a broader Slavic culture in one of the Fremen chants in the first book, though:
ima trava okolo
i korenja okolo
This does not directly correspond to any existing Slavic language, but it is very recognizable to most speakers of such - "trava" is grass, "korenja" (pronounced as "korenya") are "roots", and "okolo" literally means "around" (from "kolo", circle), and in some Slavic languages became more generic "nearby". So the snippet should really translate as "grass is around/near, and roots are around/near", but Herbert translates it as "these are the grasses and these are the roots". Then again, many clearly Arabic phrases also have meanings that are similar but not exactly the same as what they really mean, and the book sort of implies that it's just the result of language evolution over time. But it is rather interesting that Fremen of all people apparently have some Slavic language as part of its history. Given that the snippet most closely resembles South Slavic languages, it is likely a reference to Bosniaks specifically, but it's never really elaborated further.
> On the one hand I imagine that Russian and Arabic viewers would find inclusions from their languages very distracting, but then the story is so clearly about Americans and Russians squabbling over colonized Arabic territory
It isn't, though between the time it was conceived and written and when it became popular things the world situation had evolved so that became a popular interpretation.
"and the fact that Muslims still exist and are important in the future isn't just like "flavor", it was an innovative idea at the time in science fiction and still is."
But, think of the alternative.
The Fremen are an 'extremist' religious group, that easily kill any foreigner, and are manipulated into a 'jihad'.
If the Movie doubled down to making them "Islamic Flavored". Then the movie and director would get crucified for portraying Muslims in an un-favorable light.
The book might have used Islamic Flavor, but it does not do it to show Islam favorably. It shows them as radical brutal desert dwellers.
On the contrary, as the Fremen are shown to be the oppressed indigenous, the movie would be stoned for casting jihad in too positive a light, as an admirable ideal! The book hardly shows the Great Houses nor the Imperium as any better than the savage freedom fighters. If anything the series isn't really sympathetic towards any particular subgroup of humanity.
> have said that it's basically orientalism and ornament and they've gotten rid of it because it's distracting
I like the books and the first film, haven't seen part 2 yet. But this has to be bullshit. Is it about orientalist ornaments or did the studio want to avoid a midwit outrage over the frequent use of the term "Jihad"?
Just from memory, there was also the name "Usul" described as meaning "the strength at the base of the pillar". In the same context, I could see that drawing outrage too.
Within the lifetime of the universe, all futures are possible. I don't find it particularly interesting whether that future is directly a result of us, or some completely identical hominid that evolved the same way on the other side of the galaxy.
It's a book about galactic Jihad for God's sake. Of course they are going to "deflavor" it. I'm of the opinion the entire production is to take narrative control over this amazing work of literature. You can not mistake who are the bad guys and who are the good guys :)
Dune and its follow up volumes are visionary fiction.
Also, from a much more pragmatic perspective, it just sounds cool. I don’t think we should be reluctant about using any given language just because we are currently having some issues with people also using it.
It’s not as if I enjoy my games with Russian in any less.
They were just trying to avoid jihad and all that because of present geopolitical positioning. You can’t have the hero be threatening to go ISIS on the universe. You’ll get canceled.
Yeah but being constantly drawn to literally jihad. Too dangerous. “Oh man, I might accidentally unleash galactic jihad. It’s so tempting. It is my fate. I’m going to try to avoid it”. Not hero stuff.
But, of course, that is the whole point - Paul isn't a hero, he just plays the role of one for his own purposes (first survival, and then trying to prevent the end of humankind he foresees in the future). Using the Fremen's own religion - by itself, benign, but prone to manipulation as any religion is - to turn them into his fanatical followers is meant to be a bad thing, and it bugs him in the books.
All that’s true. It just seems somewhat risky that you make a movie that points to Osama and says “There, but for the grace of God, go I”. Just somewhat dangerous.
The book was written well before modern terrorism.
The Jihad in Dune had obvious parallels to the rise of the Rashidun Caliphate - previously unknown warriors appearing out of the desert and conquering most of the Roman Empire. So it was based in an era where the idea of holy war was quite different.
On top of that I think that the audience of SF literature are a little more open minded than the average movie goer.
Yes, of course. The Afghan mujahideen were widely acclaimed even not that long ago from now because they were fighting the Russians. But this is a mass-market movie. It can't walk that close to the line in this day and age. It's going to clean up the dirty ends.
From a commercial perspective, it definitely is. From a cultural one, I would argue that the fact that our modern culture gets outraged about such things is a sign of its illness: we are pretending that we can avoid difficult conversations about important things by ignoring them if they make us uncomfortable.
I think it's the other way around: the movie has come out, people are interested in the movie and the New Yorker is capitalising on this by writing about it.
You must be joking. Why in the world would a movie producer ever want to try to come up with various ways to get their movie that has a release date quickly approaching to be brought to the attention of the public? Surely, nobody would ever stoop so low to attempt to generate buzz to increase ticket sales. Next thing you know, you'll be telling me that the actors in that upcoming release will suddenly start talking about work they haven't done for at least six month like they just did it. It's like they are shills and paid performers or something. Say it aint so Joe!
As I said to a friend that asked about the Dune universe: If you spent half as much time reading the actual books as you do browsing the Fandom wiki, you wouldn't be asking me about how the tanks work.
Any "news" site is a non-human entity, a corporation, which is entirely, amorally incentivized by the pursuit of profit in service to the rules governing its existence. The writer was tasked with inventing some original content, at some target number of words, dealing with the particular subject matter that was likely contracted out to the New Yorker as part of the promotion blitz. It would have been edited for tone, length, style, grammar and spelling, and following any particular limitations or specifications directed by the ad agency or production company doing the content buys. Even if it wasn't purchased as part of the Dune promotional campaign, it is entirely brought about by that campaign in an attempt to exploit the current targets of attention.
This is the corporate soul sucking job of journalists in this era - nothing about it is spontaneous, authentic, or driven by an individual's genuine interest inspiring them to write something new. This article is the result of some guy's 9 to 5 with a deadline - he did a good job, within those constraints, but this is milquetoast SEO pap for the masses, tailored for clicks, targeted at vaguely relevant interest driving keywords with vaguely outrage adjacent topics.
I haven't finished TFA yet, but I had to double-check the date, since I recall reading an article that raised the same question as the subheadline when the first Villenueve Dune movie came out.
The book presented only a few phrases from within-universe languages. The movie includes non-trivial amounts of dialogue in those languages, which someone had to write. How they did so could be interesting, and an article about that isn't any more suspicious than one about the movie's vfx or any other aspect of the creative process.
The person who constructed the languages eschewed using the literary influences because he didn't believe that the phonemic inventory would be consistent over tens of thousands of years due to prior information that we have about diachronic change in language families.
What he fails to take into account is the fact that the wide availability of audiovisual distribution of language has a conservational effect that we've not really seen before. So for instance, while there is a large variety of English dialects in the US, "Broadcast English" and "General American" are quite stable and broadly available.
What they've done with the constructed languages of Dune would be like if they made a new Clockwork Orange movie without any of the Nadsat dialect. It robs something from the original text, all so a hobbyist can make something internally consistent that he's personally satisfied with and that may be marketed to future consumers. That sucks.