Poetry in the Speech --Reasoning for Babel?

Dai Everyone!
Yes, it's me again with more speculation for you all...

So, in a language where you have to have everything precise, is it possible that you could have such a thing as poetry? Even a metaphore? Or is defining something in such clarity the "poetry" in itself?

Perhaps this connects with the Tower of Babel: What if the story wasn't to screw everyone up... Maybe languages are different and have such lack of specifics SPECIFICLY to stimulate intelligence. A vague language generates the need for imagery and symbolism!

Two roads diverged in a yellow road...
How to write that in TS? "There is a wood that is yellow. In it there are two paths." But the true meaning is something more along the lines of "There came a point in my life were I had to make a decision..." One poem in English conveys both these ideas at the same time.

Another question: Could humans *actually* use a language that doesn't have any phrases like "sun-rise", "the crack of dawn", "when the cows come home", "chip off the old block", etc.

[Agent M]

"Perhaps this connects with the Tower of Babel"
That's exactly what I thought, only in a different way. I thought the obvious thing, the Speech was the original language that everyone used until the incident at the Tower of Babel, if it actually did happen which i don't believe it did seeing as it comes from the bible... But anyways what you're saying makes sense, maybe that's why english is so complicated...

[Gryphon]

Or maybe you have the vague symbols. Actual spellmaking could come from defining those terms. I don't really know how the Tower of Babel goes 'cept that ummm... something about languages.

[Quill]

An excellent question!

_Two roads diverged in a yellow road..._
How to write that in TS? "There is a wood that is yellow. In it there are two paths."

But shouldn't that be "In it is one path, which splits"?

Humans use precise languages fairly frequently, but not usually for poetry, unless somebody's writing poetic computer programs. (Which wouldn't really surprise me.) I think the Speech can be poetic--for instance, there's the excerpt in SYWTBAW from the Book of Night With Moon: I am the the trees that drink the light; I am the air of the green things' breathing; I am the stone that the trees break asunder; I am the molten heart of the world--

Perhaps a language that describes everything is the perfect language for poetry. It's hard to tell without actual examples.

[EWizard11]

I think the Speech can be poetic--for instance, there's the excerpt in SYWTBAW from the Book of Night With Moon: I am the the trees that drink the light; I am the air of the green things' breathing; I am the stone that the trees break asunder; I am the molten heart of the world--

However, that's literally true also, isn't it? But many expressions in languages like English aren't actually literal. "The crack of dawn" for example. Dawn doesn't really crack. So if you said "the crack of dawn" in the Speech, what would it mean?

[Peter Murray]

The crack of dawn?
1 Dawn is one of the Irish kids from Wizard Abroad, and wherever she is, that's where the action is?
2 A US kid called Dawn is selling drugs?
3 As the planet rotates, the heating/cooling effect of the sunlight on the atmosphere causes localised sonic booms?
4 Dawn has been telling jokes (wisecracks)?

Hmmm. 1) doesn't work outside Ireland, 2) and 4) only work in English - 3) works, though. I vote for 3, the sonic booms.

[Kathy Li]

My take is, if you can write poetry in perl, you can write poetry in the Speech...
<pre class="ip-ubbcode-code-pre">#!/usr/bin/perl

APPEAL:

listen (please, please);

open yourself, wide;
join (you, me),
connect (us,together),

tell me.

do something if distressed;

@dawn, dance;
@evening, sing;
read (books,$poems,stories) until peaceful;
study if able;

write me if-you-please;

sort your feelings, reset goals, seek (friends, family, anyone);

do*not*die (like this)
if sin abounds;

keys (hidden), open (locks, doors), tell secrets;
do not, I-beg-you, close them, yet.

accept (yourself, changes),
bind (grief, despair);

require truth, goodness if-you-will, each moment;

select (always), length(of-days)

# listen (a perl poem)
# Sharon Hopkins
# rev. June 19, 1995 </pre>

[Hogosha]

Interesting poem, kli6.
The Tower of Babel idea . . .perhaps the Speech was the original language before the Tower, but at the time it was being built, or just before, the Fall happened? The Lone Power's fall will have had a lot more effects on the universe than we are aware of.
But poetry is self expression. And the Speech is about telling the truth, sort of. It's possible, I think, to have synonyms in the Speech, as long as you know what you're talking about.

[PK]

There certainly appear to be many names in the Speech for the same beings. Think of the number of epithets we've been given for some of the Powers. Of course, these are only partial descriptors, but you do have several terms referring to the same being. (Actually, I think "Destroyer by Fire" got attributed to the Defender by cats and to the Lone Power by trees, but I could be wrong about that. If I am right, we also have a case of a single term, possibly used as a substitute name, referring to two notably different individuals! Which probably has something to do with why, in Wizard's Dilemma, there was discussion of needing context and understanding each other's thought systems to communicate accurately -- even in the Speech.)

I suppose I've always assumed several levels of meaning were part and parcel of working in the Speech, actually, and that this was something to take into account -- I got the impression, I think from the first book, that the meaning of a word in the Speech was influenced by individual and sometimes symbolic meanings of its individual characters, and that this might be somewhat context-dependent. This may be getting too complicated, though, and that system might make it really hard for beginners to do anything without fouling up. *g*

We've also been shown that there are multiple realities in the YW-verse, and that stories told in one may be more literally true in another, perhaps more central one.

[semiramis]

sth else of note: at one point (I forget when), I think Nita mentions that there's room in the Speech for humor (she wasn't sure if someone was serious about what they were saying or not... I think this was in one of the later books, but I'm not sure). So if there's room for humor in the Speech, I'd say there's probably room for metaphor...