Editing Babel-17 (section)

== Language of Babel-17 ==
The language portrayed at the center of ''Babel-17'' contains interesting linguistic features including the absence of a pronoun or any other construction for "I". The heroine finds her perceptions (and even her physical abilities) altered once she has learned Babel-17. Babel-17 also seems to alter the worldview of those who speak it. When Rydra speaks in Babel-17, time slows down because she is able to communicate with much more precision. The language also not only allows one to express ideas much quicker but seems to also change one's worldview.

Delany describes himself as having been "a die-hard believer in the Sapir-Whorf", which was in the air at the time, without his ever having heard the term; eventually, once he read about it, he decided that "it was just incorrect", because "it fails to take into account the whole economy of discourse, which is a linguistic level that accomplishes lots of the soft-edge conceptual contouring around ideas, whether we have available a one- or two-word name for it or only a set of informal many-word descriptions that are not completely fixed", which motivated his later works considering language: "The realization of the flaws in the Sapir-Whorf, in that they caused me to begin considering the more complex linguistic mechanisms of discourse, you might say gave me my lifetime project."<ref>[https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6088/the-art-of-fiction-no-210-samuel-r-delany The Art of Fiction No. 210], 2011, ''[[The Paris Review]]''</ref>