[HN Gopher] The Didactic Novel
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       The Didactic Novel
        
       Author : telotortium
       Score  : 27 points
       Date   : 2022-01-09 06:42 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (slimemoldtimemold.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (slimemoldtimemold.com)
        
       | bryanrasmussen wrote:
       | Regarding the Shogun stuff in the beginning - think of all the
       | Elvish you learned from Tolkien!
        
         | bradrn wrote:
         | Practically none. Tolkien went out of his way to avoid using
         | constructed languages in his books, even going so far as to
         | translate character names ('Frodo' is really Maura). When he
         | does provide sentences, there is no effort to make them
         | comprehensible to us; even today, there is no complete
         | reference grammar of even his best attested languages. There is
         | certainly no systematic attempt to teach another language, as
         | seen in _Shogun_
        
           | bryanrasmussen wrote:
           | Ok think of all the Fremen lore you learned from Dune.
        
       | themadturk wrote:
       | This gives a name to so much of what I love about many Neal
       | Stephenson novels (and about Shogun as well) -- didactic.
        
       | dbtc wrote:
       | see also 'Bildungsroman'
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildungsroman
        
       | jhbadger wrote:
       | There's an amusing comic novel by Andrew Drummond called "A
       | Handbook of Volapuk" (itself a reference to a 19th century
       | textbook of that name). It's about the 19th century Volapuk
       | movement. Volapuk was an early attempt at an artificial language,
       | like Esperanto, but earlier. The novel includes scenes of Volapuk
       | lessons and they are actually accurate, although of dubious
       | practical use.
        
         | daniel-cussen wrote:
         | An earlier one is Latin. In reading _Familia Romana Per Se
         | Illustrata_ , you see it's like a made-up language.
        
           | Jtsummers wrote:
           | There's a set of books on this, called the "direct method" or
           | "nature method"
           | 
           | A page with a link to several of these: https://blog.nina.cof
           | fee/2018/08/27/all_nature_method_books....
           | 
           | (the site that it refers to is where I initially found the
           | same list of books, but it seems to be defunct)
           | 
           | https://vivariumnovum.it/risorse-didattiche/propria-
           | formazio... (defunct, it seems)
        
             | inetsee wrote:
             | There is also a set of 3 books by I. A. Richards titled
             | "English Through Pictures.I think it's a useful idea, but
             | the pictures in these books are fairly primitive stick
             | figure drawings.
        
       | bmitc wrote:
       | _Dragon 's Egg_ is basically a tutorial on neutron stars.
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg
        
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