NEAL STEPHENSON
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universalists think that we are determined by the prepatterned structure of our brains-the pathways in the cortex. The relativists don’t believe that we have any limits.”
“Lagos modified the strict Chomskyan theory by supposing that learning a language is like blowing code into PROMs-an analogy that I cannot interpret.”
“The analogy is clear. PROMs are Programmable Read-Only Memory chips,” Hiro says. ‘When they come from the factory, they have no content. Once and only once, you can place inforrnation into those chips and then freeze it-the information, the software, becomes frozen into the chip-it transmutes into hardware. After you have blown the code into the PROMs, you can read it out, but you can’t write to them anymore. So Lagos was trying to say that the newborn human brain has no structure-as the relativists would have it-and that as the child learns a language, the developing brain structures itself accordingly, the language gets ‘blown into’ the ‘hardware and becomes a permanent part of the brain’s deep structure-as the universalists would have it.”
“Yes. This was his interpretation.”
“Okay. So when he talked about Enki being a real person with magical powers, what he meant was that Enki somehow understood the connection between language and the brain, knew how to manipulate it. The same way that a hacker, knowing the secrets of a computer system, can write code to control it-digital nam.shubs?’
“Lagos said that Enki had the ability to ascend into the universe of language and see it before his eyes. Much as humans go into the Metaverse. That gave him power to create namshubs. And namshubs had the power to alter the functioning of the brain and of the body.”
“Why isn’t anyone doing this kind of thing nowadays? Why aren’t there any namshubs in English?”
“Not all languages are the same, as Steiner points out. Some languages are better at metaphor than others. Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Chinese lend themselves to word play and have achieved a lasting grip on reality: ‘Palestine had Qiryat Sefer, the ‘City of the Letter,” and Syria had Byblos, the “Town of the
Book.” By contrast other civilizations seem “speechless” or at