Man, I'm a huge fan of Anathem (and Stephenson in general) but this short excerpt really reminded me of https://xkcd.com/483/

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ashton314 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Oh for sure. To be fair, that excerpt I posted is probably the worst in the entire book since Sammann is explaining something using a bunch of ITA ~~jargon~~ bulshytt and it’s meant to be incomprehensible to even the POV character Erasmas.

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renewiltord 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Spoilers for Anathem and His Dark Materials below

Xkcd 483 is directly referencing Anathem so that should be unsurprising but I think in both His Dark Materials (e.g. anbaric power) and in Anathem it is in-universe explained. The isomorphism between that world and our world is explicitly relevant to the plot. It’s the obvious foreshadowing for what’s about to happen.

The worlds are similar with different names because they’re parallel universes about to collide.

	▲	CamperBob2 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I wonder how effective that might be as a language-learning tool. Imagine a popular novel in the US market, maybe 80000-100000 words long but whose vocabulary consists of only a few thousand unique words. The first few pages are in English, but as you progress through the book, more and more of the words appear in Chinese or German or whatever the target language is. By the end of the book you are reading the second language, having absorbed it more or less through osmosis. Someone who reads A Clockwork Orange will unavoidably pick up a few words of vaguely-Russian extraction by the end of it, so maybe it's possible to take advantage of that. The main problem I can see is that the new language's sentence grammar will also have to be blended in, and that won't go as smoothly.