Abstract
The Houyhnhnms rule over a race of creatures called Yahoos, who are human in appearance, but are primitive, brutish and incapable of rational thought. Gulliver resembles the Yahoos physically ‘in every part’, but he is nonetheless profoundly different: he is a Yahoo capable of rational thought. Gulliver gradually learns the language of the Houyhnhnms and discovers that it has no words for lying or deceit. In order to communicate these concepts to the Houyhnhnms, he is forced to construct all manner of distorting circumlocutions to convey ideas that do not exist in the horses’ reality. Thus, to describe the English and other European languages’ words for lying, he uses a negative definition: lying becomes the thing which was not.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Implementing Educational Language Policy in Arizona |
| Subtitle of host publication | Legal, Historical and Current Practices in SEI |
| Publisher | Channel View Publications |
| Pages | 59-85 |
| Number of pages | 27 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781847697462 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781847697448 |
| State | Published - Apr 16 2012 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Arts and Humanities
- General Social Sciences