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CONTENTS

  1. A Dictionary of Americanisms
  2. A Dictionary of the English Language
  3. A Greek-English Lexicon
  4. A Latin Dictionary
  5. American and British English spelling differences
  6. Anagram dictionary
  7. Answers.com
  8. Babel Fish
  9. Babylon Ltd
  10. Bank of English
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  13. Black's Law Dictionary
  14. Brewer's Dictionary of Irish Phrase and Fable
  15. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
  16. British National Corpus
  17. Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words
  18. Canadian Oxford Dictionary
  19. Centre for Lexicography
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  21. COBUILD
  22. Collaborative International Dictionary of English
  23. Concise Oxford Dictionary
  24. Corpus linguistics
  25. Defining vocabulary
  26. Definition
  27. Descriptionary
  28. DICT
  29. Dictionary
  30. Dictionary of American English
  31. Dictionary of American Regional English
  32. Dictionary of National Biography
  33. Dictionary of Received Ideas
  34. Dictionary of the Scots Language
  35. Dord
  36. Dorland's Medical Dictionary
  37. Easton's Bible Dictionary
  38. Electronic dictionary
  39. Encyclopedic dictionary
  40. English language
  41. Etymological dictionary
  42. Etymology
  43. FrameNet
  44. Franklin Electronic Publishers
  45. Freedict
  46. Free On-line Dictionary of Computing
  47. Free On-line Dictionary of Philosophy
  48. Gazetteer
  49. Gloss
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  51. Glyph
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  53. Grady Ward
  54. Grammar
  55. HarperCollins
  56. Harvard Dictionary of Music
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  62. Jargon File
  63. KMLE Medical Dictionary
  64. Law dictionary
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  66. Lemma
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  70. Lexicographic information cost
  71. Lexicography
  72. Lexicon
  73. Lexicon technicum
  74. Lexigraf
  75. Linguistic Data Consortium
  76. List of online dictionaries
  77. Logos Dictionary
  78. Longman
  79. LSP dictionary
  80. Macquarie Dictionary
  81. Main Page
  82. Maximizing dictionary
  83. Medical dictionary
  84. Merriam-Webster
  85. Merriam-Webster%27s Geographical Dictionary
  86. Minimizing dictionary
  87. Moby Project
  88. Moby Thesaurus
  89. Monolingual learner's dictionary
  90. Multi-field dictionary
  91. New Oxford American Dictionary
  92. New Oxford Dictionary of English
  93. Noah Webster
  94. Official Scrabble Players Dictionary
  95. OmniDictionary
  96. OneLook
  97. Online Etymology Dictionary
  98. Oxford Advanced Learner%27s Dictionary
  99. Oxford Classical Dictionary
  100. Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium
  101. Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology
  102. Oxford Dictionary of World Religions
  103. Oxford English Corpus
  104. Oxford English Dictionary
  105. Oxford spelling
  106. Oxford University Press
  107. Project Gutenberg
  108. Pronunciation
  109. Pseudodictionary
  110. Quotations
  111. Random House Dictionary of the English Language
  112. Reference.com
  113. Rhyming dictionary
  114. Roger's Profanisaurus
  115. Roget's Thesaurus
  116. Samuel Johnson
  117. Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
  118. Single-field dictionary
  119. Slang dictionary
  120. Specialised lexicography
  121. Specialized dictionary
  122. Spelling
  123. StarDict
  124. Sub-field dictionary
  125. Synonyms
  126. Table Alphabeticall
  127. The Century Dictionary
  128. The Computer Contradictionary
  129. The Devil's Dictionary
  130. The Devil's Dictionary X
  131. TheFreeDictionary.com
  132. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy
  133. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
  134. Thesaurus
  135. The Surgeon of Crowthorne
  136. Translation dictionary
  137. Urban Dictionary
  138. Vines Expository Dictionary
  139. Webster's Dictionary
  140. Webster's New World Dictionary
  141. Wikipedia
  142. Wiktionary
  143. William Whitaker's Words
  144. WordNet
  145. World Book Dictionary
  146. Xrefer

 

 



ENGLISH DICTIONARIES
This article is from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel_Fish

All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License 

Babel fish

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(Redirected from Babel Fish)
For AltaVista's web translation service, see Babel Fish (website).
Anatomy of a babel fish as illustrated in the BBC TV series by Rod Lord.
Anatomy of a babel fish as illustrated in the BBC TV series by Rod Lord.

The Babel fish is a fictional species of fish in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, that can instantly translate any language to any other language. It is described thus:

“ The Babel fish is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish. ”

The Babel fish was a useful plot device for Adams, as it allowed various alien races to communicate while speaking different languages. Adams wrote that the idea that all aliens would speak English was, to him, very strange.

It was revealed in the Quintessential Phase that it also, like dolphins, has the power to effectively teleport itself and its host (in a pleural zone) out of fatal danger.

The fish's name refers to the Tower of Babel, a Biblical story, which describes events in Abrahamic theology which led to God confusing the languages of Man in order to prevent the Tower's construction, among other things.

Existence of God

Adams' description of the Babel fish also triggered a digression about the existence of God, since the Babel fish was put forth as a fideist example for the non-existence of a deity:

“ "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D."

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic."

"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and white is black and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing. While most leading theologians believe this argument to be a load of dingo's kidneys, that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid from using it as the central theme of his best-selling book, Well That About Wraps It Up For God.

 ”

In the feature film The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that scene was omitted and used as a bonus feature on its DVD release.

Catalyst for War

In the continued description by Adams:

Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers between communications, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in existence.

Trivia

AltaVista's web translation service, Babel Fish, is named after the Babel Fish in this trilogy.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel_fish"

Categories: Fictional extraterrestrial species | Fictional fish | Fictional symbionts | Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

 

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