Hilarious. Evidently, Wikipedia used to have an entry for Uqbar that followed in the spirit of Borges’ original story, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.
The story is an amazing work of art, blurring in the mind of the reader the lines between fiction and nonfiction, reality and nonreality. Borges basically tells of this imaginary (?) world called Tlön, in whose realm some of the most basic philosophies of man (not to mention laws of the universe) diverge from our own.
What originally made me love Borges’ story was the discussion of how language shapes culture (a la the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis)… quoted below is some interesting stuff on what life would be like without nouns…
Here’s an excerpt:
Hume noted for all time that Berkeley’s arguments did not admit the slightest refutation nor did they cause the slightest conviction. This dictum is entirely correct in its application to the earth, but entirely false in Tlön. The nations of this planet are congenitally idealist. Their language and the derivations of their language – religion, letters, metaphysics – all presuppose idealism. The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is successive and temporal, not spatial. There are no nouns in Tlön’s conjectural Ursprache, from which the “present” languages and the dialects are derived: there are impersonal verbs, modified by monosyllabic suffixes (or prefixes) with an adverbial value. For example: there is no word corresponding to the word “moon,”, but there is a verb which in English would be “to moon” or “to moonate.” “The moon rose above the river” is hlor u fang axaxaxas mlo, or literally: “upward behind the onstreaming it mooned.”
For more reading, Wikipedia itself has an good insightful entry on the subject (and a fun discussion on the old Uqbar entry.)