Are science fiction languages different from fantasy languages? I think they are, at least to some degree.
People think differently when they invent languages for fantasy and science fictional societies. When someone sits down and thinks about a fantasy society, very often they're thinking about it from the insider's point of view. They're going to be putting characters in this world and you'll be on their side, wanting to feel close to them. Therefore the language tends to have more familiar, friendly features. For a science fictional society, very often people are thinking, "aliens!" Aliens are outsiders. That means that typically, languages designed for science fictional societies are more prickly. Harder to pronounce, and more off-putting. The most extreme examples are those from early science fiction where the words are all consonants just for the sake of making them hard to pronounce. Vxklrp! (I made that up.)
Of course, there is a continuum.
(I'm currently writing this from my parents' house, so I don't have a pile of books with me where I could go fishing for examples. If there's interest, I could return to this question again at greater length with books in hand.)
My gut says that fantasy languages are more likely to resemble English and to have English-friendly meter and onomatopoeia - or to resemble languages which English speakers regard as friendly or parental, like Spanish or Latin. Science fiction languages are more likely to go farther afield into the alien territory.
Here's the critical element: authors make these choices. They choose the "feel" they want their constructed language to have, and how extensively they want to create its structure and vocabulary.
An author who knows a particular non-English language would surely be inclined to use that language as a partial basis for a constructed language. Tolkien used Finnish as a basis for Quenya, the High Elvish tongue, and Welsh as a basis for Sindarin (Grey-elven). I think this is a great idea. Na'vi was designed to mesh features of different Earthly languages including native American sounds so that it would be very alien, but sound accessible.
Both the Elvish and Na'vi languages distinguish themselves by having extensive structure and enormous vocabularies. That's not something that necessarily differs by genre - that one differs based on how the author intends to use it. If you've got a movie you're working with, that automatically requires an extensive vocabulary, because people have to speak it. By contrast, most languages for written stories don't need such a huge vocabulary. Tolkien got away with putting whole foreign-language stories and songs into his books, but not everyone can (or should) try to do that.
Do I have any message that might grow out of this for writers and works in progress? I suppose it's that you don't have to make your constructed language follow these trends. Think it through. A constructed language doesn't have to have a really extremely alien feel to be workable for a science fiction context. It doesn't have to feel super-friendly to be usable for Fantasy either.
Ask yourself: what flavor do I want this world to have? How accessible do I want it to feel to readers? If you want it to be accessible, try having the words of the language be pronounceable by humans - this is not just a problem in science fiction contexts, but fantasy contexts too! Oh, how many times have I heard people say, "Why do authors insist on giving their characters names I can't pronounce?" Try out the words on your own tongue.
Here are some of my own examples. All of my stories tend to include the language of insiders, so the names and words tend to be pronounceable.
With Varin I try not to use much translated vocabulary, and I'm very careful to keep most names (especially first names) short. Tagret. Aloran. Tamelera (that's one of the longest). Garr. Reyn. Gowan. Fernar. Karyas. Selemei.
Khachee is a bit more complex because of the otter sounds I based it on, but I try all the words out myself. ChkaaTsee, TsorrPfirr, Cochee-coco.
Aurrel is growly and I always imagine it to have more interesting guttural sounds than appear on the page - but readers don't have to imagine all the sounds I do. Ru-rulii, gharralli, molri.
Despite my science fictional/linguistic bent, I don't tend to like making languages that are so foreign my readers can't stretch their mouths around them. It's because I like to be friendly! And also because the insider perspective is the one that appeals to me as an anthropologist.
What do your languages look like? What are they for? Shall we talk about it?
Showing posts with label alien languages. Show all posts
Showing posts with label alien languages. Show all posts
Monday, June 27, 2011
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Culture Share: Ireland - An Ear for Language by Joshua Ramey-Renk
This post is part of The Writer's International Culture Share, in which writers discuss their personal experience with world cultures: Joshua Ramey-Renk discusses language habits in Ireland.
An Ear for Language - They speak English here. Don’t they?
by Joshua Ramey-Renk
I recently spent a year and a half living in Dublin, Ireland, living among people who, like me, grew up speaking and writing the same language I do. Or so I thought.
While there, I had a chance to interact, mingle, and absorb many of the unique twists on language that the Irish use and which sound so foreign at first but after time become second nature. In fact, some of them became FIRST nature, and I found many of those same twists and changes crept unconsciously into my writing and had to be edited out later. Of course, the tricky part is recognizing that they’ve crept in in the first place. And it wasn’t just my writing, my spoken vocabulary changed as well.
These language shifts had three major types: Spelling, “Britishism vs. Americun” and Irishisms. Here are a few examples of each.
Spelling
It’s no great thing for an American writer who is also a wide reader to recognize that “colour” is the same as “color”, or that tires come with a “y” to become “tyres”, which touch the “kerb” instead of the “curb”. But when you realiSe that you should have realiZed something and spell check doesn’t help, you’ve started to go native.
And let’s not get started with the liberal use of the possessive apostrophe. It’s mine, it’s your’s, and it is it’s own rule in much written material. I include this under spelling because I was never able to figure out if the construction was official or not.
The chilli peppers in Dublin were so spicy they needed an extra “l”, but there are plenty available after students enrol in school. Unless they’ve already enrolled.
And what chance does a foreigner have when the Glendalough Hotel is near the Glendaloch Hostel, or the you get off at the Balally tram stop to visit Ballawley park?
Britishisms v. Amurican
I use the term “Britishism” advisedly. Implying that they are still under the linguistic thumb of the British Monarchy is a fighting argument for most of my Irish friends, but I have a pass because I drink a lot of Guinness and always stand my round at the pub. These are things that go beyond mere spelling and address more of the way language is used differently among our cousins across the pond. I think they are as common in the 26 counties of the Republic as they are in the six of the (“occupied”, some would say) North.
I found the largest differences in surprising places. I’m not a sport-type, but I do believe that San Francisco is a good baseball team, whereas the Gaelic Athletic Association would claim that Cork are a good side for the hurling. Similarly, while I visit a doctor at the hospital in the US, when I was in Hospital over Christmas for a kidney stone, Doctor’s opinion was paramount and both he, and the location, were devoid of either definite or indefinite articles. But both did get capitalized.
The things I found creeping into my writing, and speaking, the most were everyday expressions that replaced their more barbaric American counterparts. I stopped calling people on their cell phones and began ringing them on their mobiles. I no longer waited in line, but I did queue for a long time. And lastly, when my wife and I argued over something we stopped saying “Don’t you think..?” and began up-scaling the argument with “Would you not agree..?”
Irishisms
These were expressions and words that I started using which, on investigation, were pure Irish gold. That is to say, unique to the island, sometimes based on particular Irish-Gaelic language usage, and occasionally involved leprechauns.
When I was told by a colleague that they were after having a meeting with the CEO, I suggested that they should knock on his door because I had seen him in his office. I got an odd look, and was asked “Why would I do that? I just met with him.” Oh. I’m told that this version of “I just had a meeting…” comes straight from the Irish Gaelic usage.
At some point in my stay, I stopped talking about “my wife” and began telling people what “Herself and I” had done over the weekend. I stopped visiting the restroom and started hitting the jacks, which is a country expression that I blame on my good friend Lorcan D. for sticking me with the first week we worked together. And my favorite four-letter word became the more socially acceptable “Feck”.
Traveller’s advisory: Don’t ask an Irishman what they think about leprechauns. Apparently belief in such creatures is for the Plastic Paddies who buy souvenir trinkets to send to their American cousins. Or those claim to have seen them but who have drunk too much Guinness and are totally locked.
At the pub, I wouldn’t refer to “that guy”, but could point out that “yer man” had showed up again and was harassing the bar staff. And that cute woman at the bar? Well, yer wan is married and it’s best to stay away. Good enough for me, since Herself wouldn’t approve of it anyway and she’d be giving out to me the rest of the night, which is much worse than being scolded or nagged.
Lastly, I was never sure if I was supposed to “Come here to me now” and pay attention or “Go away!” because I had said something surprising. I blame both of these additions to my vocabulary on the linguistic stylings of Michael H., but he’s from Galway so that’s a whole different story.
I’ll be straight up and say that I’m not a linguist. Any or all of these observed language differences may be based on something completely different that I understand, and my adopted usage itself could be completely flawed. All I can say is that I’m an observer, a writer, and like all writers, to some degree I’m a chameleon. I listen, I write, and when I edit I have to look at strange new vocabulary that has snuck into my sentences and wonder “Just how the feck did that get in there?”
Joshua Ramey-Renk lived for a year and a half in Dublin, Ireland, before relocating back to California’s Bay Area - but you're still likely enough to find him with a pint at an Irish pub!
An Ear for Language - They speak English here. Don’t they?
by Joshua Ramey-Renk
I recently spent a year and a half living in Dublin, Ireland, living among people who, like me, grew up speaking and writing the same language I do. Or so I thought.
While there, I had a chance to interact, mingle, and absorb many of the unique twists on language that the Irish use and which sound so foreign at first but after time become second nature. In fact, some of them became FIRST nature, and I found many of those same twists and changes crept unconsciously into my writing and had to be edited out later. Of course, the tricky part is recognizing that they’ve crept in in the first place. And it wasn’t just my writing, my spoken vocabulary changed as well.
These language shifts had three major types: Spelling, “Britishism vs. Americun” and Irishisms. Here are a few examples of each.
Spelling
It’s no great thing for an American writer who is also a wide reader to recognize that “colour” is the same as “color”, or that tires come with a “y” to become “tyres”, which touch the “kerb” instead of the “curb”. But when you realiSe that you should have realiZed something and spell check doesn’t help, you’ve started to go native.
And let’s not get started with the liberal use of the possessive apostrophe. It’s mine, it’s your’s, and it is it’s own rule in much written material. I include this under spelling because I was never able to figure out if the construction was official or not.
The chilli peppers in Dublin were so spicy they needed an extra “l”, but there are plenty available after students enrol in school. Unless they’ve already enrolled.
And what chance does a foreigner have when the Glendalough Hotel is near the Glendaloch Hostel, or the you get off at the Balally tram stop to visit Ballawley park?
Britishisms v. Amurican
I use the term “Britishism” advisedly. Implying that they are still under the linguistic thumb of the British Monarchy is a fighting argument for most of my Irish friends, but I have a pass because I drink a lot of Guinness and always stand my round at the pub. These are things that go beyond mere spelling and address more of the way language is used differently among our cousins across the pond. I think they are as common in the 26 counties of the Republic as they are in the six of the (“occupied”, some would say) North.
I found the largest differences in surprising places. I’m not a sport-type, but I do believe that San Francisco is a good baseball team, whereas the Gaelic Athletic Association would claim that Cork are a good side for the hurling. Similarly, while I visit a doctor at the hospital in the US, when I was in Hospital over Christmas for a kidney stone, Doctor’s opinion was paramount and both he, and the location, were devoid of either definite or indefinite articles. But both did get capitalized.
The things I found creeping into my writing, and speaking, the most were everyday expressions that replaced their more barbaric American counterparts. I stopped calling people on their cell phones and began ringing them on their mobiles. I no longer waited in line, but I did queue for a long time. And lastly, when my wife and I argued over something we stopped saying “Don’t you think..?” and began up-scaling the argument with “Would you not agree..?”
Irishisms
These were expressions and words that I started using which, on investigation, were pure Irish gold. That is to say, unique to the island, sometimes based on particular Irish-Gaelic language usage, and occasionally involved leprechauns.
When I was told by a colleague that they were after having a meeting with the CEO, I suggested that they should knock on his door because I had seen him in his office. I got an odd look, and was asked “Why would I do that? I just met with him.” Oh. I’m told that this version of “I just had a meeting…” comes straight from the Irish Gaelic usage.
At some point in my stay, I stopped talking about “my wife” and began telling people what “Herself and I” had done over the weekend. I stopped visiting the restroom and started hitting the jacks, which is a country expression that I blame on my good friend Lorcan D. for sticking me with the first week we worked together. And my favorite four-letter word became the more socially acceptable “Feck”.
Traveller’s advisory: Don’t ask an Irishman what they think about leprechauns. Apparently belief in such creatures is for the Plastic Paddies who buy souvenir trinkets to send to their American cousins. Or those claim to have seen them but who have drunk too much Guinness and are totally locked.
At the pub, I wouldn’t refer to “that guy”, but could point out that “yer man” had showed up again and was harassing the bar staff. And that cute woman at the bar? Well, yer wan is married and it’s best to stay away. Good enough for me, since Herself wouldn’t approve of it anyway and she’d be giving out to me the rest of the night, which is much worse than being scolded or nagged.
Lastly, I was never sure if I was supposed to “Come here to me now” and pay attention or “Go away!” because I had said something surprising. I blame both of these additions to my vocabulary on the linguistic stylings of Michael H., but he’s from Galway so that’s a whole different story.
I’ll be straight up and say that I’m not a linguist. Any or all of these observed language differences may be based on something completely different that I understand, and my adopted usage itself could be completely flawed. All I can say is that I’m an observer, a writer, and like all writers, to some degree I’m a chameleon. I listen, I write, and when I edit I have to look at strange new vocabulary that has snuck into my sentences and wonder “Just how the feck did that get in there?”
Joshua Ramey-Renk lived for a year and a half in Dublin, Ireland, before relocating back to California’s Bay Area - but you're still likely enough to find him with a pint at an Irish pub!
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Guest Blog Post today!
Well, we've arrived at the time for another guest blog post! Today you can get an inside view into Khachee, the language of the Cochee-coco aliens in my new story, "At Cross Purposes." Many thanks to Ann Wilkes at Science Fiction and other ODDysseys for inviting me over.
The article is called Peering behind the curtain with Juliette Wade. I hope you enjoy it!
The article is called Peering behind the curtain with Juliette Wade. I hope you enjoy it!
Friday, September 17, 2010
Alien Language: an introduction to Aurrel
I had a question over in one of my posts on Science In My Fiction asking whether I'd ever done an in-depth description of one of my languages here on the blog, and in fact I hadn't! So I thought I'd take some time to discuss Aurrel, the language that appeared in my Analog Oct. 2009 novelette, "Cold Words."
Whenever I start designing a new language, I look for one critical feature that will make the language unique, and work outward from there. For Aurrel, the critical feature was non-reciprocal status language. Thus, in any conversation between two Aurrel people, one of them will speak one dialect and one another: the one of lower status will use Warm words as a sign of self-lowering and respect, and the one of higher status will use Cold words as a recognition of his/her right to dominate the other speaker. This is a form of politeness (pragmatics).
This of course requires that people always know which of them has the higher rank. The next language-building task then became differentiating the two dialects in a way that readers would be able to recognize. I didn't want to use phonology or morphology, because those would be too far under the radar for most readers. I wanted to minimize the number of actual alien words used in the story so as to maximize comprehension for readers! So I chose the discourse/sentence function level - let me explain.
Linguists will often talk about "speech acts," or what one is trying to accomplish with the things that one says. Some classic examples are requests and commands, which are accomplished simply by speaking them. "Go to bed!" "May I have that pencil?" Pronouncements and declarations are another example: "I now pronounce you husband and wife." "I hereby declare this park open." For Aurrel Warm words, these things are accomplished just as we would do them in English, without special marking. In Cold words, by contrast, each sentence (or series of sentences of the same function) has to be marked at the beginning with a word that indicates what kind of action will follow. Here are some examples.
Bow-bow: do as I say! Now, given that the Aurrel are wolflike people, this does tend to evoke "bow-wow," but in fact it's a command marker, which commands the other person to bow to them.
Bel-belly: I don't mean to anger you. When dogs or wolves want to show extreme submission, they show their bellies, so I chose this word to mark acts of submission. You may notice that this marker is redundant with the use of Warm words... However, the Aurrel have a special rule that Warm words must not be used in the presence of the Majesty - so in audiences with him, one would hear this marker a lot.
Sniff-sniff: what did you say? I decided that a curious wolf's sniffing would be used to mark questions.
I designed these markers intentionally to be repetitive: specifically, to duplicate the first syllable. Reduplication is often seen in morphology (word endings etc). Since my Cold words speakers had originally been tundra hunters, I reasoned that this style of speech would be consistent with having to communicate on the run. First you'd want to get the person's attention with a short bark, and then give a hint for what you were about to say, then say it when you were sure they were listening. In this way, a concept of general language evolution helped me to decide how to develop specific features of the language on the word level.
The Cold Words reduplication also extends to names of people and places.
This brings me to phonology. I designed the Aurrel phonology on the basis of the idea that these people had mouths like wolves. The language has no unvoiced sounds, like p/t/k/s/f. Thus, all sounds are voiced, like b/d/g/z/v. This wouldn't be a requirement for a people with wolf mouths, but I felt it was consistent with wolf howls as a language feature. I also felt that, with their long tongues, they would have multiple versions of L and R. Since there was no way for me actually to render the sounds I imagined (unlike in a film!), I used very small differences in spelling to mark them. Thus:
Whenever I start designing a new language, I look for one critical feature that will make the language unique, and work outward from there. For Aurrel, the critical feature was non-reciprocal status language. Thus, in any conversation between two Aurrel people, one of them will speak one dialect and one another: the one of lower status will use Warm words as a sign of self-lowering and respect, and the one of higher status will use Cold words as a recognition of his/her right to dominate the other speaker. This is a form of politeness (pragmatics).
Higher status: Cold words -><-Warm words: Lower status
This of course requires that people always know which of them has the higher rank. The next language-building task then became differentiating the two dialects in a way that readers would be able to recognize. I didn't want to use phonology or morphology, because those would be too far under the radar for most readers. I wanted to minimize the number of actual alien words used in the story so as to maximize comprehension for readers! So I chose the discourse/sentence function level - let me explain.
Linguists will often talk about "speech acts," or what one is trying to accomplish with the things that one says. Some classic examples are requests and commands, which are accomplished simply by speaking them. "Go to bed!" "May I have that pencil?" Pronouncements and declarations are another example: "I now pronounce you husband and wife." "I hereby declare this park open." For Aurrel Warm words, these things are accomplished just as we would do them in English, without special marking. In Cold words, by contrast, each sentence (or series of sentences of the same function) has to be marked at the beginning with a word that indicates what kind of action will follow. Here are some examples.
Bow-bow: do as I say! Now, given that the Aurrel are wolflike people, this does tend to evoke "bow-wow," but in fact it's a command marker, which commands the other person to bow to them.
Bel-belly: I don't mean to anger you. When dogs or wolves want to show extreme submission, they show their bellies, so I chose this word to mark acts of submission. You may notice that this marker is redundant with the use of Warm words... However, the Aurrel have a special rule that Warm words must not be used in the presence of the Majesty - so in audiences with him, one would hear this marker a lot.
Sniff-sniff: what did you say? I decided that a curious wolf's sniffing would be used to mark questions.
I designed these markers intentionally to be repetitive: specifically, to duplicate the first syllable. Reduplication is often seen in morphology (word endings etc). Since my Cold words speakers had originally been tundra hunters, I reasoned that this style of speech would be consistent with having to communicate on the run. First you'd want to get the person's attention with a short bark, and then give a hint for what you were about to say, then say it when you were sure they were listening. In this way, a concept of general language evolution helped me to decide how to develop specific features of the language on the word level.
The Cold Words reduplication also extends to names of people and places.
- Rulii (Warm words) => Ru-rulii (Cold words) the main character
- Aurru (Warm words) => Au-aurru (Cold words) the planet
Aurr-u
Aurr-el
Aurr-el
This brings me to phonology. I designed the Aurrel phonology on the basis of the idea that these people had mouths like wolves. The language has no unvoiced sounds, like p/t/k/s/f. Thus, all sounds are voiced, like b/d/g/z/v. This wouldn't be a requirement for a people with wolf mouths, but I felt it was consistent with wolf howls as a language feature. I also felt that, with their long tongues, they would have multiple versions of L and R. Since there was no way for me actually to render the sounds I imagined (unlike in a film!), I used very small differences in spelling to mark them. Thus:
"rr" is not the same sound as "r"
"ll" is not the same sound as "l"
"ll" is not the same sound as "l"
I also expanded the language's fricatives. These are sounds like "v" and "z" (and "s" and "f" and "th", though these don't occur in Aurrel). In addition to V and Z, therefore, I gave them a fricative version of g, which I spelled "gh."
the stop "b" corresponds to the fricative "v" (lips)
the stop "d" corresponds to the fricative "z" (alveolar)
the stop "g" corresponds to the fricative "gh" (velar)
the stop "d" corresponds to the fricative "z" (alveolar)
the stop "g" corresponds to the fricative "gh" (velar)
At this point, I will ask you for fun's sake to imagine the pronunciation of this word:
gharralli (a small fierce toothy animal similar to a weasel)
In fact, when asked to pronounce Aurrel accurately myself, I feel rather nervous about it, because it does sound quite dramatically throaty! I'm afraid I would need more practice to get over the nervousness.
There are only a few more things which deserve mention here. I didn't do much designing of Aurrel syntax because the story had no need for complete sentences rendered entirely in Aurrel (as opposed to English). However, I did play with something called subcategorization. When we use certain verbs, we expect certain other structures to follow them:
Lastly, I did a lot of work on semantics. Using words like "puphood" instead of "childhood" is relatively simple. Naturally, a person born in the same litter is a "littermate" - but as a result of that, the word "mate" for a lover sounded odd, so I switched it to "consort."
However, there were a few more major semantic issues that came up in the story.
The first is that Aurrel has no word for "friend." The Aurrel have two major opposing concepts in their society: interdependence, and rank. "Friend" doesn't fit into this system because it implies interdependence without requiring a rank relationship. Thus, the names for relationships are somewhat different. A "huntmate" is a person involved in pursuing the same activity or project as oneself, but is not necessarily close. This is contrasted with the relationships of "littermate" and "consort" which are considered to be "skin-close," where interdependence is so strong that rank has little influence (none, in intimate situations).
The second is that the hunt is what I call an organizing metaphor for Aurrel life (much as the journey is for us). Pursuing a goal is equated with hunting. The goal itself is the "quarry." If a huntmate suddenly stops helping you toward your goal and tries to take the project in a different direction, they'd say he had "lost pace with you." These examples are extensive and can be found all over the language.
The third (and last, for this post) is the contrast between Warm and Cold. Warm is seen as comforting and intimate, but also as lowly. Cold is cruel, but also valuable and exalted. The Majesty's mark of rank is glass beads coated on the inside with silver, called silver-glass or "royal ice." Rulii calls the human character "warm" at one point in the story, but then feels obliged to add, "no insult, but from my Lowland heart." There are two Aurrel races: one heavy furred, the tundra hunter group, and one downy-furred, the Lowland group. The insulting/exalting characteristics of warm and cold came about when the tundra folk conquered the Lowlanders, and everything about warmth came to be associated with baseness and submission. The language gradually then developed in such a way that the tundra dialect became Cold words, or dominator's words, and the Lowland dialect became Warm words, or submissive words.
I hope that gives you an idea of how Aurrel works, and the different things I considered as I was designing it - and perhaps also helps you think through one version of the process you might take to develop your own alien language. There's a good basic description of this process by Megs over at Rabia Gale's blog today, for an additional perspective on the matter!
There are only a few more things which deserve mention here. I didn't do much designing of Aurrel syntax because the story had no need for complete sentences rendered entirely in Aurrel (as opposed to English). However, I did play with something called subcategorization. When we use certain verbs, we expect certain other structures to follow them:
He appears nervous.
He shows signs of being nervous.
It reminds me of my indigent childhood.
It drags me down with memories of my indigent childhood.
I deliberately switched some of these around. In Aurrel, you would say,He shows signs of being nervous.
It reminds me of my indigent childhood.
It drags me down with memories of my indigent childhood.
He shows nervous.
It drags of my indigent puphood.
What was great about this for my purposes was that it felt very alien, yet was pretty comprehensible in context.It drags of my indigent puphood.
Lastly, I did a lot of work on semantics. Using words like "puphood" instead of "childhood" is relatively simple. Naturally, a person born in the same litter is a "littermate" - but as a result of that, the word "mate" for a lover sounded odd, so I switched it to "consort."
However, there were a few more major semantic issues that came up in the story.
The first is that Aurrel has no word for "friend." The Aurrel have two major opposing concepts in their society: interdependence, and rank. "Friend" doesn't fit into this system because it implies interdependence without requiring a rank relationship. Thus, the names for relationships are somewhat different. A "huntmate" is a person involved in pursuing the same activity or project as oneself, but is not necessarily close. This is contrasted with the relationships of "littermate" and "consort" which are considered to be "skin-close," where interdependence is so strong that rank has little influence (none, in intimate situations).
The second is that the hunt is what I call an organizing metaphor for Aurrel life (much as the journey is for us). Pursuing a goal is equated with hunting. The goal itself is the "quarry." If a huntmate suddenly stops helping you toward your goal and tries to take the project in a different direction, they'd say he had "lost pace with you." These examples are extensive and can be found all over the language.
The third (and last, for this post) is the contrast between Warm and Cold. Warm is seen as comforting and intimate, but also as lowly. Cold is cruel, but also valuable and exalted. The Majesty's mark of rank is glass beads coated on the inside with silver, called silver-glass or "royal ice." Rulii calls the human character "warm" at one point in the story, but then feels obliged to add, "no insult, but from my Lowland heart." There are two Aurrel races: one heavy furred, the tundra hunter group, and one downy-furred, the Lowland group. The insulting/exalting characteristics of warm and cold came about when the tundra folk conquered the Lowlanders, and everything about warmth came to be associated with baseness and submission. The language gradually then developed in such a way that the tundra dialect became Cold words, or dominator's words, and the Lowland dialect became Warm words, or submissive words.
I hope that gives you an idea of how Aurrel works, and the different things I considered as I was designing it - and perhaps also helps you think through one version of the process you might take to develop your own alien language. There's a good basic description of this process by Megs over at Rabia Gale's blog today, for an additional perspective on the matter!
Monday, July 19, 2010
Creating the next great alien language... why?
A couple of days ago I read and linked to an interesting article over on io9, called How to write the next great alien language. The article compares the Elvish languages (Sindarin and Quenya) and the Klingon language, and opens as follows:Constructing an entire alien language is the most challenging task in all of speculative fiction, and there are two examples that tower above the rest: J.R.R. Tolkien's Elvish and Marc Okrand's Klingon. We'll show you how to outdo even them.
When it comes to world-building, there's no finer way to capture an alien culture than to give it a language that seems utterly strange to human ears. It's obviously a challenging task, and one that requires a decent working knowledge of linguistics. So while we have to leave the nitty-gritty of language construction to a textbook, what we can do is examine the very different overarching approaches used in constructing the two most iconic alien languages - Elvish and Klingon - and then explain how you could create a language that combines the best of both.
When they t
alk about overarching approaches, they are effectively referring to the fact that Tolkien based his Elvish tongues in part on a pair of human languages (Finnish and Welsh) and extensively developed the history of changes these languages, while Marc Okrand used existing names and a couple of lines of dialogue as a basis for creating a Klingon language system with an extensive vocabulary that could cover all kinds of topics (Klingon Hamlet, anyone?) but didn't delve into history of Klingon at all.Let me start by saying that I'm terribly impressed with both Tolkien and Okrand for their achievements. The io9 article didn't mention Paul Frommer or Na'vi, but as I've understood it from independent research, Frommer designed the Na'vi language of Avatar in a somewhat similar way to Klingon (i.e. by approach from a contemporary linguistic perspective, though without the snippets of previous language use as a basis).
I wondered about a couple of things in this article. First, there's a general idea that one should give an alien culture a language that sounds "utterly strange" to human ears. How do you define "utterly strange?" I suppose I'd say that an alien language must have two major features: it must be unintelligible by speakers of any existing human language, and it must have no etymological connection with any existing human language. If it did have such connections, it wouldn't be "alien" by definition. Beyond that it's a matter of personal taste.
Marc Okrand had to work with an existing description of Klingon as "guttural," which affected his choice of the language's sounds. He also tried to have patterns of sounds in the sound system that didn't occur in existing world languages - his example was having a sound for V without having one for F. In the area of grammar he chose to use object-verb-subject word order, which is the most unusual in world languages. Overall, I would summarize by concluding that he was trying to defeat the human language "universals" in order to make the language very alien.
Paul Frommer was freer in his choice of
sounds because he got to start from scratch, and in articles about his creation of Na'vi he has said he deliberately chose language sounds for his sound system that came from rare Earth languages and thus would be hard for most humans to recognize. Na'vi is in some sense the opposite of Klingon, in that it has no V - instead it has P and an ejective, written "px". Verb conjugation is by infixes rather than prefixes or suffixes - another deliberate choice to make the language unusual. You can read more about it at Wikipedia or at Learn Na'vi.One of the key features of both Klingon and Na'vi, though, was that they had to be pronounceable by humans so that they could be used in a movie - and as it turns out, Sindarin Elvish is also pronounceable by humans; its vocabulary has been developed for use in the Lord of the Rings films.
That brings me to the question of how one might "outdo" Tolkien and Okrand - one of the proposals of the io9 article. They imply that the next great alien language should involve both an extensive contemporary vocabulary and a sense of historical development. Seems logical, at least inasmuch as that would "fill in the blanks" of what the developers of these existing languages didn't cover.
But my commenter Megs had a different point of view: "I think one of the most fundamental things about creating an ALIEN language isn't so much to use things that are rare in human languages, but to not BASE them on human languages. Just use logic to create a system that communicates. But maybe that's just me."
Okay, so Megs would want to create a system of communication that's not based on human languages, just on logic. One could argue that the logic required has some human basis too, but I see her point. What about extremely different alien physiology? What about scent language, or visual language? Alien is alien, right?
In order to understand the parameters here, I think we have to ask one critical question:
Why am I creating this language?
The answer to that question will determine everything about the language you create. Tolkien set out to create a history of mythology, and thus spent a lot of time on the history of his languages; that was a natural consequence. Okrand and Frommer set out to create languages that could be used by human actors on film, which required extensive vocabulary and contemporary usage, but did not require that they trace the history of the languages - and heavens forbid they should create something that was unpronounceable!
So let's get back to basics. The purpose of most science fiction and fantasy languages is to function in a story. The nature of that story is what determines the features and qualities of the language.
Here are some examples of languages that I've created, what parts of them I've created, and why:
Gariniya
Gariniya was based on the idea of a canon-based language - a language that consisted primarily of oblique references to a set of stories that all speakers of the language knew. To my knowledge, this language concept originated with Star Trek: The Next Generation's episode Darmok. My own contribution was to the culture surrounding it, in particular to finding ways for the language to have evolved and ways that the language would be learned and passed on (which I had felt were missing in the Star Trek episode; see my entry Darmok and Me). I also needed culture surrounding it, dictating the conditions of its use. For the purposes of the story I did NOT need it to have either an extensive vocabulary or a fully realized grammar. I designed phonology pretty thoroughly, constructed a few words to use in the story, and that was sufficient for my purposes.Aurrel & Khachee
Both Aurrel, from "Cold Words," and Khachee, from my forthcoming story "At Cross Purposes," are entirely original in concept and execution. Similarly to Gariniya, though, they have well-developed phonology but don't have a big vocabulary because I only needed to use a few names and concepts in the stories. As I've said before, the more of an alien language you use, the more you alienate the reader, so if you're working from an insider perspective, it's good to use as little of the alien language as possible. Both of these languages differ from Gariniya in that I did much more design of their grammar. I started with one single key feature that was going to cause the most trouble in the story - status dialects in Aurrel and discourse/turn-taking structure in Khachee - and then developed from there. Another reason that grammar knowledge was important was because I tried to alter my use of English so I could sound like a native-speaker-of-alien-language-speaking-English when in the alien point of view. Aurrel also had a language evolutionary angle, and a historical angle, because these were directly relevant to the plot.
Varinn
The Varinn language (from Varin, as you've probably guessed) is the most extensive language I've created. I did intend it to be pronounceable - and relatively easily pronounceable - by humans, since the Varini (people of Varin) themselves are humans. It has phonology and syntax and morphology, and I've delved far into cultural issues surrounding its use by various social groups. It also has a rudimentary history as a language, including sound changes and changes in verb conjugations. This is because I have other stories that I've designed in which this history becomes important. I've also developed more vocabulary for this one because I wanted to have a Varinn translation of certain songs and oaths that appear in the story. However, I hardly ever use it in the stories themselves. All of the stories are told from an insider perspective, and thus need to be effectively "in translation" whenever possible so the language won't distract from the story.So when it comes right down to it, what makes a really great invented language?
The io9 article, and some comments that have followed it, seem to suggest that it would be better to include both concurrent vocabulary and language history - an additive sort of solution based on their analysis of Elvish and Klingon. Even if you had both, though, the language wouldn't have all the richness, irregularity, cultural grounding, manners, etc. of a natural language.
I'm going to argue, though, that the next "great alien language" is not going to be much like a natural language, for one single reason: without a great story to rest upon and guide its form, a language would have no reason to exist. It might be quite comprehensive and possibly quite alien (if that's what its creators were after), but nobody would care about it. A language needs a world, and characters, and a story, to make it compelling and worthwhile. Once it's in the hands of dedicated fans and learners, anything is possible. After all, creole languages are natural languages, vibrant, with functional grammar, and these languages develop naturally in locations where adults have been using awkward pidgin. Once you've put the accepted usage into the hands of learners, especially child learners, language tends to take on a life of its own.
So if you're creating a language, be careful of losing yourself in the conlang process, and make sure to keep an eye out for the needs of the story you want to tell. I encourage linguistic research, exacting standards, and lots of hard work - if that's what you're into. But for those of you who don't have tons of time to devote to language development, keep in mind that an effective and functional alien tongue doesn't need to be extensive to work. It just needs to be systematic and serve the needs of the story you want to tell.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Article about creating alien languages
Here's a cool article I ran across thanks to TTA Press on Facebook. It compares Elvish and Klingon and talks about how to go about approaching "the next great alien language." No mention of Na'vi, which surprised me, but it does have quite a long video in which Marc Okrand talks about his creation of Klingon. Very interesting stuff.
Monday, March 22, 2010
Wow! Great article on invented languages
My friend Dave Malinowski put me onto this terrific article, where two experts on invented languages answer questions about the topic. The experts are Paul Frommer, inventor of Avatar's Na'vi language, and Arika Okrent, author of "In the Land of Invented Languages." Check it out!
Monday, January 11, 2010
Another link about Avatar and alien language
For those of you who have found the discussion of alien languages interesting, you might also be interested in this discussion of the Na'vi language of Avatar from another linguistic and cultural perspective, at a UC Berkeley language blog:
Found in Translation
Found in Translation
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Alien Languages - how foreign would they really be?
This post was requested by CWJ, my friend from the forum over at Analog - thanks so much for the question, CWJ! It also strikes me that this may be a timely topic for people who are considering the Na'vi language that was used in Avatar.
CWJ asked:
Now, human languages are very diverse. The most thorough article I've seen on this topic was recently published in the Economist, and you can check it out here.
In fact, it's hard to say how much of human language is innate and how much is learned. Humans are oriented towards language from birth or even earlier; this is well known, as newborn infants prefer to listen to language sounds over non-language sounds, and their mother's native language over other languages (studies measured strength of sucking response!). They also go through a number of language development stages, like early babbling, even if they don't have any auditory language input (say, with non-hearing babies). Non-hearing babies are also known to babble with their fingers. People have also looked at pidgin languages, which tend to take on grammatical structure - and very similar grammar structure - when they're passed on to the second generation, and used this as evidence for a more extensive innate language faculty.
On the other hand...
I've been quite impressed by research which looks at language acquisition from a neural-network point of view. Neural net computers have been shown to learn language patterns like English past tense -ed in much the same progress trajectory as human kids. I've also heard about research that says re-occurrence of phrases may play a larger role than we thought in language acquisition. Certainly human brains are very good at tracking the frequency of occurrence of things (sounds, words, etc.) - a critical skill for language learning. So in the end I'm not personally convinced that grammar is really what's innate and at the root of the drive for language acquisition.
I suppose if there were some kind of universal grammar beneath all human language, then it might be restrictive for the learning of alien tongues. Since I'm not really in the innate grammar camp, I don't think that the primary restriction on learning alien tongues would come from that department.
I think it would come from perception problems. More on this below.
The evolution of language is not simply a matter of brain evolution, but of the co-evolution of the brain, the ear, and the vocal tract as language developed. As a result, they are all well-suited to one another, and babies can hear any language sound from any language in the world, and learn it natively, given the opportunity and a normal course of development. We listen for audible building blocks from the vocal tract that are put together sequentially. Our brains are excellently tuned to process them, and we associate them with physical, temporal and social context in lots of complex ways. But alter these very basic prerequisites, and the problem becomes much harder (even if we assume maximum language-learning ability like that of a child). Sign language shows that the language stream need not be auditory. But what if the language stream is not sequential but simultaneous? Or what if the language producing organs of the alien create a language stream that our eyes and ears are unable, or only partially able, to perceive?
Sheila Finch's stories about the Guild of Xenolinguists speak more directly to the kind of language problems that CWJ mentions - basic problems of auditory vs. visual, processing in the brain and such - than my own. In fact, CWJ, if you haven't read them, you might find them very interesting, because she takes a very Chomskyan approach to her concept of language. She has humans being able to understand all sorts of things, but requiring special drugs to make them forget their existing categorizations of perception, for example. Speak with her in person, though, and she'll tell you - as I will - that any communication with aliens would be next to impossible.
In the realm of animal communication on Earth, we're still discovering things, like the super-low sounds produced by giraffes. We're working hard on the communication of dolphins, too (see a very interesting article on dolphin intelligence, here). We've taught some creatures how to interpret basic signals on a behavioral basis (I remember Mike Flynn having an interesting post on the nature of communication - I'll see if I can find the link). But we haven't really cracked any codes. One of the things that can cause misunderstandings between humans is differences in categorization of concepts - places where the two languages file things differently, as when the Dutch say a picture is "up the wall" instead of "on the wall." A creature that lives underwater and perceives its world through sonar signals will have a totally different way of perceiving the world. It may not even conceptualize the separation of objects as we do. What does it do to language concepts when the means of producing language (sound) is the same as the means for perceiving one's surroundings?
So effectively I think it would be hard to recognize alien language as language at all, and probably harder to try to "break it down," especially in a situation where the physiology of the aliens in question, and their environmental context (not to mention social context) were unknown.
This doesn't stop me from designing alien languages, obviously! As far as constructing the languages goes, I think it really depends on the author's intent with the story, and the nature of the primary language problem in the story. If decipherment is your primary problem, then you can really embrace problems of channel (auditory/visual etc.) and the identification of structure. If your primary problem is one of first contact and code cracking, then you can do some channel stuff, or you can focus on grammar or phonetic dificulties, pronunciation difficulties, etc. If your primary problem has to do with cultural issues and misunderstanding, then it's helpful to create a language and assume that humans have already cracked the code, which allows you to place the focus where it really belongs.
Wow, that became a long post! I hope you find it helpful. I welcome any questions, followup, "what-the-heck-did-that-mean-can-you-explain-this-bit-again-please," etc.
CWJ asked:
-
Juliette, I'd like to hear more about (constructing) non-human languages. In particular, if Chomsky's idea of universal innate grammars is correct, does that mean there are only certain avenues down which humans can go, which might be different from aliens? That is, maybe there are some concepts or constructs that would be difficult for humans to truly conceptualize. Or the other way around. In short, I am interested in the possibility that communication may be very difficult.
- This is a complex question, so I'll take it a bit at a time.
Now, human languages are very diverse. The most thorough article I've seen on this topic was recently published in the Economist, and you can check it out here.
In fact, it's hard to say how much of human language is innate and how much is learned. Humans are oriented towards language from birth or even earlier; this is well known, as newborn infants prefer to listen to language sounds over non-language sounds, and their mother's native language over other languages (studies measured strength of sucking response!). They also go through a number of language development stages, like early babbling, even if they don't have any auditory language input (say, with non-hearing babies). Non-hearing babies are also known to babble with their fingers. People have also looked at pidgin languages, which tend to take on grammatical structure - and very similar grammar structure - when they're passed on to the second generation, and used this as evidence for a more extensive innate language faculty.
On the other hand...
I've been quite impressed by research which looks at language acquisition from a neural-network point of view. Neural net computers have been shown to learn language patterns like English past tense -ed in much the same progress trajectory as human kids. I've also heard about research that says re-occurrence of phrases may play a larger role than we thought in language acquisition. Certainly human brains are very good at tracking the frequency of occurrence of things (sounds, words, etc.) - a critical skill for language learning. So in the end I'm not personally convinced that grammar is really what's innate and at the root of the drive for language acquisition.
I suppose if there were some kind of universal grammar beneath all human language, then it might be restrictive for the learning of alien tongues. Since I'm not really in the innate grammar camp, I don't think that the primary restriction on learning alien tongues would come from that department.
I think it would come from perception problems. More on this below.
The evolution of language is not simply a matter of brain evolution, but of the co-evolution of the brain, the ear, and the vocal tract as language developed. As a result, they are all well-suited to one another, and babies can hear any language sound from any language in the world, and learn it natively, given the opportunity and a normal course of development. We listen for audible building blocks from the vocal tract that are put together sequentially. Our brains are excellently tuned to process them, and we associate them with physical, temporal and social context in lots of complex ways. But alter these very basic prerequisites, and the problem becomes much harder (even if we assume maximum language-learning ability like that of a child). Sign language shows that the language stream need not be auditory. But what if the language stream is not sequential but simultaneous? Or what if the language producing organs of the alien create a language stream that our eyes and ears are unable, or only partially able, to perceive?
Sheila Finch's stories about the Guild of Xenolinguists speak more directly to the kind of language problems that CWJ mentions - basic problems of auditory vs. visual, processing in the brain and such - than my own. In fact, CWJ, if you haven't read them, you might find them very interesting, because she takes a very Chomskyan approach to her concept of language. She has humans being able to understand all sorts of things, but requiring special drugs to make them forget their existing categorizations of perception, for example. Speak with her in person, though, and she'll tell you - as I will - that any communication with aliens would be next to impossible.
In the realm of animal communication on Earth, we're still discovering things, like the super-low sounds produced by giraffes. We're working hard on the communication of dolphins, too (see a very interesting article on dolphin intelligence, here). We've taught some creatures how to interpret basic signals on a behavioral basis (I remember Mike Flynn having an interesting post on the nature of communication - I'll see if I can find the link). But we haven't really cracked any codes. One of the things that can cause misunderstandings between humans is differences in categorization of concepts - places where the two languages file things differently, as when the Dutch say a picture is "up the wall" instead of "on the wall." A creature that lives underwater and perceives its world through sonar signals will have a totally different way of perceiving the world. It may not even conceptualize the separation of objects as we do. What does it do to language concepts when the means of producing language (sound) is the same as the means for perceiving one's surroundings?
So effectively I think it would be hard to recognize alien language as language at all, and probably harder to try to "break it down," especially in a situation where the physiology of the aliens in question, and their environmental context (not to mention social context) were unknown.
This doesn't stop me from designing alien languages, obviously! As far as constructing the languages goes, I think it really depends on the author's intent with the story, and the nature of the primary language problem in the story. If decipherment is your primary problem, then you can really embrace problems of channel (auditory/visual etc.) and the identification of structure. If your primary problem is one of first contact and code cracking, then you can do some channel stuff, or you can focus on grammar or phonetic dificulties, pronunciation difficulties, etc. If your primary problem has to do with cultural issues and misunderstanding, then it's helpful to create a language and assume that humans have already cracked the code, which allows you to place the focus where it really belongs.
Wow, that became a long post! I hope you find it helpful. I welcome any questions, followup, "what-the-heck-did-that-mean-can-you-explain-this-bit-again-please," etc.
Friday, December 4, 2009
Darmok and Me
I have a couple of serious posts brewing, but I thought today I'd keep it light and whimsical... partly because I exercised this morning and do want to get some writing done before my kids-at-school window closes, and partially because I discovered that someone had googled "Darmok" and found me.
If you've read my first published story, you already know why I find this delightful.
Even those who know me well - but from recent times - may not know that I was a Star Trek: The Next Generation fan in college. Not a Trekker, and never a "dress-up-and-go-to-cons" type, but someone who would watch Star Trek TNG every single week. This actually lasted all the way through getting married, and I watched Voyager and Deep Space Nine too, and even Enterprise. My first favorite was TNG, and DS9 was second. Something about the aliens... you all know how I love to think about the alien experience.
I remember very well when I first saw "Darmok." I was fascinated. I kept hoping I'd catch it on reruns. There was something about the language premise of a people who would speak only indirectly, in allusions to a set of stories they shared, that really fascinated me. I think it was the fact that someone had at last found a way to stump the universal translator! I was glued to the screen, and afterwards I kept thinking about the episode, thinking and thinking.
I was struggling with it.
I mean, what a brilliant concept! But things about it kept bugging me. I guess I'd already come into my obsession with cultural depth in science fiction and fantasy, even though I hadn't yet discovered writing. How, I wondered, had these folks become a spacefaring people if they didn't ever speak in productive sentences? Were there stories in their canon concerning circuits and how they went together? More than that - how was this language learned?
I'm actually pretty flexible when it comes to my expectations about how languages are learned. Kids are amazing, and they can learn a lot from the data that they're presented with. But grammar, as a force, is pretty irresistible. Witness the creole languages that grow out of pidgin languages: the first generation cobbles something choppy together so they can get things done even though they don't have a common language, but the second generation takes that and gives it grammar. It's pretty amazing.
So I struggled with the idea that a guy like the alien captain, when facing death, would still be speaking in choppy sentences. I figured the language concept would work, but that the language would have to have a grammar and it would have to be spoken productively somewhere, sometime - the same place where the language would be learned by children. Then the people would just have to have some vastly compelling reason why they'd speak in the oblique manner.
The idea sat in my head for a very long time. The vastly compelling reason was easy to come up with: religion. Religions are intimately linked to patterns of language use, and they're very good at setting up rules and taboos, so it fit perfectly. Then I realized that the stories they told were considered religious, and were told in a holy place. That led to the idea that the holy place was a community building where people could spend hours on a regular basis, particularly as children, and where behaviors would be learned.
Then I left it alone for a long time, and finally after a number of years I wrote "Let the Word Take Me." So if you've read it, and you were ever curious, yes, there's a reason it reminds you of "Darmok." In the first draft the language concept was my "punch line" and the story didn't work, exactly because I was using the Star Trek idea as the surprise - and after Darmok, it's not a surprise any more. When the story really started to take off was when I combined the Darmok language concept with some of my own experiences in Japan - an additional social aspect - and with some concepts from anthropology about coming of age.
So in the end, this post has turned not only into the story of Darmok and me, but a little description of the process of writing, and how my ideas came together for that initial story, which appeared in Analog in July/August 2008.
At this point, my stories are made up of language concepts and ideas that are all mine, but I'm very grateful for that initial inspiration, or I wouldn't be where I am today.
If you've read my first published story, you already know why I find this delightful.
Even those who know me well - but from recent times - may not know that I was a Star Trek: The Next Generation fan in college. Not a Trekker, and never a "dress-up-and-go-to-cons" type, but someone who would watch Star Trek TNG every single week. This actually lasted all the way through getting married, and I watched Voyager and Deep Space Nine too, and even Enterprise. My first favorite was TNG, and DS9 was second. Something about the aliens... you all know how I love to think about the alien experience.
I remember very well when I first saw "Darmok." I was fascinated. I kept hoping I'd catch it on reruns. There was something about the language premise of a people who would speak only indirectly, in allusions to a set of stories they shared, that really fascinated me. I think it was the fact that someone had at last found a way to stump the universal translator! I was glued to the screen, and afterwards I kept thinking about the episode, thinking and thinking.
I was struggling with it.
I mean, what a brilliant concept! But things about it kept bugging me. I guess I'd already come into my obsession with cultural depth in science fiction and fantasy, even though I hadn't yet discovered writing. How, I wondered, had these folks become a spacefaring people if they didn't ever speak in productive sentences? Were there stories in their canon concerning circuits and how they went together? More than that - how was this language learned?
I'm actually pretty flexible when it comes to my expectations about how languages are learned. Kids are amazing, and they can learn a lot from the data that they're presented with. But grammar, as a force, is pretty irresistible. Witness the creole languages that grow out of pidgin languages: the first generation cobbles something choppy together so they can get things done even though they don't have a common language, but the second generation takes that and gives it grammar. It's pretty amazing.
So I struggled with the idea that a guy like the alien captain, when facing death, would still be speaking in choppy sentences. I figured the language concept would work, but that the language would have to have a grammar and it would have to be spoken productively somewhere, sometime - the same place where the language would be learned by children. Then the people would just have to have some vastly compelling reason why they'd speak in the oblique manner.
The idea sat in my head for a very long time. The vastly compelling reason was easy to come up with: religion. Religions are intimately linked to patterns of language use, and they're very good at setting up rules and taboos, so it fit perfectly. Then I realized that the stories they told were considered religious, and were told in a holy place. That led to the idea that the holy place was a community building where people could spend hours on a regular basis, particularly as children, and where behaviors would be learned.
Then I left it alone for a long time, and finally after a number of years I wrote "Let the Word Take Me." So if you've read it, and you were ever curious, yes, there's a reason it reminds you of "Darmok." In the first draft the language concept was my "punch line" and the story didn't work, exactly because I was using the Star Trek idea as the surprise - and after Darmok, it's not a surprise any more. When the story really started to take off was when I combined the Darmok language concept with some of my own experiences in Japan - an additional social aspect - and with some concepts from anthropology about coming of age.
So in the end, this post has turned not only into the story of Darmok and me, but a little description of the process of writing, and how my ideas came together for that initial story, which appeared in Analog in July/August 2008.
At this point, my stories are made up of language concepts and ideas that are all mine, but I'm very grateful for that initial inspiration, or I wouldn't be where I am today.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Sheila Finch at TTYU!
Please welcome Sheila Finch, Nebula award winner and author of eight science fiction novels, who has agreed to blog here as a guest and tell us a bit about the experience of developing and writing in the universe she explores in her stories about The Guild of Xenolinguists. Now, turning it over to Sheila...
I wish somebody had warned me, when I wrote the first lingster story, that I had just set out to create a whole series of tales about communicating with aliens, my own universe, let alone an entire Guild of Xenolinguists with all its rules and precepts. I might have taken the endeavor more seriously right from the start instead of having to make it fit as I went along, with too many occasions where I found myself thinking, Oh no! I didn’t say that in a previous story, did I? How on earth am I going to get around it?
The novel that came to be called TRIAD (1986) started as notes on African native cultures that quickly morphed into notes about an alien one. I was at UCLA for a quarter on a fellowship, studying South African literature, crafts and (dabbling in) language. It wasn’t the first novel that I’d written (actually it was the fifth – or sixth if we count a perfectly ghastly one that eventually went into the trash can) but it was published as my second. But somewhere in the writing the word xenolinguist appeared, and a Guild that trained them. The author hardly noticed.
“Babel Interface” was supposed to be a one-off story about alien communication (which I’d been convinced for many years wasn’t going to be as easy as Star Trek portrayed it). It’s a story whose birth pangs I don’t even remember – that’s how casually I dropped in details about the “Guild” back on Earth that Tomas worked for, or the fact that such communicators were called “lingsters,” or the field pack of interface drugs they relied on. But there they were.
I didn’t sell that story right away (several editors disliked it thoroughly), and I went on to write other stories. Meanwhile, I continued reading books about language, a major passion of mine. And somewhere along the line I started wondering what Whorf and Chomsky, Pinker – and all the other linguistic scholars whose books I bought as soon as they were published – might have to say about talking to aliens. I began noodling around with an article on how we might eventually approach the problem. I’m not even certain that I took the matter too seriously even then, judging from the title: “Berlitz in Outer Space.” But I had fun dreaming up the first class in
Xenolinguistics 101.
An editor finally bought “Babel,” and wanted to see “Berlitz” too. He finally printed both in the same edition of Amazing Stories in 1988. But even then I didn’t seem to understand the trap I’d laid for myself. “A World Waiting” was under construction about that time, and I was thoroughly distracted by the marvelous experience I’d just had of hearing my unborn granddaughter’s heart beat and seeing her ultrasound picture which I knew was going into the story somehow. Then one morning I realized that my lingster (the term had stuck) was
dragging her luggage into a tent and that the luggage had a logo on it – and the Guild of Xenolinguists finally made it into the author’s consciousness.
The rest is history, or maybe bibliography. There are now two novels and eleven stories about the lingsters, not to mention a couple of borderline stories where the lingsters themselves never appear.
What would I have done differently if somebody had warned me at the beginning what I was doing? Well, for one thing I wouldn’t have founded the Mother House of the Guild in Geneva. I had to do some hand-waving in “First Was the Word,” last written but first in the timeline, to explain that. And, if the reader notices, Triad is apparently set in a female-dominated world which had to be conveniently ignored in later stories. The role of Artificial Intelligence changed over the years too, from Earth’s warm and fuzzy CenCom to the Venatixi AI that acknowledges no loyalties. Little details like that. About midway through, I stopped and wrote myself a
“bible” of the Guild and its teachings; I wish I’d had it from the beginning.
So do I now know all there is to know about the Guild and the lingsters? Heavens no! At least, not consciously. I’m currently working on a longer story – maybe a novella – set at the very end of the cycle, and I’m constantly surprising myself with things my unconscious mind apparently knew that I didn’t. Such as why Humans and Venatixi fought a war in “Out of the Mouths,” or who the Sagittans were whose presence Gia experienced in Triad.
Maybe I had to hide the fact I was creating a series from myself in order not to scare myself off from writing?
Many thanks to you, Sheila, for sharing your thoughts.
For all those who would like to learn more about her work, her website is at http://www.sff.net/people/sheila-finch/ .
I wish somebody had warned me, when I wrote the first lingster story, that I had just set out to create a whole series of tales about communicating with aliens, my own universe, let alone an entire Guild of Xenolinguists with all its rules and precepts. I might have taken the endeavor more seriously right from the start instead of having to make it fit as I went along, with too many occasions where I found myself thinking, Oh no! I didn’t say that in a previous story, did I? How on earth am I going to get around it?
The novel that came to be called TRIAD (1986) started as notes on African native cultures that quickly morphed into notes about an alien one. I was at UCLA for a quarter on a fellowship, studying South African literature, crafts and (dabbling in) language. It wasn’t the first novel that I’d written (actually it was the fifth – or sixth if we count a perfectly ghastly one that eventually went into the trash can) but it was published as my second. But somewhere in the writing the word xenolinguist appeared, and a Guild that trained them. The author hardly noticed.
“Babel Interface” was supposed to be a one-off story about alien communication (which I’d been convinced for many years wasn’t going to be as easy as Star Trek portrayed it). It’s a story whose birth pangs I don’t even remember – that’s how casually I dropped in details about the “Guild” back on Earth that Tomas worked for, or the fact that such communicators were called “lingsters,” or the field pack of interface drugs they relied on. But there they were.
I didn’t sell that story right away (several editors disliked it thoroughly), and I went on to write other stories. Meanwhile, I continued reading books about language, a major passion of mine. And somewhere along the line I started wondering what Whorf and Chomsky, Pinker – and all the other linguistic scholars whose books I bought as soon as they were published – might have to say about talking to aliens. I began noodling around with an article on how we might eventually approach the problem. I’m not even certain that I took the matter too seriously even then, judging from the title: “Berlitz in Outer Space.” But I had fun dreaming up the first class in
Xenolinguistics 101.
An editor finally bought “Babel,” and wanted to see “Berlitz” too. He finally printed both in the same edition of Amazing Stories in 1988. But even then I didn’t seem to understand the trap I’d laid for myself. “A World Waiting” was under construction about that time, and I was thoroughly distracted by the marvelous experience I’d just had of hearing my unborn granddaughter’s heart beat and seeing her ultrasound picture which I knew was going into the story somehow. Then one morning I realized that my lingster (the term had stuck) was
dragging her luggage into a tent and that the luggage had a logo on it – and the Guild of Xenolinguists finally made it into the author’s consciousness.
The rest is history, or maybe bibliography. There are now two novels and eleven stories about the lingsters, not to mention a couple of borderline stories where the lingsters themselves never appear.
What would I have done differently if somebody had warned me at the beginning what I was doing? Well, for one thing I wouldn’t have founded the Mother House of the Guild in Geneva. I had to do some hand-waving in “First Was the Word,” last written but first in the timeline, to explain that. And, if the reader notices, Triad is apparently set in a female-dominated world which had to be conveniently ignored in later stories. The role of Artificial Intelligence changed over the years too, from Earth’s warm and fuzzy CenCom to the Venatixi AI that acknowledges no loyalties. Little details like that. About midway through, I stopped and wrote myself a
“bible” of the Guild and its teachings; I wish I’d had it from the beginning.
So do I now know all there is to know about the Guild and the lingsters? Heavens no! At least, not consciously. I’m currently working on a longer story – maybe a novella – set at the very end of the cycle, and I’m constantly surprising myself with things my unconscious mind apparently knew that I didn’t. Such as why Humans and Venatixi fought a war in “Out of the Mouths,” or who the Sagittans were whose presence Gia experienced in Triad.
Maybe I had to hide the fact I was creating a series from myself in order not to scare myself off from writing?
Many thanks to you, Sheila, for sharing your thoughts.
For all those who would like to learn more about her work, her website is at http://www.sff.net/people/sheila-finch/ .
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Deciphering an unknown language...
This post is a response to Marian's question of a few days ago.
I have seen some of the instances Marian refers to, of humans trying to decipher alien communication beginning with numbers. David Marshall also has a good point about chemistry. In effect, the idea behind these approaches is to try to find understanding by starting with something we know we must have in common.
I'm not convinced that these things would work in actual practice, simply because they rely in large part on our own perception of the separation of objects.
However, in SF generally there is a degree of commonality embedded in the premise. Sometimes the only assumption is that of common perception of objects and numbers. Sometimes it's greater, as when an author asks you to accept a computer that is able to process and decipher language, or when an author asks you to accept a machine translator (or babel fish!)
In her Xenolinguist stories, Sheila Finch often deals with thorny questions related to how alien contexts and physiologies would influence language form - and in fact, she'll be guest blogging here in the next day or so to talk a bit about her design of the Xenolinguists' universe.
In my own stories, I like to pick up at a point where linguists feel they've already got the language largely under control, and deal with the fine points of culture, dialect, and the significance of language.
But the question was how to get past numbers into deciphering more of a language. The key, I think, is context.
The folks who write about the numbers-based communication strategy are setting up a very hard problem, dealing as they are with signals sent at a distance. This kind of communication, much like writing, is highly divorced from the original context of communication.
Humans tend to see objects as separate from one another and assign words to them. This is the vocabulary, or lexicon. When humans are working in a close context of togetherness and shared activity, often enough only a single word is enough to evoke the correct meaning, as when the doctor says "scalpel" over the patient in the operating room. The further away one moves from immediate shared context, the more language features become necessary to get the message across. This is essentially the origin of grammar - pieces of sound (in the human case) stuck in with the object information to show relation, in cases when the relation is not immediately clear to both parties. Writing takes this phenomenon to an extreme, while transmission of data over interstellar distances pushes it even farther.
Humans have powerful language-processing mechanisms built into their brains. We are able to track sounds with powerful accuracy, identifying separate clicks even when they are delivered at quite high speeds - I saw an article on this in the New York Times while in Chicago a few weeks ago. When light flashes occur at the same rate, the eye perceives it as continuous motion and is unable to separate it.
Another thing humans are able to do is perceive frequency of occurrence. If I were to give you two words, say, "true" and "identifiable," you could probably give me an accurate ranking of which one occurs more commonly in English, right off the top of your head. This is a tremendous advantage in deciphering language, whether it be auditory or visual.
So what we do when we see communication is we try to identify patterns that repeat in similar contexts. If we went to an alien planet, the best approach would probably be to get as close as possible to aliens and begin taking samples of their language with as much contextual information as possible - both physical, temporal, and social. Since those contextual cues may not be the same ones we typically use, having sophisticated sensors and computer power at our fingertips would probably be a great help. Once we figure out correspondences, we can start assigning tentative meanings. Having a local resident to test these meanings on, even if it means playing recordings of things that human vocal tracts find unpronounceable, is an indispensable step.
Even so, this process would certainly take years.
The last thing I'll add tonight is a couple of examples of context and frequency distinctions, from the area of phonology. Linguistics talks about something called a "minimal pair," which is the diagnostic test for a phoneme. It goes roughly like this: if you change one single sound in a word, and the meaning of the word changes, then that single sound is a phoneme. The two words, one with one sound and one with the other, are called minimal pairs.
"bit" and "bat" show that short "i" and short "a" are separate phonemes from each other.
On the other hand, aspirated "t" and non-aspirated "t" both occur in English, but are allophones, or two different forms of the same phoneme, because they can be related by a rule, and don't make the difference between separate words.
"tar" contains aspirated "t"
"star" contains non-aspirated "t" - but the non-aspirated "t" is present because of the "s" preceding it.
These two types of "t" are phonemes in at least one Indian language (I can't cite a minimal pair, however, not knowing Indian languages well myself; perhaps one of my readers could give me an example).
I hope that sheds a little light on this process; I certainly have enormous respect for the linguists who have gone out into the field and taken on languages previously unknown to them. Marian, you can always let me know if you have other questions.
I have seen some of the instances Marian refers to, of humans trying to decipher alien communication beginning with numbers. David Marshall also has a good point about chemistry. In effect, the idea behind these approaches is to try to find understanding by starting with something we know we must have in common.
I'm not convinced that these things would work in actual practice, simply because they rely in large part on our own perception of the separation of objects.
However, in SF generally there is a degree of commonality embedded in the premise. Sometimes the only assumption is that of common perception of objects and numbers. Sometimes it's greater, as when an author asks you to accept a computer that is able to process and decipher language, or when an author asks you to accept a machine translator (or babel fish!)
In her Xenolinguist stories, Sheila Finch often deals with thorny questions related to how alien contexts and physiologies would influence language form - and in fact, she'll be guest blogging here in the next day or so to talk a bit about her design of the Xenolinguists' universe.
In my own stories, I like to pick up at a point where linguists feel they've already got the language largely under control, and deal with the fine points of culture, dialect, and the significance of language.
But the question was how to get past numbers into deciphering more of a language. The key, I think, is context.
The folks who write about the numbers-based communication strategy are setting up a very hard problem, dealing as they are with signals sent at a distance. This kind of communication, much like writing, is highly divorced from the original context of communication.
Humans tend to see objects as separate from one another and assign words to them. This is the vocabulary, or lexicon. When humans are working in a close context of togetherness and shared activity, often enough only a single word is enough to evoke the correct meaning, as when the doctor says "scalpel" over the patient in the operating room. The further away one moves from immediate shared context, the more language features become necessary to get the message across. This is essentially the origin of grammar - pieces of sound (in the human case) stuck in with the object information to show relation, in cases when the relation is not immediately clear to both parties. Writing takes this phenomenon to an extreme, while transmission of data over interstellar distances pushes it even farther.
Humans have powerful language-processing mechanisms built into their brains. We are able to track sounds with powerful accuracy, identifying separate clicks even when they are delivered at quite high speeds - I saw an article on this in the New York Times while in Chicago a few weeks ago. When light flashes occur at the same rate, the eye perceives it as continuous motion and is unable to separate it.
Another thing humans are able to do is perceive frequency of occurrence. If I were to give you two words, say, "true" and "identifiable," you could probably give me an accurate ranking of which one occurs more commonly in English, right off the top of your head. This is a tremendous advantage in deciphering language, whether it be auditory or visual.
So what we do when we see communication is we try to identify patterns that repeat in similar contexts. If we went to an alien planet, the best approach would probably be to get as close as possible to aliens and begin taking samples of their language with as much contextual information as possible - both physical, temporal, and social. Since those contextual cues may not be the same ones we typically use, having sophisticated sensors and computer power at our fingertips would probably be a great help. Once we figure out correspondences, we can start assigning tentative meanings. Having a local resident to test these meanings on, even if it means playing recordings of things that human vocal tracts find unpronounceable, is an indispensable step.
Even so, this process would certainly take years.
The last thing I'll add tonight is a couple of examples of context and frequency distinctions, from the area of phonology. Linguistics talks about something called a "minimal pair," which is the diagnostic test for a phoneme. It goes roughly like this: if you change one single sound in a word, and the meaning of the word changes, then that single sound is a phoneme. The two words, one with one sound and one with the other, are called minimal pairs.
"bit" and "bat" show that short "i" and short "a" are separate phonemes from each other.
On the other hand, aspirated "t" and non-aspirated "t" both occur in English, but are allophones, or two different forms of the same phoneme, because they can be related by a rule, and don't make the difference between separate words.
"tar" contains aspirated "t"
"star" contains non-aspirated "t" - but the non-aspirated "t" is present because of the "s" preceding it.
These two types of "t" are phonemes in at least one Indian language (I can't cite a minimal pair, however, not knowing Indian languages well myself; perhaps one of my readers could give me an example).
I hope that sheds a little light on this process; I certainly have enormous respect for the linguists who have gone out into the field and taken on languages previously unknown to them. Marian, you can always let me know if you have other questions.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Westercon report
It was a whirlwind day yesterday. I got up at 4 am and took a 6:20 flight to Phoenix, whence I found my way to Westercon by around 8:30. If you know how people party on Saturday nights at conventions, you might already have guessed that things were pretty quiet around the place.
I always like to hang around the social rooms, like the green room, to meet people. I've met a lot of very cool authors that way, and I had some great conversations today also. I used some of my extra energy, on behalf of those who had less, to help organize the food in the Con Suite.
Before the panel started, I got to meet Alastair and Marian from the Analog forum who were in the audience. That was fun!
The alien language panel was super-awesome. I think the greatest thing about it was that all three of us - Stan Schmidt, Sheila Finch, and I - were both qualified and excited about the topic of designing alien languages. We talked about them from all kinds of angles. Evolution of language, physiology and its relationship to language form, phonology, morphology, and many other things including how to render alien languages so they're comprehensible in English (always important so people will keep reading your story!).
One of the things that Stan Schmidt brought was a pair of recordings which really added to the depth of the discussion. The first was of animal sounds from Earth - birds, insects, and others. My favorite - and clearly his also - was the willow ptarmigan, a tundra bird that sounds as if it is really speaking a language. That was a striking thing to listen to! He also had a recording of messages in a language he'd created that used vowels, pitch and length to distinguish meanings. What a great example for the group to consider!
I think there were about 20 people in the audience. They were great, too - very engaged, listening well, awake (and on Sunday at a Con, this is no small feat), and asking great questions.
After that I got to eat lunch with my fellow panelists, which was also very enjoyable. We talked a bit about language at that point, and also about stories and about Dr. Schmidt's editing experiences. Fascinating stuff. I promised I would do my best to get a new story out to Analog by October - so I have my work cut out for me now.
It was a great, exhausting day. You're welcome to ask questions if you're curious about anything else.
I always like to hang around the social rooms, like the green room, to meet people. I've met a lot of very cool authors that way, and I had some great conversations today also. I used some of my extra energy, on behalf of those who had less, to help organize the food in the Con Suite.
Before the panel started, I got to meet Alastair and Marian from the Analog forum who were in the audience. That was fun!
The alien language panel was super-awesome. I think the greatest thing about it was that all three of us - Stan Schmidt, Sheila Finch, and I - were both qualified and excited about the topic of designing alien languages. We talked about them from all kinds of angles. Evolution of language, physiology and its relationship to language form, phonology, morphology, and many other things including how to render alien languages so they're comprehensible in English (always important so people will keep reading your story!).
One of the things that Stan Schmidt brought was a pair of recordings which really added to the depth of the discussion. The first was of animal sounds from Earth - birds, insects, and others. My favorite - and clearly his also - was the willow ptarmigan, a tundra bird that sounds as if it is really speaking a language. That was a striking thing to listen to! He also had a recording of messages in a language he'd created that used vowels, pitch and length to distinguish meanings. What a great example for the group to consider!
I think there were about 20 people in the audience. They were great, too - very engaged, listening well, awake (and on Sunday at a Con, this is no small feat), and asking great questions.
After that I got to eat lunch with my fellow panelists, which was also very enjoyable. We talked a bit about language at that point, and also about stories and about Dr. Schmidt's editing experiences. Fascinating stuff. I promised I would do my best to get a new story out to Analog by October - so I have my work cut out for me now.
It was a great, exhausting day. You're welcome to ask questions if you're curious about anything else.
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