You're creating a world. How much language will you teach?

I read a novel once which had been handed to me with the highest recommendation as a book which created a "truly alien world." And guess what? It was really well done, really alien, very deeply thought through.

I had one problem: there wasn't enough language.

Now, I don't mean to say that there was no alien language used. There was. But for example I noticed that there was a lack of biodiversity: extensive areas of the world growing with the same two or three plant species, and we kept seeing the same animal species. The same pattern was found in a few other places, too (like artifacts), where I sensed the available vocabulary was just too small.

Surely we don't want this. On the other hand, we don't want our readers floundering in piles and piles of alien vocabulary that they don't understand - they will stop reading. I've remarked before on this blog that if you want to create a sense of intimacy and internal perspective, you should avoid using alien vocabulary as much as possible, and make sure to back every instance of it up with a lot of contextual support - conversely, if you want a sense of alienness, more alien vocabulary is all right. It still has to be comprehensible.

One way to avoid overwhelming readers is to use a translation approach. Whatever concept it is that you want readers to understand, find a way of rendering it in English. In fact, I use this approach all the time, because I want my readers to feel like they are insiders (insiders=minimize alien vocabulary).

In "At Cross Purposes" (Analog Jan/Feb 2011) I had two alien concepts that I needed readers to understand. The first one was "Purpose." Our English word "purpose" was a subset, or a partial meaning, for what the aliens meant when they used it. Because of this, I could start having them use it in context in a place where the two meanings overlapped, and then slowly have them extend their use of the world with a lot of contextual support. Notice here: I was teaching my readers deliberately. I start readers in a place they can easily grasp, the area where English "purpose" overlaps with Khachee-translated "purpose." Then I make sure to extend that usage so that the reader will question the places where the meanings don't overlap, and start creating a new definition for it. I did the same thing with the word "cold" in "Cold Words" (Analog Oct. 2009). The second concept I needed readers to understand was much harder. I tried and tried to encapsulate it in a single word, but everything I found was either too corny, too awkward-sounding or too context-specific to our world. Only when I'd exhausted all the possibilities for English translation did I decide to use an alien word, "apfaa." That single term was able to cover all the multiple meanings of the social relationship of twinhood in their society - matching, symmetry, mutual social support, but also conflict, criticism and mutually beneficial argument. I had to make sure the aliens had a good reason to consider the concept consciously (they were wondering whether humans had it). Then I gave a basic definition for it: "the duality that holds agreement in one hand and conflict in the other." After that I tried to make sure all of its uses were supported by context suggesting the different ways it might be used.

I guess what I'm saying is that when you have alien language and concepts (whether those are sf "alien" aliens or just fantasy concepts that are unfamiliar), you need to decide how much language teaching you actually want to do. I'm less interested, in my stories, in teaching vocabulary than I am in teaching different ways to think - but I am very interested in teaching that.

The other thing I'm trying to say is that if you have invented a language with lots of words and all those words have history, and connotations, etc. etc. it doesn't mean that any of that information and insight is making it onto the page. If you want to show that words are related to one another, and make it meaningful to readers, you have to put in a lot of contextual support to make sure those implications are clear. If you have a really cool compound word that you love and you want to teach to readers, make sure that it's highly relevant to the events of the story, and put it in in such a way as to maximize easy understanding of it. If it's pivotal to the story's success, you might even want to break it into parts and show the meaning of the parts before you put it together. Just don't assume that because you have the grand language concept that everyone else shares it too. Remember that there is teaching going on, whether you are teaching actual new words, or just concepts and local metaphors.

In fact, there is teaching in all kinds of stories, even ones without aliens. Real world stories with local dialects? Yes, there's teaching. How about real world stories with hugely extended metaphors like "Snow Falling on Cedars," where the author spends lots of time comparing the snow and its effect on the countryside with the mental states of his main character? There's teaching going on there too. Every place you need to teach, you'll be looking for reader engagement to reward the effort of learning. So don't make people work for things that are trivial.

It's something to think about.

Science Fiction Languages vs. Fantasy Languages

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?

A funny article!

This is a wonderfully funny one. Many thanks to my lovely friend K for directing me to it - an article about a constructed language called Na'vi which is used in the upcoming series, "Avatar." Apparently the language has been developed in some depth, and certainly the article treats its subject respectfully. This also includes references to Klingon, for those interested - and an intriguing reference to an artist who renders Eminem rap songs in Klingon!

The article itself is here.

Make your world personal

Very often on writing and science fiction forums I see discussions of worldbuilding (including language) and backstory, and how not to make a world overpower a story with infodumping. This is an issue that I have struggled with, because my love of linguistics and anthropology makes me want to know every detail about the worlds in which my stories occur. After many years of writing I've developed my own philosophy of how to deal with this issue. I'll call it make your world personal.

We are all the products of our experiences and the worlds we've grown in. The way each of us understands the world is intensely personal. When we speak, our personal understandings of the world filter through our words in many ways: in the words we choose to describe things, in how we categorize things and people, and in subtle shadings of grammar. When ethnographers study social situations in the real world, they often analyze such elements of speech to improve their understanding of how individuals in a social situation judge one another and the world around them. Because the subtle details of expressing identity in language are mostly subconscious, their effects are easy to feel but difficult to explain. The ethnographer's analytical techniques have been designed explicitly for the purpose of bringing these details into full consciousness.

When as writers we create a new world, we often begin by laying out logistical details and descriptions as if we were reading about a foreign place in a book. I find it all too easy to write lots of words about the worlds I create, but at the same time I find that's not enough for me to enter the story world successfully. I need a character.

If I take all of the impersonal questions I've asked about my world - geography, culture, objects, naming conventions, etc., etc. - and recast them from the point of view of a character inside that culture, then I start to get to somewhere new. The place I want to find is inside someone's head, a stance and point of view that will warp everything around it, where action and the judgment of action will cause backstory to reveal itself. I want to make my world personal.

One place to start is to play with what is. Take a paragraph of description - almost any one will do - and highlight every name, object, and category label you find in it. Then ask yourself how each one reflects the unique point of view of the narrator, and whether you might be able to push any of them closer to that person - for example, by changing an article from a to the, by adding a judgmental adjective, or by substituting a word heavy with interesting connotations. Then see how the paragraph has changed.

You may discover that your world feels more personal.

It's something to think about.

Workshop: Rendering a Created Language in English

I thought I'd pay attention today to an issue I sometimes call "the translation problem," which effectively is the issue of rendering a created language in English. After all, no matter how much work you put into creating a language, a culture, etc. the language that carries the story will be English. So in some manner, you have to find a way to give the flavor of your created language to your English.

This issue covers two of the items from my last post: dialogue, and voice. This is because both of them have directly to do with the content of the language you put down on the paper.

Let me start with a couple of examples from my own work.

The alien dialogue in "Let the Word Take Me" (Analog July/August 2008) was based on the principle that the Gariniki would speak only in oblique references to a set of canonical sacred stories. Some of you may be familiar with this language concept, which I first encountered in Star Trek: The Next Generation's fascinating episode entitled "Darmok."

What I did for the dialogue was design references without actually writing the underlying stories themselves. Examples include "Kridia's head-scales shone," "Rosbas drew strength from the sedi," "In the desert Herremi could not see her face." These were deliberately intended to be opaque. The linguist's son, David Linden, could understand most of them because he'd worked out correspondences between context and utterance along with his father for several years. So I could use his understanding to help the reader's understanding - of the dialogue.

The voice of Allayo's point of view was a different matter. Because culturally she knew of contexts in which the language was used productively (normally), she could think to herself in the language without using the oblique style - a good thing, or I wouldn't have been able to use her point of view at all. But if I tried to make her voice like the English I speak, that would not have worked either. So I looked for ways that her attitude toward language and the world could show up in the way that her voice came across. Since she considered all language sacred, I aimed for a tone that would suggest reverence - using words and meter (stress patterns) that would hint at Biblical verse or incantation. This also meant avoiding slang and contracted forms like "don't" "I'm" etc.

The language of the Aurrel in my forthcoming story, "Cold Words," depends on a distinction between high-status and low-status talk. The high-status talk I designed as the dialect spoken by a tundra-dwelling species of Aurrel, who used talk for coordination of their pack hunts. Thus I decided that they would begin by getting one another's attention on the run with an initial word that both announced the intent to speak and indicated the functional content of what would follow. The low-status dialect didn't use these same initial words, but had some of the same functional things - like submitting, or dominating, or asking for attention - simply mixed into the general talk.

This may all sound pretty complicated. Well in fact, seeing it done is much easier than trying to explain it. However, I did have a tought time at first making it readable in English. I had to make two attempts! Thank goodness for my critique group who basically said "Are you nuts?" and made me try again. However, the end result was both readable and distinctive once I introduced it properly early in the story. An example of the contrast between dialects might be as follows (where the word "belly" refers to a canine apology):

Low status:
"I belly to you, but I don't think so."

High status:
"Bel-belly: I don't think so."

Again, this is the dialogue. I could NOT do this comprehensibly in the character voice. The character voice was made distinctive in part by using first person present tense, in part by completely avoiding the present progressive tense "am __ing," and in part by keeping intense focus on the kinds of world metaphors that my character used. These metaphors were related to dominant and submissive relationships, hunting, animal behavior, etc. When possible I also tried to use a loping meter suggestive of running on the hunt.

These are my own examples, so they are extreme - but I'm hoping you can get some ideas from them. One of the things I tend not to do is use altered spelling to suggest pronunciation. However, this can be done well. Mike Flynn, author of The January Dancer, does it beautifully in his work. He not only alters spellings systematically, but backs them up with surrounding description that connects the spelling changes to the local dialects he is creating.

Before I finish this entry, I'll take a brief look at two of the language models in this workshop that might benefit most from a deliberate language-to-English representation strategy. One is wordjinn's partial psychic dialogue, and the other is David's underwater dialogue (pyraxis may also find this useful, but I don't know enough about rsakki at the moment).

In order to have two people speak to each other, you need to have linguistic content. That linguistic content is going to be most easily expressed in English words. So take the meaning of what one entity says to another, put it in words, and use that for the verbal dialogue. To give it a unique flavor, concentrate on giving unique color to the meanings expressed. So far you will be working free of obligation as to the precise sounds involved in the exchange.

Things like slang and contractions are responses to social and speaking conditions, and as such, they draw attention to the social and speaking conditions surrounding the dialogue in question. If your social context does not match that of a particular slang term, avoid it. Contractions are less distracting, but still, watch out for them if you're trying to create a formal impression with the communication.

Any created word that you insert into your interaction will instantly imply sounds in the pronunciation of the alien language. If that language is never ever pronounced in an air medium, the type of sounds that can be transmitted goes way down (indeed, most or all of our consonants would have no hope of being transmitted under those circumstances; this might be worth researching in more detail). If it is sometimes pronounced in an air medium, you can get away with saying that the word is not fully pronounced in that context, but implied, and the full word would be evoked in the speaker or hearer's mind.

If you have crucial components of communication that are not delivered verbally, then you need to decide what they are and how exactly they are transmitted. While color and scent languages could evolve to a level of sophistication, I have a hard time believing that they could be easily developed for the conversion of verbal material, which is why I'm advocating sign language for David. Sign languages already exist, and the primary time burden would be in learning the amount of material that these people wanted to preserve. It would be far easier to write with indelible ink on stone or another water-durable material to preserve records than to marshall a large population into memorizing cultural content in a newly learned language. Color or scent might be more effective for conveying mood, which I think would fit well with the discussion to this point. Wordjinn: with telepathy, you can presumably send words if you want, and thus those would have a soundlike representation. The harder trick is interweaving it with dialogue without ending up with something that reads like a script, because people will generally find this more difficult to follow. Also you'll probably want to have it represent the content, instead of having it look like an explanation of the content. So you might want to give some thought to how the djinn talk about their own telepathy. What do they call it? How do they refer to the keys, and what is the content of the keys? Etc. In our language, we have words that we use for opening communication, identifying ourselves, and asking permission for various things; I think these could be relatively easily adapted in a unique way to give the impression of the psychic content you're looking for. These are complex messages, and thus I think words are the best communicators for such content, but I think you can use words to gesture toward what is being expressed. Think of it almost as an English translation, and you'll find the content will become much easier to handle.

I hope this helps...