You're a linguist - talk to them!

Another short entry tonight, as I'm leaving in the morning for Chicago. Spending two weeks with my parents, and it should be a blast. I hope I'll be able to post daily and will do my best, but technical details may need to be figured out, so I'll take Saturday night off and try back on Sunday.

Today I decided that the title of this entry should be, "You're a linguist - talk to them!" This is in fact my signature line at some of the forums I visit, and was my favorite line from the movie "Stargate." When I first saw Stargate I wasn't exactly a linguist yet, but I'd done enough of it to realize what a choice line this was.

Because, in a nutshell, linguists are not necessarily translators.

In science fiction when you have linguists on a planet they're usually out to record the language, analyze it, grasp its structure and then move on to really speaking it with the aliens. Theoretical linguistics starts with language patterns like sounds, word subparts, word order, etc. and then moves on to the larger social questions as you move from pragmatics into sociolinguistics. The deeper you go into a given language, the more speaking it becomes an advantage, but at the beginning stages it's not strictly necessary. And the skill of a translator is far, far more than simply the ability to speak a language. For me at least, when I speak Japanese or French I'm thinking in those languages, and purposely not translating because it slows me down. I have great respect, awe and amazement for simultaneous translators. I couldn't do it.

As a linguist you have to stand back from the language a little so that you can analyze what you hear (or think). Often as a native speaker of a language you can be defeated by how subconscious your own knowledge is.

My favorite example of this comes from the study of politeness. If you ask a professor to lend you a pen, you won't do it quite the same way as if you're asking your mom, or your best buddy. But if someone gives you the question: "You're asking your professor for a pen, what do you say?" - and here's the punchline - your answer is likely to be wrong. So if you write your answer down, and then tape yourself the next time you actually do ask your professor for a pen, the two probably won't match.

This is because when we have to answer questions about what we say, we don't actually explain what we would say - we explain what we think we should say. Our actual use is subconscious.

One last thought on the Stargate movie. I was always pretty impressed with the way they handled language. They had the linguist, who had constructed a theoretical pronunciation system for a language he thought was "dead" and only existed in hieroglyphics, sitting in front of those hieroglyphics and comparing notes with a living speaker who actually spoke the language natively. And the linguist figured out the basic pattern of sound change and somehow managed to learn to speak it. Far-fetched? Sure, especially at the speed with which he accomplished it. But someone had really thought that through, and even with my current knowledge of linguistics, I still think it was very well done.

More about Designing Languages

After my post on designing languages I had comments (here and on the Analog forum) from three people, which I thought I'd follow up on tonight.

Bill Gleason asked about translators.

A universal translator like the one in Star Trek is effectively a deus ex machina, an intervention on the part of the designer to allow us to bypass the real problems of different languages.

A mechanical translator can do a lot when it comes to predictable language structures - finding word boundaries by identifying repeating sets of sounds, tracking the structure and the sequence of those words. A really snazzy neural-network-style translator would probably also be able to do a good job of tracking phrases that repeat, and be able to do fuzzy categorization of words so it could capture exceptions to rules and things like that. It would also be able to do meaning to a certain extent, but I'm not sure how it would push past literal meaning to social meaning, for example. I suppose it would have to depend on how high you assumed the technology was.

I think it would be really interesting to have a translator machine that was really helpful but also limited in predictable ways. One issue a really "universal" translator would have to address would be how to incorporate information from the surrounding visual and social context - and that would be very tricky. Certainly it would require a device that could follow things like eye gaze and body position.

Bill also asked about body language. I talked about that yesterday so I won't go too deep, but if you assume that two groups of aliens are each able to identify discrete objects in their environment, then I think there would be a high likelihood that pointing would be used by both. Beyond that, a human trying to interpret alien gestures would need to be very sensitive to surrounding context and remember not to make assumptions about natural meaning for a given gesture. A shoulder-lift might not mean the same as a shrug, or possibly the alien might use an eye-gaze gesture similar to ours, but that is not accompanied by a shoulder motion. I don't think it's too far out to have two alien groups reach a basic level of mutual comprehension, but watch out for places where categories of objects are defined differently.


Tom Ligon brought up two very interesting ideas: a language based on bioluminescence, and a sound-based language with such vast range that human sounds seem undifferentiated.

Fireflies communicate by bioluminescence, but in a very simple way ("Where are you?" "Here I am!"). For a species with such a language to be able to grasp that humans are communicating, they would have to have an awareness of sound and its potential for carrying messages. They might even have unique alternate means to communicate via sound, as humans have used Morse code on Aldiss lamps, or semaphore (with flags).

As far as the language with vast range is concerned, that's a very interesting one. Human babies must gradually learn what not to pay attention to in their environment, so as to make communication easier without distraction, and so I think this is a completely solid concept. A human would have a tough time with this initially - it makes me think of H. Beam Piper's Fuzzies, who spoke with supersonic pitch. But given a good receiver, a lot of analytical work, and an appropriate sound generator, they might do a good job of speaking the range-language. Among range-language speakers, I think it would be a question of special individuals being able to grasp human language sound concepts. I've met many people who aren't able to hear sound distinctions that differ from their own native language - but on the opposite side, there are always exceptional individuals who are able to hear more subtle sound distinctions.


Greg Ellis peppered me with examples - what an exciting range of species! Look for them in his FOTS universe. The first place I'd start, given a large number of groups like this, would be sound design based on physiology, and believe it or not, the minute you name a group, you've already started language design. I'm going to comment a little on each group he gave me (except two he called the Swarm and the Machines), and I hope this will give a sense of how I get started when thinking through alien languages.

Saurians, Dwa'Kim
It might be good to ask whether dinosaur-like aliens have flexible lips, for example, because inflexible lips might restrict their ability to create consonants like p/b/w/m, or vowels like o/u. It looks already as though the Dwa'Kim have such flexibility - that could be used as a distinction between the two languages.

Jareen'qwar
My question about caterpillar aliens is whether they have a hard palate, and whether they have a nose. Both are useful to have, the palate being good for consonants like j (assuming it's pronounced "dzh") and the nose for sounds like n. The species might well have a different way of re-routing the air stream to produce a different resonance, the way we do with our noses. The name of the species as given here would actually be possible to pronounce without a palate if the j were pronounced like a y, and the q low down in the throat. But generally speaking the transcription of sounds would have to be considered approximate.

Rrowlk'aa
A doglike group. I've got the vibe. It looks like these guys are going to have some really cool growl-like consonants, or multiple qualities of "r." Does the apostrophe mean a glottal stop, a plosive consonant, or some kind of dropped sound? These are possibilities that might help the language expand.

Kahs
A more humanoid group, and their name is short, so lots of directions to go with this. I'd be looking to culture and social situations of language use to find out more about how the language is used.

Kon'ta Py'ron, Q'Tez, Grymphon
I'm grouping these together because they are relatively insectoid, with hard body parts, which suggests to me that they'll have a lot of means for clicking, creating hums and vibrations, and potentially whistling, all of which are difficult to use English letters for. But for clicks you can always turn to k/p/t/! , and for hums or whizzes you can go for s/z/f (or ph!) Whistles might give you vowels. I wonder a little about "n" and "g" for these groups, but this is all about getting creative - these might indicate sounds created by a combination of hum and click. Think through the type of mandible structure they might have, and whether they would have rubbing surfaces on their legs or other types of sound-producers they could use for language.

And that's it for my thoughts! Thanks for sending me the questions, guys - and I hope these examples have been thought-provoking for other people facing similar challenges.

Want to design a language?

I'm back after a great trip. Great adventures seeing sea lions and seals and kelp (in nature and in the aquarium) and playing with my parents and my kids and my brother's family too. Then I came home to the news of one rejection and one honorable mention from Writers of the Future - so quite a mixed surprise!

While I was away, I had this list floating through my head of the things I think about when I want to create a language. I always like to find reasons for the structures and words I create - because even though language is arbitrary in theory, in practice most of the things we say interconnect and make sense. Plus it's really hard to make up random strings of sounds off the top of my head. So here are some things to think about:

1. Language evolution. I've heard a number of people, particularly at the Analog forum, talking about the way they've thought through the physiological evolution of their aliens. So why not think about how their language evolved? What was it first used for? Distress calls across long distances? Cooperative activities of some kind? A language used for hunting might come out differently from one used while building tree homes, or one used to find other members of a family in a dark den.

2. Mouth shapes (sounds). The most obvious - but not the only! - application here is to aliens in science fiction. The sounds of the language have to be produced somehow, so if your alien has a lot of teeth, or a very long neck, that might influence the type of sounds in the language. Mouth shapes are also relevant to fantasy human languages, and to real-world languages. The sounds of English just don't require us to move our lips as much as French speakers do, but more than the sounds of Japanese do. Those general mouth patterns contribute to the feel of languages in real life, so why not in our stories?

3. Word structure (morphology). This means breaking down words into their component parts, such as re+cite, walk+ing, dog+s etc. And actually, it's one of the things most likely to be noticeable about your language in a story. Why? Because the language elements that tend to be included in a story are words for things, for languages and peoples, and possibly for activities. I've seen a lot of stories where the sound "i" is stuck on the end to make a plural. But why not use something else? Or, as the Japanese do, just (mostly) forget about plural nouns? The word for a town might have a prefix or suffix meaning "place." There are lots of options, and they can really add a sense of depth to your world. If you look at Tolkien's writings, you'll notice that all the elf names can in fact be broken into parts, and translated into literal meanings. I always thought that was amazing!

4. Sentence structure and above... Unless you're writing full sentences in your created language, you usually don't need to work out how sentence structure works. This is where it's good to turn around and consider how you want to capture the feel of your language in English. If you're not working with real world languages, then choosing an existing language dialect becomes problematic, because very often it will be recognizable. The last thing I want is for someone to ask, "I wonder why Wade's aliens are speaking Cockney?" So I go for alterations in rhythm and feel. English tends to have a natural speaking pattern of alternating high and low stress,

"x X x X x X x X" (iambic)

so you can reverse that, or alter it in funny places. In addition, you can have someone speak repetitively, or in very short sentences, or very long drawn-out ones.

5. Cultural concepts. Your people's belief system, and what kind of things are important or repugnant to them, can have a huge influence on language. This includes political ideology or religion. The Gariniki in "Let the Word Take Me" had an extreme version of this, where their view of the sacredness of their own language shrunk their public usage down to phrases without any sustained rhythm. The flip side of this was that when they spoke fluently, I tried to have them speak in a way that emulated the tone and language of sacred stories in English. I can hardly think of a world in which nobody ever swears (though maybe I should make one, hmm...), and the content of swearing has a lot to do with belief systems.

6. Language learning. Children in a society have to learn their own language, and they don't always need to learn it the same way. The Gariniki children learned to speak in the holy place by listening to stories and discussing them. In our society children generally learn to speak from their mother or primary caretaker. In some societies, children learn more language from their own siblings than from their parents. And generally, television- or computer-generated language is not responsive enough to play a significant role in child language learning.

Foreign language learning also comes to mind, but I need to end this post so I'll leave it for another time. I will say though that it differs in some key ways from child language learning.

I'd love to go into more depth on any of these points, so if you're curious about them just ask. Or it might be fun to do an example language. I'll think about it for upcoming posts.

Do you want to take on dialects?

I was thinking about writing a little on dialects, and then lo and behold, Bill Moonroe over at Asimov's board asked me to write about it! So that was perfect timing.

Dialects can be really fun to work with, and they can also be very challenging to work with, depending on how they're approached (especially the real-world ones). It's awesome to find a story where dialect is done really well - gives the whole thing a lot of flavor. But if it's done badly it can be insulting, as I'm sure many of you know.

Here is one useful principle of dialects: since language is constantly changing as it's being used, the longer a population has lived in a given area, the more that pockets of language use in the area will diverge. Some real life populations that come to mind are China, where the dialects are very often mutually unintelligible, Japan, which has a vast variety of dialects, and England. All of these are populations that have been in place for a very long time. In the US we have many dialects that originate from other parts of the world, but it's interesting to observe how many fewer accents there are on the more recently populated West Coast than in the East.

Intercommunication will not eradicate dialects, but it can slow their divergence. This is a useful thing to keep in mind if you're designing a fantasy world, or a SF planet, where the population has been around for a long time.

Dialects also reflect social status. (Don't get me started on social status! Today I have to stick with dialects...) There once was a study done in New York by Labov (earlier I said England, but my visitor Byron kindly reminded me of the real source) where different department stores had slightly different English usage (in pronunciation of "r"), and this was seen as an indicator of status (how classy the store was). So in your world/universe a particular profession, say, mariners or spacefarers, could easily develop their own dialect because they're relatively tight-knit, often isolated, and have a lot of pride in their own community. These regional dialects can simultaneously conflict, and coexist, with "standard" dialect (i.e. without disappearing), because social value is placed on being able to speak to the public, as it were, but a different kind of social value is placed on being able to mark yourself as one of the insiders for any particular language group.

If you want to work with a real-world dialect, there are different ways to approach it. Using alternative spellings of English can be clunky, both to write and to read, if it's not done just right (and for me, sometimes even if it is done right). Fortunately there's a lot more to dialect than just accent (phonetics and phonology, for the linguistics buffs). You can also work with vocabulary, or usages of words that are particular to the dialect. And you can also work with sentence structure, or with rhythm (prosody). Sometimes the easiest approach is to develop a feel for word-flow with a dialect speaker, and then use the surrounding text to imply the accent rather than trying to render it in spelling. In any case, for using real-world dialects the best bet is not to make any guesses. Find yourself a "native speaker" of the dialect and use them to help you grasp its patterns, and if you can, get them to proofread at the end. This is the best kind of insurance against inadvertently making an error that seems to belittle the dialect.

If you're not working with a real-world dialect, you can have a lot more free fun - though I will note that if the dialect appears to resemble a real-world dialect, or has "developed in the future" from one, then you might want to "hang a light on it," or bring attention to the fact that this is a dialect that has progressed on one hundred years since the cockney dialect, etc. so that people won't make wrong guesses.

My last thought would be that it's important to consider the ease with which the reader can grasp the dialect in question. My critique friends will laugh at me for saying this, after all the odd things I've asked them to try to read, but it's true. I just recently designed a language for a short story, but my main concern was less what the language itself sounded like, and more how that language could be rendered comprehensibly in English while still retaining the feel of an alien language. I think my friends would kill me if I actually ever tried to alter spellings, so I always try to go for using sentence structure and rhythmic patterns to indicate the difference. This is because I'm asking them for a real commitment, i.e. to read a whole story in this style. In "Let the Word Take Me" I did a similar thing with the gecko-girl Allayo, which is to say didn't worry much about what her language sounded like, but gave her a different rhythm of speech to contrast with the voice of David Linden.

If you've got one guy who talks funny, that's one thing, but the more extensive the use of dialect is, then the more reader effort it requires. It's worth putting in some effort as a writer to make sure the audience's comfort is being considered.

Because believe me, I don't want to make anyone suffer.

Does your world/universe use names?

I'm figuring it does, whether it's an SF story or not.

Every time we choose a character name, it means something. I was part of a panel discussion about this at BayCon 2008, and the panel agreed that names are often chosen for what they convey subconsciously about a character. This is true whether the names are from English, from other world languages, or even if they are all made up.

Science fiction names are often taken from world languages. The presence of different language groups (like English/Germanic, French/Spanish/Romance, Indian, Chinese, etc.) can imply a lot about the history of the future world featured in the story. Off the top of my head I can think of Aliette de Bodard, Sheila Finch and Mike Flynn who have done interesting things with their naming schemes and also with the twists they've put into the history of their universes.

Okay, so what if all the names are made up?

Making up names is fun, at least for me. When I'm creating a character, a lot of times the name will just leap into my head, but in order to take the world concept just a bit deeper, it's good to consider these in a language context. Are these names pronounceable in English? Are they pronounceable by anyone? And to push the level a little further, do they form part of a unified system?

Here's my own experience with finding an underlying language system.

I had this great mega-fantasy story and I had made up scads and scads of names for it before I suddenly decided I wanted my world to be a bit more principled. So I tried to figure out what "language" the different names might have come from, and I found the names falling into three or four categories as far as the types of sounds that occurred in them. Some sounded like English-pronounceable names, while others were more like Spanish-pronounceable names, or French-pronounceable names. I asked myself, "Do I want to have this be a single-language world?" The answer for me was that I wanted everyone in the immediate area to speak the same language, but I remembered that names in almost every country tend to keep the forms of older contributing languages - and I really liked the idea of this country having older contributing languages. So I took the few names that "were not like the others" and regularized them to one of the four main sound systems. And that gave me a place to go with the world's history and backstory, i.e. that there had once been people from four different language groups that populated the area.

Which is the long way of saying that if you think about your names for people, and names for things, as part of a language system, you can inadvertently give yourself a much deeper world concept and open up possibilities for history and demographic changes in your world.

Linguistic/Anthropological Terms and Researchers

Articulatory Phonetics: here / Wikipedia
Phonology: Wikipedia
Morphology: here / Wikipedia
Syntax: here / Wikipedia
Semantics: 1, 2, 3 / Wikipedia
Pragmatics: here / Wikipedia
Sociolinguistics: here / Wikipedia
Discourse Analysis: Wikipedia
Note: some of the Wikipedia entries above lack proper citations, but on my quick scan appear to be accurate.

Franz Boas: Wikipedia
H. P. Grice: Wikipedia

How Linguistics Can Help You - Index

This series of posts first appeared during a workshop here at TalkToYoUniverse, and has since been reprinted at the blog of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). It goes into detail about how different aspects of linguistics can be helpful in writing fantasy and science fiction.

1. How linguistics can help you
2. How articulatory phonetics can help you
3. How morphology can help you
4. How syntax can help you
5. How semantics can help you: Part 1 (choosing the right word)
6. How semantics can help you: Part 2 (connotations and allusion)
7. How semantics can help you: Part 3 (making up words)
8. How pragmatics can help you
9. How sociolinguistics can help you