Let Us Go Down and Confuse Their Language

I have, of late, been dismayed at the state of con-langery (languery? langhery?), and fictional linguistics in general. You’d think this crap was hard.

• Darmok. You know, the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, with those aliens whose language can be translated literally by the Universal Translator, but still can’t be understood because everything in that language is expressed in references to their legends?
  
  Horse hockey.
  
  Plainly the writers got their hands on something like Basso’s Wisdom Sits In Places, about the Apache habit of expressing moral principles by reference to things that had happened in places in Apache country, and presumed mightily on their understanding of the anthropology involved. But see, Apaches can tell you what something means if you ask, and the race in “Darmok” should’ve been able to, too: otherwise they’d never be able to have learned about their legends in the first place. It wouldn’t be an issue, except that a freakish number of people are actually impressedby that episode.


• The novel of Planet of the Apes (nowhere near as good as the movies, any of the movies) says that apes have the anatomy to speak, but they don’t, and nobody knows why. This, of course, is a flat-out lie; though apes can produce many of the same consonants as humans, they have a vastly different vocal apparatus, owing to their hyoid process being much higher in their throats, limiting the number of sounds they can make and their control over them.


• On a similar note, the anthropomorphic wolf in Freefall apparently (I know it only by reputation, I’m rather happy to say) has been trained in ventriloquism, since wolves’ mouths are set up differently from humans’. Only…wolves (and canids generally) can produce most of the same consonants as humans. The only issues are (1) their jaws and lips are less mobile, so they might have to pronounce F labially, like the pronunciation of Phi in Modern Greek, or the F in Japanese, and (2) their tongues are probably too mushy for alveolar stops like T and D, so they’d have to pronounce them interdentally, like Spanish. Assuming the brain-ware for controlling the mouth-parts as precisely as humans do, of course.
  
  But wolves, like apes, have a vastly different vocal apparatus—their voices are what’s different. Ventriloquism is addressing the exact problem she hasn’t got.


• Remember all those nay-sayers who said Avatar is Dances With Wolves IN SPACE? Yeah, probably doesn’t help that the Na’vi language is an elaborate cipher for a simplified version of Sioux.


• The Na’vi remind me, though they don’t actually have the problem: apostrophes. Why? I mean, I use them in some of my alien languages, but I know what I’m doing: they’re glottal stops, the way they are in lots of Native American languages and Romanized Arabic. You could conceivably use them the way McCune-Reischauer Korean and Wade-Giles Mandarin do, as “hard breathings” (a usage borrowed from later forms of Greek). But the way they’re usually used is just blind, unthinking exoticism, to make words look “furrin.” The way they’re used in Warcraft, for instance, or Stargate SG-1 (linguistics being the only thing it doesn’t do better than the movie): the apostrophes are always between syllables that have no need of a break—Quel’thalas and Teal’c not only can be pronounced as Quelthalas and Tealc, that is how they’re pronounced.


• The desire to avoid alien languages following Indo-European rules (girls’ names ending in A, for instance)—complained of by Lovecraft all the way back in the ’20s!—doesn’t have to mean alien languages can’t have rules for things like the sex of names. And yet so often, it does, people being named quite randomly (in the rare cases their names are actually words, I mean). It doesn’t have to be an ending; it could be tone, or vowel harmony, or something. In my book, for instance, the aliens’ male names have purred vowels on odd syllables (they’re felinoids, remember), while their female names have them on even syllables. And the types of names will be different, too—alien girls in my book end up being named after metals, of all things, a lot (I randomly generated my word list, using a set of sounds and some rules, and all the metals ended up being in the feminine pattern: consider the cultural-setting possibilities that creates).


• Just in general, people trying to get in way over their heads in the matter of linguistics, trying to do strange, alien things—or rather, outré, the Lovecraftian pretentiousness of the word being absolutely perfect in this instance. How to do it right? Cherryh’s knnn, who have multiple mouths (the letters in their name probably represent the sound each mouth is saying at once), and also multiple brains, so therefore their grammar has to be conceptualized as a matrix rather than a line. That’s actually believable. How not to do it? Darmok, above. Nobody’ll blame you if your language is SOV or SVO, nominative-accusative, and agglutinating, instead of OVS, ergative-absolutive, and inflecting—there’s no reason to have a language like that other than to have it scream “Yo, I’m alien, mamma-jamma!” It’s more realistic for an alien language to be, just by coincidence, somewhat similar to the majority of Earth languages, anyway; the only way a language will be vastly different is if the aliens were trying.


• Why do people have a problem with aliens not using our time units? Admittedly, yes, the phrase “Two of your Earth minutes” is somewhat odd, but the phrase “In your units, two minutes,” is perfectly fine, and in fact it’s better, unless everyone uses the Babylonian-derived systems for time we do. Unless your aliens created Babylonian civilization, in which case—enjoy.