— eep opp ork ah‐ah —
FANTASY EXOTIC TONGUES – An Introduction
If you're here chasing the search‐string “+fantasy +exotic
+tongues”, then I'm afraid you've probably come to the
wrong place. This article is a companion to my guides to SF
Chronophysics and
Exobiology, dealing with another random feature
of fictional world design. It is written in the same spirit
as the chronophysics guide: I'm willing to tolerate any level of
implausibility in the quasiscience as long as these flaws are
irrelevant to the linguistic issues! (For a definition of
this term “quasiscience”, see my Star Trek
Rant.) And I'll try to avoid jargon, since there's no
reason a pedantic distinction between (e.g.) inflectional and
derivational morphology should be relevant for non‐terrestrial
languages. So for instance the Universal
Translators section is not intended as an assessment of
how close we are to building natural‐language interpreter machines
in real life – it's just a somewhat idiosyncratic
survey of the excuses available for SF writers who want to avoid
dealing with irritating language barriers.
By the way, when I say “SF” I don't mean to exclude Fantasy.
This is one of the reasons I avoid the word “sci‐fi”: I can claim
where convenient that the abbreviation “SF” stands for something
nice and inclusive like “Speculative Fabulation” or “Secular
Fantasy”! (But I do now also have a page specifically about
Fantasy Elvish.)
— klaatu barada nikto —
LET'S SPEAK ALIEN – In Ten Easy Lessons
Ever wondered how all those traditional space‐opera and
epic‐fantasy races – the pig‐faced
warriors, the smug bumheads, and all
the rest – came up with their wonderfully clichéd alien
vocabularies? It's not difficult; once you've mastered these
basic rules, you'll be able to produce names and phrases just as
stereotypical as theirs!
LESSON ONE
Languages described as “High”, like High Martian, Old High
Vulcan, or indeed High Draconic, aren't from upland regions (as
is the case for, e.g., High German) – they're ancient
and complicated prestige dialects preserved from the days when
the Empire was much bigger and better and more
sophisticated. Speaking them requires considerable effort,
dramatic gestures, and often a special capital‐T Talent.
LESSON TWO
Sounds (and sequences of sounds) common in English are still
possible in Alienese, but much less common – there are
no exotic alien worlds called Stritty or Thudgewundle.
Sounds (and sequences of sounds) entirely unused in English are
also very rare in Alienese – no Star Trek character
will ever be named Bwäølh or Ngì! But sounds (and sequences
of sounds) uncommon in English are abundant in Alienese; hence
the alien races known as the Xeelee, Chirpsithtra, and Githyanki.
LESSON THREE
Initial K is especially popular (Kazon, Klendathu, Krell,
K'kree). Incidentally, there's a good reason for this (and
one I'll credit to Steve Mowbray): aliens are obsessed with
triangles, a particular shade of green, the number three, and the
letter K because they learned everything they know from our TV
broadcasts. To be more specific, from a particular episode
of “Sesame Street”.
LESSON FOUR
Aliens enjoy designing their words to look like Latin or Greek,
or occasionally Hebrew; they make heavy use of classical sounds
spelt in classical ways, such as X, QU, TH, and PH –
hence Thranx, Zarquon, Tholian, Cylon, et cetera.
Some, such as the Romulans, Centauri, and Draconians, take it a
step further and steal entire words out of Latin dictionaries (or
Atlantean TV broadcasts, maybe).
LESSON FIVE
What's more, aliens tend to put classical‐looking endings on
their names: ‑ON and ‑OS are particular favourites
for planet names (Axos, Auron, Gothos, Krypton), and if there's
any sign of females, their names will end in an unstressed
‑A (Thuvia, Belanna, Dua, Ardana).
LESSON SIX
A civilisation of billions of individuals will have no trouble
allocating each one a unique, pronounceable name a syllable or
two long (e.g. Worf, G'kar, Worsel, Kal‐El,
Shevek). They may even manage to
make them all alliterate. Exceptions to this rule usually
have very long names indeed, though there are a few planets where
everyone is called Bruce to save time.
LESSON SEVEN
The names of a species, empire, language, homeworld, homestar and
so on will all be self‐evidently related; Ogrons come from Ogros,
Arisians come from Arisia, Arcturans come from Arcturus, and
Humans no doubt come from Humus.
LESSON EIGHT
When the endings aren't pseudoclassical they usually follow the
Middle‐Eastern standard: Pakistan‐i, Minbar‐i, Tymbrim‐i,
Kimdiss‐i. Such words often serve both as racial adjective
and collective noun, removing the need for a distinct plural;
where alien plurals do occur they either end in ‐I (Fyndii) or
occasionally ‑N (Thrintun).
LESSON NINE
A name dominated by guttural consonants and sibilants (Cthulhu,
Troxxt, Chasch) indicates savagery; one with lots of front
vowels and sonorants (Alderaan, Eloi, Emereli) implies a more
civilised nature. Except of course that mysterious
gas‐giant races always have names like thunderous farting.
LESSON TEN
If they use apostrophes, ignore them – they're not
serious. Some aliens will try to tell you that “'” stands
for an obscure vowel (F'lar, T'pau, Sp'thra), or a silent
consonant (Dra'Azon, Ka'a Orto'o), but in reality it's purely
decorative. It's not clear why they choose to use
apostrophes rather than, say, umlauts (à la
Mötley Crüe) – or peculiar alien squiggles, come
to that. Maybe they just want to keep things convenient for
ASCII.
— cthulhu fhtagn —
THE UNSPEAKABLE – And the Unthinkable
If you're the kind of person who read the
Silmarillion just for the linguistic appendices (No? Oh,
well, it's only me then), you'd probably prefer your SF languages
not to be quite like the ones lampooned above. So what's the
alternative? Well, I suppose you could use the Simpsons
Manoeuvre – to quote Kang: “No, actually I'm speaking
Rigellian. By an astonishing coincidence our two languages
are exactly the same!” But to the best of my knowledge, only
Star Trek has ever had the nerve to offer
this excuse with a straight face (see e.g. “Bread and Circuses”)…
so if that's out, you're left having to imagine a real alien
language. What could that be like?
Well, there are plenty of ways in which alien languages could be
extremely unearthly. The most basic variables are those of
FORMAT:
Phonology: even human languages vary widely not just in
the sounds they use (nasalised clicks, uvular implosives, four
distinct kinds of “L”) but in the sequences of sounds they permit
(English uses “h‑a‑ng” and yet rejects the equally
pronounceable sequence “ng‑a‑h”).
Modulation: whereas we rely mainly on pitch and quality to
carry meaning, aliens might make equivalent use of volume and
tempo (so that “n‑i‐k‐t‑o” is
“abort program” and “NIKTO! ” is
“hurry”), or rely on rhythms and harmonies calibrated for alien
aural equipment.
Articulation: audible languages can still be unspeakable
for those with terrestrial mouthparts. And never mind
deciding whether you should spell it as “Cthulhu fhtagn” or
“K'thooh looph'dægh‐n”; you'll be lucky if you can identify any
of the sounds involved (“Erm, was that Rroahrgh! or
Wroarrgh?”).
Medium: nonaudible (e.g. ultrasonic) or nonauditory (e.g.
visual) languages obviously pose major hardware problems for any
interpreter. More subtly, different media introduce varying
natural protocols for communication; some depend on direct
one‐to‐one physical contact, some require “listeners” to keep
quiet until the “speaker” stops talking, and others make
utterances accessible from anywhere forever after (by HTTP).
Understandably, writers (including screenwriters) tend to shy away
from untransliteratable dialogue – but no such problems
arise from variations in GRAMMAR:
Exoticity: if you only know English, or even if you know
half a dozen European languages, you might imagine that Denebian
would necessarily have equivalents for “preposition” or “plural
ending”, but no; that's less alien than Japanese! Not all
languages use the same toolkit of elements (adverb, adjective,
infinitive, etc.), or signpost the same things (number, case,
person, etc.); see the “Coding” section below. And even
familiar categories like “plural noun” can be indicated in a
dizzying array of ways – with freestanding
“plural‐marker” particles; with additions, changes, or even
reshuffles at the beginning, middle, or end of the noun; with
changes in accompanying articles, or adjectives, or verbs, or
other words that just happen to be around.
Conjugations: the upshot of all this is that knowing the
words “me” and “go” won't necessarily help you recognise the
phrase “I went” in ET‐speak (any more than it would in English);
if the direction was to windward rather than leeward it may take
a completely different motion‐prefix!
Rearrangements: the rules for arranging words in sequence
are no more variable than all the rest, but scrambled word‐order
is disproportionately popular in fiction as a marker of
alienness. Easy to carry over into English it is!
Architecture: seriously alien grammars may throw out the
whole terrestrial “tree‐structure” scheme, replacing it with
something more bizarre (see for instance my own mock‐up of a
structurally alien language: “Europan”).
And on the traditional third hand, it's commonplace for languages
to make some things more and others less convenient to
communicate about by means of alternative styles of CODING:
Lexicalisation: you probably already knew that Eskimo
dictionaries contain innumerable words for “snow”… so it's a pity
that factoid's not true! They only have about as many basic
words for it as we do, though Eskimo does have a lot of
specialised seal‐hunting vocabulary items (and “iglu” is their
general‐purpose word for house).
Le Mot Juste: people often get very excited about the idea
that (e.g.) “Martians have no word for war”, forgetting that a
lexical gap this easy to fill with a paraphrase or loanword is
unlikely to tell us much about their familiarity with the
idea. After all, until the twentieth century Terrans had no
word for genocide. It's unlikely that any concept that's
understandable could ever be totally inexpressible; nonetheless,
an alien language might make an idea formidably awkward to
conceptualise or communicate, and the closest translation may
have any manner of strange built‐in associations. Even if
the word “pity” is in a Dalek's vocabulary banks, it may
be listed as a synonym for “errorcode 7 (failure to exterminate
caused by temporary targeting impairment or neural dysfunction)”.
Naming: English creates or borrows new words fairly
readily; extreme creativity or conservatism might make for a
genuinely interesting alien vocabulary. Contrariwise, while
assigning stable “proper names” to things is quite limited in
English, it could be common for (say) Elves: if you live for
centuries, you have time to learn the nicknames of individual oak
trees… but who'd bother naming something as shortlived as a cat?
Grammaticalisation: a language's favourite distinctions
may be drawn by means of independent separate coinages
(king/queen, mother/father) or with compounds (chairman/‐woman,
prince/princess). But the whole thing can also be built
into the syntax, so that words take gender‐marked adjectives
(blond/blonde) or pronouns (he/she). Now, in place of
gender, try imagining the same things being done to mark
duration, proximity, certainty, agency, approbation, or urgency,
and not being done to distinguish singular/plural or
affirmative/negative.
Inescapables: often, concepts are treated as so important
that they're built into words and sentences automatically,
whether they're relevant or not. Thus it's unnecessarily
difficult to be neutral with regard to social position in
Japanese, to gender in Esperanto (see
Ranto), or to tense in English (see
Chronophysics).
So, is there anything that can't vary? Well, there's
no surplus of hard evidence, but I'd say that all true languages
(see footnote) must have in common the following
characteristic properties, necessary for any general‐purpose
communicative mechanism:
STRUCTURE
Utterances are constructed and interpreted out of modular
constituents according to systems of combinatorial rules (capable
of creating arbitrarily many novel sentences). Some
proto‐sapient species might in principle do this “primitively”,
as some sort of pidgin (cf.
Pleistocenese), but a “holistic,
impressionistic grammar” with no such structure won't get them
far.
DISCRETENESS
Meanings depend on systems of distinctions between finite
sets of elements (sounds, words, grammatical forms, and so on),
not on the subtle shadings of their individual qualities.
Continuous variables such as stress may be useful for expressing
generalised attitudes and overtones, but they're no good for
specifics.
CONVENTIONALITY
Words are arbitrary labels, not representations of what they
denote. The word “giraffe” isn't particularly giraffelike,
“big” is a small word, and dogs don't really say “bark”.
Even in sign‐languages and pictographic writing systems, few
meanings are guessable from their signs – aliens may
use sonar onomatopoeia, but it won't make their grammar any more
comprehensible.
METAPHOR
The “literal‐minded” languages of many space‐opera Ancients are
impossible; all linguistic categories and rules are formed via
analogies, explicit or implicit. The definition of the word
“dance” presupposes a resemblance between waltzes and
raves – and pluralising “days” is a fossilised
metaphor too: when did you last see a stack of them? On the
other extreme, the “allusive language” of “Darmok” (see
Star Trek Rant) is unworkable because
it's all metaphor and no grammar.
ABSTRACTION
Phenomena can be discussed other than those directly apparent to
the senses, including spatially or temporally remote events,
hypothetical or generalised situations, counterfactual fantasies,
and lies. The speakers may have trouble with them, but the
language will always provide for “saying the thing that is not”.
CONTEXTUALITY
Meanwhile, phenomena that are directly apparent or
previously established can be referred back to by means of
special shortcut forms – pronouns and
point‐of‐view‐dependent expressions as in “you were behind
them”. Aliens with no way of expressing the first person
(even as “this person now speaking”) are unlikely –
they'd need unique absolute identifiers for every person, place,
moment, and event!
Footnote – “What do you mean, true
languages?” I hear you cry. Well, the category includes
sign languages like ASL, pilloried vernaculars like Jamaican
creole, and inventions like Klingon, since you could translate the
information on this page into a Klingon version that a
non‐anglophone Klingon‐speaker would understand. But it
excludes the things occasionally called “languages” which you
couldn't do that with, such as Braille, or music, or bee‐dances,
or Perl. You might think
“print 'xenolinguistics'” is a translation, but
a Polish monoglot Perl‐hacker wouldn't agree… counter‐arguments
welcome at the usual address!
Then again, while I'm sure about xenolinguistics being a branch of
linguistics, can I entirely rule out the idea of intelligent
lifeforms who simply don't have language? The usual
suggestion is that instead they have some sort of (telepathic or
biochemical) “hive mind”. Well, maybe. But unless
they've got some standardised way of encoding concepts for
portability from brain to brain, it's not going to be enough to
distinguish them from animals – and if they have,
that's essentially a language by another name.
— zog —
UNIVERSAL TRANSLATORS – A Buyer's Guide
Okay, so you walk into the spaceport bar and discover that nobody
within a kiloparsec speaks English (or
whatever it's become by the year
3000 AD). You may think you'll be able to tell what
that Kzin is saying just by the tone of his voice; you may think
you can signal your friendly intentions by showing your teeth a
lot; you may even hope he'll speak your favourite interlanguage
(cf. [the late] Don Harlow's notes on Esperanto and Science‐Fiction). But no, take my
advice: it's time to invest in a Universal Translator system
(henceforth “UT”)! And beware of dodgy characters trying to
flog second‐hand 3PO units or fishy‐looking implants; here are
some guidelines to help you avoid wasting your credits on
something likely to get you lynched or brainwashed.
For the convenience of any alien readers (especially Gubru,
Ramans, and the like), all the points made
come in sets of three.
“UNIVERSAL”
There is some room for flexibility here – you needn't
splash out on a Star‐Trek‐style model that can handle any number
of unknown alien tongues at once, as long as it doesn't
specialise in, say, Basque‐to‐Tamil. Does it need to be
able to cope with thoroughly alien mindsets, non‐auditory
languages, and so forth, or is everyone in the bar tediously
humanoid? And when you encounter a language it doesn't
already have on file, how does it learn new ones?
Possibilities include:
Plug‐and‐Play – “canned” languages, which you
can upload into the UT or your own brain. Note the social
implications if you can learn Xemahoa on a whim, Gothic as a
fashion statement, or a private
cryptolang to baffle eavesdroppers.
Just be careful with black‐market language tapes; don't buy any
that claim to be “doubleplusgood”.
Exchangers – including “handshaking” computers
that swap lexicons on contact (do you really want to give away
security‐risk terms such as “hypnosis” to unknown aliens?), and
psychic “language chamaeleons” that can reply in any dialect they
encounter (be careful not to use “royal we” back to
God‐Emperors).
The Hard Way – language learning by prolonged
interaction with cooperative native speakers. Unless you've
got magical assistance, don't expect mere minutes of
eavesdropping to help. Even if the locals point at a
spaniel and say “That's a dog!” you can't be sure they mean “dog
= Canis familiaris”; it could be “dawg = barking” or “tsäd
= Fido”!
“TRANSLATOR”
When it comes to the “three levels of translation” it's worth
being clear about your requirements:
“Literal” or word‐by‐word translation is less useful than
monoglots tend to imagine; the intelligibility of the results is
proportional to the relatedness of the source‐language to the
target‐language. This is hopeless for Syrians, let alone
Sirians – if you pass that first line through an
online translator a couple of times, you get: “literal” or the
word for the translation of the word is little use, of that
monoglots if inclines to present itself.
“Official” or phrase‐by‐phrase translation is organised by
legal conventions about equivalences, and restricted to subjects
with narrow, codified jargons. If you're an interplanetary
lawyer or civil engineer, this might be
adequate; but don't expect it to convey subtexts. Actually,
unless your UT device is ridiculously good it's always wise to
steer clear of fancy figures of speech, such as jokes or irony
(“do I look stupid?”) – be literal and tolerant of
apparent threats, insults, and the like.
“Psychological” or concept‐by‐concept translation is the
ideal, producing exactly the same effect on a speaker of the
target‐language as the original would on a speaker of the
source‐language. This objective is next to impossible for
anything less expensive than a trained human‐equivalent
brain. When you're talking about your family life to a
Sontaran warrior‐clone, syntax, idiom, and social background
knowledge blur into one another as things that need to be
translated; so how much are you willing to pay for? A
“shallow” UT confuses “Pat owns an orange pelt” with “Pat has red
hair”; better models can deal with slang, xenoethnological
trivia, and allusions to Oolon Colluphid.
MECHANISM
Never mind the questions “What is it? How does it
work? Where is it?” (to quote someone else's
(ex‑)rant); all that matters is that there
are three broad categories of UTs, each of which has its own pros
and cons.
Polyglottisers – mechanisms by which one or
both participants can come to understand all of the languages
involved (i.e. either a cyberpunk plug‐in language‐chip or a
psionic/magical Pentecost Effect). The drawbacks of this
are that if you become a monoglot again afterwards, you're left
with baffling memories (if only “Why was that funny?”), and if
there's any truth whatsoever to Whorfian Relativism, exotic
languages may influence the decisions you make thinking in
them! The effects of human tongues such as Hopi are
arguable, but UTs capable of making you take as natural the
conversational instincts of a radar‐using methane‐shark shaman
are another thing entirely.
Psi‐Dubbing – reads what a speaker is thinking
and provides a voiceover, itself preferably telepathic.
Alien brains may turn out to be unreadable, or all minds may
prove to be readable regardless of native tongue – it
all depends on whether there's a universal nonlinguistic
“language of thought” for the Psi‐Dubbing to work in (a very
Chomskyan thing to imagine). Unfortunately, if it works it
may outflank all efforts at diplomacy – at any rate,
it sounds like a monstrous breach of privacy – and it
requires improbable technology such as psionics or
neurotelemetry. Farscape's playful
suggestion of “translator microbes” is about the most plausible
version I've heard of!
Cyberinterpreters – “expert system”
translators, with robot bodies. Audio‐only “Pocket UTs”
wouldn't be able to handle situations as simple as a trip to a
Spanish grocer's: the correct rendering of “I'll have that
one!” depends on whether it's nearby and feminine (¡ésa!),
distant and masculine (¡aquél!), or whatever. The
body needn't be humanoid, but any decent Machine Translator would
have to be such a flexible and intelligent AI that it deserves
civil rights (I pity C‒3PO, kept as
a slave translator for biochauvinist rebels in a society where
everything understands English anyway). Nonetheless, you
may have to slow down to allow your interpreter to keep
up – a good one may start translating your sentences
“incrementally” before you finish, but anything approaching a
“simultaneous” translation takes an awful lot of processing
power. So if your UTAI starts speaking at the same moment
as you do, shut up and let it do the talking.
FEATURES
Check how good the system is at coping with mismatches between
languages in the following fields:
Vocabulary – if one language lacks an idiomatic
match for the other's expressions, UTs may paraphrase or
neologise to fill the gaps (“he contracted blue fever from a
jabberwock bite”). More problematic are partial
matches: we say “cousin (parent's sibling's child)”, they say
“cousin (relation of the same moiety and age‐grade)”; they say
“water (dihydrogen monoxide)”, we say “water (salt or fresh, but
always liquid)”. The classic example of this problem is the
inventory of basic colour‐terms: Russian discriminates between
“light blue” and “dark blue”, while Hanunóo uses a single term to
cover the entire green/blue end of the spectrum. And as for
Jovians…
Agreement – when a Betelgeusian calls you
{addressee‐agentive‐adult‐nondistributed}, the UT throws
away as irrelevant all the surplus grammatical features and
focusses on its function, parallel to English “you”. Then
when you in reply address the Betelgeusian as “you” the UT has to
somehow come up with the extra details the alien agreement system
involves. This kind of routine trimming and padding takes a
good deal of creative fudging – especially if there's
a risk the Betelgeusian might later turn out to have intended you
to pay attention to some of the discarded “trivial”
details. The UT could play safe and insist on conveying
every last ambiguity and nuance explicitly, but this is
excruciatingly difficult, not to mention distracting (exercise:
try paraphrasing the precise differences between “he ate the
biscuit” and “she has eaten a cookie”).
Implicatures – ordinary communication relies on
speakers obeying a set of “conversational maxims”. They
shouldn't say things that are either uninformative or
self‐evident; that are inaccurate; that are irrelevant; or that
are either otiose or ambiguous. Of course, people
aren't always apposite, reliable, etc., but the
interesting point is that infractions are often themselves
communicative: if I say something blatantly inappropriate, it
usually means there's a subtext to be found. The trouble
is, aliens are likely to have different conventions about such
things, and inhuman intuitions about what needs to be pointed out
(“You're very tall…”), what level of hyperbole is acceptable
(“Nobody ever comes this way”), what's relevant (“Are you
hungry?” – “It's daytime!”), and what's concise (Ents
and Vorlons never get along).
INTERFACE
Ensure the UT's output is appropriately customisable –
assuming it has output; if the UT's skills are seamlessly
integrated into your own mind, you may not have these options.
Confidence – if it has to guess at a
translation, does it plough on with fingers crossed, flash
unintelligible warning lights, or constantly interrupt with
questions? Backchat can be annoying (“Is that and/or
or either/or?”, “You realise that's not answering the
question?”), but it's the best way of dealing with errors when
they do occur. Internalised UT systems don't pose these
problems, but external ones make great scapegoats…
Anthropomorphism – does it credit you with a
lot of background expertise (talking of “zitidars”, “foreclaws”,
and “spoo”) or recast everything patronisingly into familiar
analogies (“elephants”, “thumbs”, “apple pie”)? And what
style of analogy does it use – does 144
baph‐ʾl‐ghab equate to “503 km” or “a hundred
leagues”? Does gobl‐digûk become “many mooncycles”
or “several of your Earth years”? Or does the UT just
convert everything into Galactic Standard hexadecimal Planck
units?
Diplomacy – should the UT respect linguistic
taboos and conversational etiquette, or translate insults as
insults? If your UT can cope with multiple stylistic
registers, it can be set to convert between them and filter out
(or enhance) the profanities. Come to that, any UT that can
translate an oratorical welcome can be expected to summarise it
too. There's no need to reply with a formal speech of
gratitude; simply configure the translator to turn your terse
colloquial English into polite long‐winded Vilani. Etc.,
blah, waffle.
— ack ack ack, ack ack ack ack —
CETI FOR BEGINNERS – Little Green Manuals
You may or may not be surprised to learn that some extremely
serious attempts have been made to specify in detail the best ways
of opening up communications with Extra‐Terrestrial Intelligence,
either in radio broadcasts or on the White House lawn. To
start with the classic example:
Personally, I say if they can't be bothered to work out in advance
how to say “Take me to your leader” then they can't be trusted to
drive unlicenced starships around in our atmosphere… Blast
them out of the sky before somebody gets hurt!
2017 POSTSCRIPT – Ack, Nack, Googlewhack
If only we'd had universal translators as good as Google Translate
in the mid‐nineties it might have saved us from the tragic
interplanetary failure of communication documented in the movie
“Mars Attacks”: