Alien Languages (food for thought)

[Kilgs]

Neat article about universal languages, alien species having only one language and humanity having 7,000 while providing a "plausible" explanation for such...

http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_...iction_versus_earth_linguistic_diversity.html

 

[robject]

Bah. Chomsky's been repudiated, and epiphenomena is just doctoral-thesis-speak for "just stop thinking and start talking". And the article doesn't really offer any help -- regardless of where Earthian languages come from, Dyirbal (for example) is unintelligible to those who don't know it. Speaking *Proto-World to Dyirbal speakers will not help. Especially if it doesn't have split ergativity. Ha ha. Ha?

Disclaimer: I am not a linguist, so what I wrote above is a complete load of hogwash.

On the Gripping Hand, we DO happen to have at least two people on this forum who know a lot about linguistics, who I think could write better on the matter.

 

[Timerover51]

I have poked around some with linguistics, between studying it in college and then working with Egyptian Hieroglyphics. Given the range of dialects in the just the English language, from Northeastern Louisiana to the Scottish Highlands, I seriously doubt that any alien civilization is going to have a single language or limited number of dialects.

I remember in Eric Frank Russell's Wasp, the principal character spoke a dialect of the alien language that pegged him as a resident of the alien capital.

And the use in the article of the Bugs of Starship Troopers is a bit odd, as the Bugs Brains apparent communicate telepathically, if I remember correctly.

 

[sayatmenace]

Release the cranky!

Imagine that all reporting on astronomy and astrophysics covered only those research findings that had been generated by mycologists, geologists, and specialists in Victorian-era American literature.

That's what it's like to read about linguistics (inter alia) in even 'serious' popular science journals.

So I don't hate this Slate blurb as much as I was prepared to at first, not at all. Yes, it's disappointing that it leans on known crowd-pleasers of negligible interest/credibility among linguists, coming from an author whom I don't know but assume has formal postgraduate training in some field of contemporary linguistics. I don't get the impression the author even pretended to put any effort into whipping this one out. (And I'd beg to disagree with robject about the connotation or denotation of "epiphenomena" ;p -- but then I shared a lot of teachers and mentors with Terry Deacon, and am generally a fan of his work).

W/r/t Chomsky, I thought he'd pretty much dropped Universal Grammar proper by the early 1980s in favor of things like the much more appealing Governess & Bondage Theory -- but then another feature of reading linguistics reportage and 'science education' is that when it does manage to cite ideas of actual linguists, it's usually a solid academic generation (~15 years, say) behind current events, and is often found quite happy paddling around in work that was being superseded a solid two human generations ago.

Here's what I like about this piece:

Along this line of thinking, if aliens have something we recognize as language in the first place, then it's probably going to be a language much like any other, with arbitrary association between symbols and meanings, discrete units ("words"), the ability to talk about new things and things that aren't there, and so on.

This is the same basic argument that many exobiologists use for extraterrestrial life: Alien life has to be a least a little bit like what we're used to or we'd never recognize it for what it is.​

This. More narrowly than the possibility of recognizing 'alien life' -- I'll leave that to biologists (anyway, not being a computer scientist or a philosopher, my thoughts on that subject aren't worthy of airing) -- I find it generally unlikely that humans will be able to recognize alien intelligence or its communication, much less 'decode' it.

That's why, as someone from the squishy thinky talky sciences, I've always taken Traveller to clearly be loose, light science fantasy. There's nothing 'hard SF' about it from my (lowly, unworthy, contemptible) perspective.

And, FTR, I like it a lot.

EDIT: Come to think of it, the Slate piece doesn't name-drop either Joseph Greenberg (& co.) OR Jared Diamond. It's actually AWESOME!!!

 

[robject]

There we go, thanks Kenji. I just hold a place in the line for others.

And here's a more interesting read to salt our wound:

http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html

 

[G. Kashkanun Anderson]

The Slate article is producing GIGO because they're addressing the question to the wrong discipline. Why people speak a particular language is not a question of general linguistics, or at least it's much less so than it is one of sociology, anthropology, history or, yes, sociolinguistics. Etruscan was a language, true, but the reason nobody speaks it anymore is not something explainable via standard Chomskyan gobbledygook.

Similarly, there may be thousands of human languages in existence today*, but very few of them possess any prestige. And those languages tend to be dominated by just as few prestige dialects. Nobody, as far as I know, has ever said it was any different on Vulcan, Q'onoS, or even our Dear Old Vland. Certainly, if anything, a case could be made for both Klingons and the Vilani being forcefully monoglot societies, at least by the time we Earthers encounter them.

*And, as any sociolinguist would tell you, fewer and fewer of them every day. Bluntly, the number of languages spoken on this planet is collapsing; I believe I just read that India has seen over 200 languages die off in just the last fifty years.

 

[Kilgs]

There we go, thanks Kenji. I just hold a place in the line for others.

And here's a more interesting read to salt our wound:

http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html

That's great! Thank you!

 

[Enoki]

*And, as any sociolinguist would tell you, fewer and fewer of them every day. Bluntly, the number of languages spoken on this planet is collapsing; I believe I just read that India has seen over 200 languages die off in just the last fifty years.

India is a good example. Many languages there are at odds with others. That is, it is insulting for one or both parties to use the other's language. English, a "neutral" language has become dominant in business and the public sector simply to avoid problems with insulting someone over your choice of language.

Over time, English just becomes easier to use all the time than a local dialect so the local language dies off.

Or written Chinese. That is likely at some point to see radical changes. A pictographic written language where every word has a unique graphic just isn't conducive to the modern world where someone might need to know 10,000 + words just to function.

 

[aramis]

Or written Chinese. That is likely at some point to see radical changes. A pictographic written language where every word has a unique graphic just isn't conducive to the modern world where someone might need to know 10,000 + words just to function.

That's not exactly an honest description of Chinese.
Mind you, most of my Chinese comes via study of Japanese, but...

Many of the [o]pictographic[/o] ideographic symbols are reused in multiple characters, and thus families of symbols can be learned easily.

Radicals are graphic elements that may be compressed into a character square in multiples. Chinese has 214 normally used ones.

The radicals also are characters unto themselves when full size.


The man character 人
The woman character 女
Both are used as radicals.
one word, nuán 奻 is translatable as trouble, foolishness or bickering...

Li 力 is power...
Dao 刀 is knife...
both are radicals...
but note that power is visually similar to knife...
... and a mnemonic to remember is that power holds a knife.

some examples of combined radicals
屲 Mountainside is 山 mountain and 丿(which I can't find a meaning for)...
㞤 combines mountain 山 above man 人... and can mean either a tall mountain or to aid or help.

Japanese uses 1800 (2300 in older texts) chinese characters, mostly with meanings close to the chinese, but uses many of them in proper names solely for their phonemic values.

Chinese names are often written phonetically in the regional dialect's readings of the characters as a phonetic value... but sometimes, they're written as compound words with meanings. So the name might be spoken in Mandarin by a mandarin speaker, and misspoken by a cantonese speaker, but have the same meaning to either.

And, to be honest, if I'd grown up with Japanese, it's honestly no harder a system than English... English has a lot of funky rules.

How do we spell the long o sound?
oe in hoe
ow in show
o in no
eau in beau (Beau)

And long u?
ue in blue
oo in shoot
u in flu

ough has several pronunciations: cough (äf), rough (ŭf), Houghton (ō).

There is a lot to be said for linguistic inertia in not changing the writing systems, especially when the system continues to work well enough.

 

[Enoki]

That still makes it cumbersome and complex. But, thank you for the clarification my not speaking Chinese or Japanese.

One language I did come up with for one semi-human race with Traveller was written it was done in octal in groups of 8 numbers. It amounted to a sort of automatic code that secured communications among those who used it.

 

[sayatmenace]

And here's a more interesting read to salt our wound:

http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html

Wasn't there a cartoon making the rounds a few years ago, of a couple ants in white lab coats on a vast expanse of kitchen floor, with one of the ants saying, "That's it, we've sampled 1400 tiles so far and there's not a slightest trace of pheromone tagging. We're alone in the universe."?

Wow, this thread is bouncing around all kinds of thinly-connected topics, just like the link to Slate. Not that I object when we do it, of course

 

[sayatmenace]

And, to be honest, if I'd grown up with Japanese, it's honestly no harder a system than English... English has a lot of funky rules.

How do we spell the long o sound?
oe in hoe
ow in show
o in no
eau in beau (Beau)

Making English orthography 'logographic' in a similar way, with similar advantages, to writing Chinese languages in hanzi or Japanese with kanji: to disambiguate homophones, which all three languages have plenty of.

Hoe vs (w)ho(re) vs ho(-ho-ho!)
No vs know
Beau vs bow
Discreet vs discrete
Flower vs flour
Mary vs merry vs marry
(in my dialect of English, anyway)

These are features, not bugs!

 

[G. Kashkanun Anderson]

... ough has several pronunciations: cough (äf), rough (ŭf), Houghton (ō).

Not to mention lough (äk), nought (ät), slough (o͞o) and... uhh... Slough (ou).

Like you said, many pronunciations.

 

[robject]

I like Valerie Yule's "Interspel" pages, by the way, but I also like the looks of Middle English, so I'm not necessarily on the practical side of things.

I've thought about ideographs, for about a combined total of one hour, maybe two, over the last twenty years. Maybe three. Ah well a few more than that, but I'm an amateur.

Not to get too far into the weeds.... oh h3|| why not.

So it seems to me that the Japanese spend lots of time learning their mandatory 800+ characters. Granted it may not be as bad as it seems, but if they're still learning characters by high school, I feel like they've lost time otherwise spent learning the rest of their curriculum. I don't know for sure, though. But consider a lovely constructed alphabet like Korean Hangul. Kids probably have learned it by Kindergarten or 1st grade. Then they've got that out of the way. I have trouble inventorying their alphabet from Wikipedia, but it looks to me like they've got around 50 individual sounds, uniquely described. Just lovely.

Even farther into the weeds. Japanese are continually fiddling ever-so-slightly with their ideographs and the core lists. In theory they could migrate and bifurcate and evolve radicals into a phonetic scheme, barely like some bizarre block furigana on steroids perhaps.

If English were more like "Hangul"... ha. What would that look like?

 

[aramis]

Not to mention lough (äk), nought (ät), slough (o͞o) and... uhh... Slough (ou).

Like you said, many pronunciations.

Slough has three pronunciations - apparently regional: slō and slew for the geographical feature. For the verb, slŭf.

Unifon failed in congress by 1 vote in the 80's. crying shame, really.

I've thought about ideographs, for about a combined total of one hour, maybe two, over the last twenty years. Maybe three. Ah well a few more than that, but I'm an amateur.

Not to get too far into the weeds.... oh h3|| why not.

So it seems to me that the Japanese spend lots of time learning their mandatory 800+ characters. Granted it may not be as bad as it seems, but if they're still learning characters by high school, I feel like they've lost time otherwise spent learning the rest of their curriculum. I don't know for sure, though.

We're still teaching grammar in high school, not just vocabulary. 10th grade english still has spelling tests. We teach 400 sight words by grade 4. We teach 2000 non-conformal spellings by grade 10, most of the sight words falling into these.

The Japanese have learned all their grammar by 8th grade, and it's just being formally required to be able to clearly write all 1800 common kanji by 8th grade, as well as the 144 kana (72 hirigana 72 katakana) by 2nd grade or so. According to the academic papers, the average japanese student can read all 2300 regular use kanji by grade 6, can write clearly 1200 of them, uses both katakana and hirigana both for clarity and for word endings in kanji, and has the grammar rules down pat.

Japanese is interesting in that the grammar is so regularized it's almost synthetic in feel. There's little room for poetic variation. Hence their emphasis on structural poetry. But it also makes for easy learning of the grammar.

English has loads of flexibility. By use of articles, I can write "I am going to Bosco's" several different ways.
"I am going to Bosco's" "Boscos is where I am going" "Boscos I am going to." "I to Boscos am going" "I go to bosco's." "To boscos I go" "Boscos is where I go to."
All of these are legit, valid, english grammar. Two of them have direct Japanese correlations. Three of them are archaic and little used.

As for English ideographic writing:
Pick the 150-250 most common english non-compound words. Make pictographs of them. Reduce those to no more than 5 strokes each.
Add the 42 typical sounds; any that match a word use it, so about 35... Use a pictograph for each of those.
There's your list of radicals.
Hint: Dolch list

 

[Timerover51]

The following communication problem appears in the report of the 77th Infantry Division Quartermaster, American Expeditionary Force, at the end of World War One.

In the British Array the Ordnance and Quartermaster work are combined in one department. There ware certain other radical differences which made the task of learning the English method somewhat difficult for our officers and men. Noncommissioned officers from the English Army were detailed to assist the quartermaster enlisted personnel and there were sometimes amusing complications arising from differences in terminology. A truck was a "lorry" and a requisition was an "indent".

One quartermaster sergeant was put to his wits ends one day when a British non-com presented a small slip of paper, which he said was an 'indent' for an 'ablution bowl'. The quartermaster sergeant in his efforts to produce the requisitioned article suggested everything from a condiment to a G.I. can and finally was enlightened and vastly relieved when in the course of their journey in search of the desired item the British non-com pointed out to him four or five men who were washing in a basin.

I also remember the first time when we were in England, my wife heard someone refer to their car's "bonnet". She wanted to know if the English put hats on their cars, so I explained to her about the "hood" being the "bonnet" and the trunk being the "boot". There is definitely an American-speak and a British-speak.

 

[wbyrd]

I can see one language being used for interacting with other races. while the species has hundreds of various languages.

While there are thousands of languages on earth. English is the standard language for most International Pilots, Crews, and Air traffic controllers. So a race, or species adopting a single language for various purposes might not be beyond the realm of possibility.

 

[G. Kashkanun Anderson]

Slough has three pronunciations - apparently regional: slō and slew for the geographical feature. For the verb, slŭf.

Yeah, but you covered the latter with 'rough', so I chose to ignore that for the point. Didn't know about the regional pronunciation ('slo'), though.

 

[Ulsyus]

The Japanese have learned all their grammar by 8th grade, and it's just being formally required to be able to clearly write all 1800 common kanji by 8th grade, as well as the 144 kana (72 hirigana 72 katakana) by 2nd grade or so. According to the academic papers, the average japanese student can read all 2300 regular use kanji by grade 6, can write clearly 1200 of them, uses both katakana and hirigana both for clarity and for word endings in kanji, and has the grammar rules down pat.

Japanese is interesting in that the grammar is so regularized it's almost synthetic in feel. There's little room for poetic variation. Hence their emphasis on structural poetry. But it also makes for easy learning of the grammar.

Don't forget that they're learning it from the time they start to read, and have been exposed to it early on, just like kids in any country.

Western government language schools often put Japanese in the highest category of difficult-to-learn languages for English speakers. So their writing may be easy to learn for someone who speaks the language, but picking up the latter could be tough.

I also remember the first time when we were in England, my wife heard someone refer to their car's "bonnet". She wanted to know if the English put hats on their cars, so I explained to her about the "hood" being the "bonnet" and the trunk being the "boot". There is definitely an American-speak and a British-speak.

I remember being in the US, asking for a biscuit, and being given a scone. You should have seen the blank stares when I mentioned a chook! "Divided by a common language" is the phrase for this I do believe.

 

[robject]

Western government language schools often put Japanese in the highest category of difficult-to-learn languages for English speakers. So their writing may be easy to learn for someone who speaks the language, but picking up the latter could be tough.

Traveller alien writing systems probably would pose similar problems, and potentially worse ones if their brain structure is different. Consider if you could SEE the writing system of the K'kree but never be able to understand it.

"Okay, here are the fundamentals of K'kree ideographs. Just lines on a page, right?"

"Sure, but why are they counting upwards here and downwards here?"

"No no, those aren't really numbers, they're symbolic."

"Of what?"

"Not what, exactly. More like states of being."

"So they're categories?"

"Sure. Well, sort of. Actually, no. Look at this line, for example:"

|3|| /||3 \||/3: |3:|// \\//3//\\

"Yeah, I can't figure that one out. Is he saying the warship attacked on the nightside of G!krrzik Three?"

"No. Well it depends on what you're classifying."

"Well |3 is a classifier, so it's modifying the noun || in this case, and the noun :|// in the other case, right?"

"Nooooooo... they don't have nouns."

"What do you mean? Of course they have nouns. All languages use nouns. You have to have subjects of your sentences. You have to talk about THINGS. Otherwise, why bother talking at all? How can there be any PRACTICAL COMMUNICATION unless you're talking about something doing something for or by or at or with something else?"

"Well...."



I doubt whether a language exists which doesn't have something that fills the place of nouns. But if you're a referee and none of your players are linguists, you can tell them that a particular alien language lacks nouns, then watch them flail about, because it seems to me that that DOES create a situation where a language is incomprehensible to most of us.