A Primer In
SF XENOLINGUISTICS

— eep opp ork ah-ah —
Justin B Rye 1998–2002

— ash nazg durbatulûk —
TABLE OF CONTENTS

— borag thungg —
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 nonterrestrial 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!

— 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, etcetera.  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).  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 (Alderan, 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 some bizarre kind of stack or hash, but I feel no urge to attempt to describe such horrors.

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-sentient species might in principle do this primitively (as some sort of pidgin), 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:

1. 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 Nonesuch to baffle eavesdroppers.  Just be careful with black-market language tapes; don't buy any that claim to be doubleplusgood.
2. 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).
3. 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

1. 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.
2. 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!
3. 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:

1. 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…
2. 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).
3. 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.

1. 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…
2. 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-'l-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?
3. 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:

On LINCOS – an interstellar auxiliary language
Cosmic Intercourse – LINCOS v2

And here are some other TEFLETI projects:

Me Human, You Alien – How to Talk to an Extraterrestrial
Solresol, a musical language – remember Close Encounters?

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!

Linguistic SF:
BABEL 2.0