Review: "Reading Fictional Languages"

I'm going meta! I'm reviewing people who are reviewing people who use conlangs in fiction!

Reading Fictional Languages (that's an Amazon Affiliate link, but you can also get it directly from Edinburgh University Press) is a collection of articles that follows up on the presentations given at the eponymous Reading Fictional Languages conference, which brings together both creators and scholars of constructed languages used in fictional works. I was provided with a free review copy as a PDF, but not until after I had bought my own hardcover anyway.

The first thing to note is that the title is kind of poorly chosen. It is telling that articles by conlangers refer to their subject as "constructed languages" or "conlangs", while articles by literary scholars refer to their subject as "fictional languages". Based on personal communication with some of the contributors, it seems that the organizers of the conference on which this volume was based (which I did submit an abstract for myself, but was not accepted) were unaware of the modern conlanging community and taken somewhat by surprise when actual language creators showed up to talk about their work! And they had thus developed their own analytical terminology ahead of time in isolation from conlanging practitioners.

Chapter 1, the introduction, contrasts "real" languages with languages which are "imagined for an equally fictional community of users, where the environment is being imagined at the same time as the language is being constructed". However, that misses out on a very important distinction in the types of non-natural languages that are actually used in fictional works: those that do not exist as usable languages in the real world, and those that do. I.e., those which actually are fictional, and those which are real, despite being artificially constructed.

Skipping to page 77, in Chapter 6: "Design intentions and actual perception of fictional languages: Quenya, Sindarin, and Na’vi", by Bettina Beinhoff, specifies that "fictional languages" are a subset of "constructed languages", being languages constructed for use in fictional works. That's sensible, but when talking about Quenya, Sindarin, and Na'vi in particular--all languages which have been heavily developed and actively used by communities outside of their fictional contexts--it really highlights the inadequacy of this academic terminology.

We also get an explanation of the "Reading" part of the title--in short, it's about the reader's interaction with a text, and how the use of invented languages influences the creative process and the reading experience. Apart from defining terminology, however, Chapter 1 does provide a decent overview of the history of invented languages in fiction and of the proceeding contents of the book. 

Chapter 2, by David Peterson and Jessie Sams (who has since become Jessie Peterson) explores the nature of working with television and film makers as a language creator. I couldn't possibly do this justice in summary; David and Jessie probably have more experience with film and TV language construction than everyone else in the industry combined, and they certainly know what they're talking about! One complication of working in Hollywood, however, is not unique to working in Hollywood:

A script writer often won’t have heard of language creation and will have no sympathy for someone whose role they don’t understand commenting that the line of dialogue they want to be cut mid-word won’t work in translation because the verb in the conlang comes at the end of the sentence and won’t have been uttered yet if cut off after three words

That's basically the lament of every translator ever! Especially the ones that have to translate dialog for foreign-language editions of novels, movies, and TV shows.

Just from having been active in the conlanging community for a good long time, there was a lot in this chapter that I already knew, even though I could not have articulated it as well as David and Jessie do. But the biggest insight I gained came in an explanation of how the form of a constructed language is constrained by the needs of a film production--and not just in the sense that actors need to be able to use it. Additionally, the language creator needs to be able to translate rapidly, which means they need to construct a language that is easy for them to use without too much practice. I have long thought that Davidsonian languages all seem to have a common sort of character about them, which is partially attributable to David's construction process--but now I can see there's a darn good reason for it, and I can't actually blame him! That's just more reason to work towards getting a greater diversity of language creators into the film industry, so that we can start to see a greater diversity of languages reflecting differences in what is easy for individual creators to use in service of the needs of a film production.

I found Chapter 3 "On the inner workings of language creation: using conlangs to drive reader engagement in fictional worlds", by BenJamin Johnson, Anthony Gutierrez, and Nicolás Matías Campi, to be the most immediately useful to me, and probably to most of the people who read my blog (or at least, the intended audience for the Linguistically Interesting Media Index, which is authors who want to figure out how to do this better!) It's pretty comprehensive, covering why you might want to do this, how to handle collaboration between an author and a conlanger if you don't happen to fill both rolls yourself, and some very basic stuff about the mechanics of actually using a conlang in fiction. This is where BenJamin introduces his 5-level categorization of the types of textual representation for conlangs, which I immediately latched onto and began expanding on after seeing the conference presentation that preceded this chapter, as a complement to my own categorization of comprehension-support strategies.

Chapter 4 is a case study in creating dialectal variation in a constructed language. Useful for a language creator, but you're left on your own as far as making use of that variation in your fiction writing. Personally, I think it might be hard to justify, given the difficulty of representing natural language dialects in a non-annoying way in most modern writing. Of course, if you get one of those coveted film jobs, it becomes more practical; see, for example, Paul Frommers call back to create a new dialect of Na'vi for The Way of Water.

Chapter 5, by Victor Fernandes Andrade and Sebastião Alves Teixeira Lopes, is an exploration of the visual influence of Asian scripts on alien typography in science fiction media. I'm not completely convinced, but the argument is worth reading. They've got interesting data to look over, at least.

I already briefly mentioned Chapter 6; essentially, it determines that the languages studied were perceieved as intended on some subjective axes, such as "pleasantness", by a surveyed population, but failed in aethetic design aims on other axes, and that cultural context is important to aesthetic evaluations. Chapter 7 "The phonaesthetics of constructed languages: results from an online rating experiment" by Christine Mooshammer, Dominique Bobeck, Henrik Hornecker, Kierán Meinhardt, Olga Olina, Marie Christin Walch, and Qiang Xia is essentially the same thing, just better, as it covers a broader selection of conlangs, and gathers responses from both English and German speakers, rather than just English speakers from the UK, and controls for gender, age, and linguistic background. They additionally tested listeners' abilities to discriminate between conlangs, as well as their subjective evaluations. This is potentially useful information for conlangers who are trying to target a particular aesthetic effect on a particular audience--however, it also suggests that doing specific research on this isn't really necessary for a creator, as the languages studied were pretty good at achieving their creators' stated goals already!

Chapter 8 "Tolkien’s use of invented languages in The Lord of the Rings" by James K. Tauber is basically exactly what I do on this blog--an analysis of how secondary languages are used in a fictional work to augment the narrative! I've avoided doing this sort of analysis on The Lord of the Rings myself because it is a Very Large Work, so I'll definitely be coming back to this chapter to see what I can integrate into my own analytical system later.

Chapter 9 "Changing tastes: reading the cannibalese of Charles Dickens’ Holiday Romance and nineteenthcentury popular culture" by Katie Wales analyses the representation of a truly fictional language--one which does not exist as a developed and usable language in the real world--in terms of the sociological environment in which it was published, and how the tastes of modern audiences and thus the appropriate means of cultural representation have changed over time. It is a reminder that appreciating old literature often requires being intentional about not ascribing modern points of view and modern judgments on people of the past, and trying to understand the literature as it would've been read by it's original intended audience.

Chapter 10 "Dialectal extrapolation as a literary experiment in Aldiss’ ‘A spot of Konfrontation’" by Israel A. C. Noletto reads like a pretty standard sample of Dr. Noletto's work; he's the only academic author represented in this volume with whom I have a prior acquaintance, such that I can compare his other work! Noletto argues that " the presence of an unfamiliar fictional language interlaced with English as the narrative medium does not necessarily constitute a barrier to understanding as might otherwise be expected", and that the use of the extrapolated dialect in fact serves as an important means of conveying the theme of the story through narrative style. There's a little bit of my sort of detailed analysis of the text to show it is constructed to support comprehension.

Chapter 11 "Women, fire, and dystopian things" by Jessica Norledge examines the successes, failures, and impact of Suzette Haden Elgin's Láadan language as a language for a dystopia--and particularly as a language meant to expand the user's capacity for thought, in contrast to other dystopian languages, like 1984's Newspeak, which are intended to restrict thought in a Whorfian fashion. The title is of course a reference to George Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.

Chapter 12 "Building the conomasticon: names and naming in fictional worlds" by Rebecca Gregoryis a broad survey of how names are constructed and reflect language and culture--or fail to do so--in a variety of fictional works. She ends with "with a bid for names to be seen as just as fundamental a part of language creation and conceptualisation as any other of language’s building blocks", which I can only read as a plea to academics doing literary analysis, not language creators or authors, given the broad recognition that already exists in the conlanging community of "naming languages" as a thing that is useful in worldbuilding for fiction across many types of media.

Chapter 13 "The language of Lapine in Watership Down" by Kimberley Pager-McClymont analyses the idioms, conceptual patterns, and attested formal structure of the Lapine language, how it is connected to the embodied experience of rabbits, and thus contributes to generating empathy in the reader for non-human protagonists. An excellent case study to reference for conlangers who want inspiration on the developing the connection between language and culture, and especially for those working on non-human languages.

The final chapter, 14, "Unspeakable languages" by Peter Stockwell, presents another case where my intuitions clash with the chosen terminology. Stockwell examines languages which are difficult or impossible to represent directly in the narrative--i.e., a subset of truly fictional languages which necessarily remain fictional for practical reasons related to their asserted nature, not merely because the author didn't bother to flesh them out. Stockwell introduces the term "nonlang" for what I would simply call a fictional language. Terminological disputes aside, though, this chapter presents an intriguing overview of how science fiction works have dealt with the concept of the "linguistically ineffable"--languages which we can never hope to decipher or understand. The only quibble I have with the actual content is that Stockwell claims that "it is evident that the pragmatics of a question and an exclamation are still carried even in Speedtalk by intonation (marked here by ‘?’ and ‘!’)."--but that is an unwarranted conclusion based on the evidence presented, as intonation is definitely not evident on the page, and we should not assume that the use of '?' and '!' in the text actually correspond to intonation contours in the fictional spoken form--or, if they do, that the intonation contours so indicated actually correspond to questions and exclamations, given that the Speedtalk text is untranslated and explicitly not understood by the character transcribing it.

Overall: I have some complaints, and not all chapters are of equal quality or usefulness from my point of view--but there is plenty of good stuff in here that makes it worth a read, and I for one am strongly in favor of further, perhaps more intentional, collaborations between academics and conlangers in analyzing the use of constructed languages in fiction.

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How Would We Know If We're Talking to Aliens?

A follow-up to my review of Xenolinguistics.

Suppose we encounter aliens and begin linguistic fieldwork in earnest. Or, suppose that we have reason to believe we may have finally successfully decoded a language of cetaceans or cephalopods (who for all practical purposes in this context may as well be aliens, despite living with us on Earth). How would we be able to tell that we actually got it right--that we understand what they mean, and that they understand what we mean? In particular, how would we overcome the Clever Hans Effect?

Language is ultimately a noisy and lossy channel; a great deal of human communication involves the receiver inferring what the sender probably meant, not directly extracting information that is unambiguously encoded in the linguistic signal itself. And even among humans, this can frequently go wrong, resulting is misinterpretations. But at least living humans can object when they are misinterpreted, and try to correct the miscommunication. That is much, much harder for nonhumans with whom we do not already share a language--and for dead or otherwise unavailable humans who have left behind undeciphered documents.

In these situations, it is all too easy to impute meaning from our own minds onto signals that arise from a totally different intent, or have no meaning at all. And if we're only reading out the information that we unintentionally inserted ourselves, we're not really communicating, are we?

So, there need to be ways to validate our decipherments--ways to obtain information from a non-human entity that we know we could not have provided ourselves. One option, which has been used with human texts, is to hold out validation data; if you can decipher the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone without reference to anything but the Rosetta Stone, and then the system you derived turns out to produce sensible-looking results for other collections of hieroglyphics, then you've probably got it right. If you claim to have deciphered the entire Voynich Manuscript, big deal, it's only the 10th claim this year; but if you claim to have deciphered a few pages in isolation, and other people can use your system to make sense of the rest of it, that would be a much stronger claim.

Theoretically, this could be done with aliens as well. We have, as a species, collected quite a lot of recordings of whale song that could serve as validation data, for example. But it does require special circumstances to be able to collect that data. For example, if we find some technologically-primitive tribe in an alien rainforest (or even an Earthly rainforest for that matter), who do not have written records to reference, would we be terribly surprised if they objected to us setting up equipment to record everything they say just so we can analyze it later? It would be much better to have access to interactive methods, even though interaction itself increases the risk of Clever Hans events.

Another option is to attempt to make predictions about the real world based on alien-sourced data--but this also requires special circumstances, insofar as you must find a subject area which humans do not already know about, but can verify. For example, we haven't explored much of the ocean, but we have the ability to dive to specific places in the ocean if it's worth it. So, if someone claims that a whale or a squid gave them the location of a shipwreck, and then we go and find that shipwreck, that's good evidence that they can really communicate. Another option would be checking on solutions to mathematical problems--but, of course, that only works if the aliens have mathematics, and are more advanced than us in at least one area. "We don't know how to answer that." is sadly both a perfectly reasonable true response, and extremely easy to fake. Additionally, even when they exist, those kinds of natural situations can get expensive to investigate. 

The obvious alternative is to manufacture such situations. Place the alien in a test environment hidden from the human communicator. Allow the human communicator access to the alien, such that the alien is their only source of information about the test environment. See if they can describe it accurately afterwards. If a human can extract information that is verifiably available through no means other than communication with an alien, then we can be confident in the decipherment scheme used for such communication.

Of course, this does require a certain degree of cooperation from the alien! Ultimately, establishing verifiably accurate communication with an alien species depends largely on the motivation that they have for communicating with us, and their ability to understand our desires prior to establishing linguistic communication. Also note that verifying that we have deciphered a language is entirely different from verifying that an alien species has language. There are observational experiments that can rule out any option other than individuals communicating arbitrary information with each other in an open-ended system, such as observing dolphins executing coordinated swim routines together that they have never done before, and so could not have learned from observation. One instance of that type could be attributed to a limited-usage para-linguistic system, but many observations of individuals acting on information they could only have obtained by communication with another individual allows eventually building up a strong case for the existence of language in an alien species, even if we have no idea how it works.

One significant point brought up in the Xenolinguistics book is that we do not currently have the fieldwork techniques that would be necessary for reliably deciphering and documenting alien languages. Creating protocols for identifying the existence of languages to high degree of certainty is one of those gaps--when we do fieldwork with humans, we can assume with a high degree of certainty that they do use language, and we merely need to figure out their particular language. But if you encountered a bunch of electroceptive alien fish, would it even cross your mind that they might have language and might be worth talking to? But another significant gap is precisely in creating those protocols to validate that our understanding is correct. When working with other humans, there is a huge amount of shared context and instinctual knowledge that we can use to guide our investigation--you don't have to speak another person's language to understand the significance of deictic pointing, or to realize when they are upset or happy. But when it comes to non-human creatures (particularly those, unlike dogs, whom we have not already bred to share understandable signals with us; and unlike cats, whom we have spent enough time with to have some understanding of their desires and body language), all of that goes out the window, and we have to start from a place of no assumptions, and rigorous scientific validation of every conclusion if we are to avoid misunderstanding and misleading ourselves. If you're looking for more ways to incorporate linguistics into science fiction, here you go: propose the missing protocols!

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