Война et Paix: French in the Great Russian Novel

 — Eh bien, mon prince. Gênes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des поместья, de la famille Buonaparte. Non, je vous préviens que si vous ne me dites pas que nous avons la guerre, si vous vous permettez encore de pallier toutes les infamies, toutes les atrocités de cet Antichrist (ma parole, j'y crois) — je ne vous connais plus, vous n'êtes plus mon ami, vous n'êtes plus мой верный раб, comme vous dites. Ну, здравствуйте, здравствуйте. Je vois que je vous fais peur, садитесь и рассказывайте.

Thus begins Leo Tolstoy's masterpiece, War and Peace, widely regarded not only as one of the greatest works of Russian literature, but of world literature. And yet, that first paragraph is mostly French! There is no translation, even in a footnote. There is no context that could make the meaning obvious to a Russophone reader. What is going on?

The mystery deepens if we examine the opening of this French translation from 1901:

« Eh bien, prince, que vous disais-je ? Gênes et Lucques sont devenues les propriétés de la famille Bonaparte. Aussi, je vous le déclare d’avance, vous cesserez d’être mon ami, mon fidèle esclave, comme vous dites, si vous continuez à nier la guerre et si vous vous obstinez à défendre plus longtemps les horreurs et les atrocités commises par cet Antéchrist…, car c’est l’Antéchrist en personne, j’en suis sûre ! Allons, bonjour, cher prince ; je vois que je vous fais peur… asseyez-vous ici, et causons... »

That's... not the same. Even accounting for the need to replace the Russian phrases peppered into the original, you'd think if someone was translating French into French, they could just use the original French, right? The initial serialization of War and Peace began in 1865, so this translation was done only 36 years later--hardly long enough for the French language to have changed so much as to need updating for modern readers.

One clue comes from the fact that the speaker in that opening paragraph is not French--it is, as we learn in the second paragraph, Anna Pavlovna Sherer, maid of honor to Empress Maria Feodorovna, speaking to Prince Vasily.

Tolstoy is not using French as a secondary language, such as I have investigated in other works. Thus, he has no need to employ any of the special techniques for incorporating secondary languages. Rather, War and Peace is a bilingual novel (or, a bilingual work of literature, anyway; Tolstoy himself did not like to call it a "novel"). It is written under the assumption that its readers will already know two languages--Russian, and Russian French.

In the time during which War and Peace was set, and in which it was written, French was the literal lingua franca of Europe, and the language of the European aristocracy--including the Russian aristocracy. But just as, e.g., Indian English is different from, despite being mostly mutually intelligible with, British English, Russian French was not exactly the same as standard French French. Hence, the translation, from one dialect to another, which would be more intelligible to French readers.

Because Tolstoy expected his audience to comprehend the language, he could accurately represent the language that his characters really would have been using. And without having to employ any of the special techniques used to support comprehension of a secondary language, Tolstoy could convey changes to the character's political affiliations and sense of personal identity through their choice of language as the Napoleonic wars progress and the occurrence of French declines over the course of the story (partially as a result of Francophone Russians learning actual Russian for the first time!)

Modern Russian readers, however, cannot generally be assumed to be French/Russian bilinguals--and yet, materially altering the text of Tolstoy's masterpiece by translating the French into Russian in-line would be culturally unacceptable! The French, thus, has to be treated as a secondary language, but with very limited opportunities for improving integration. In practice, modern Russian editions add extra footnotes with Russian translations of the original French. And at least one audiobook edition does a very audiobook-specific thing: playing the original French dialog at lower background volume, while the Russian is spoken over it!

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British Sign Language in _Doctor Who_

Under the Lake and Before the Flood, episodes 3 and 4 of Doctor Who, series 9 (Amazon affiliate link), are notable for featuring a Deaf character (Cass), played by a Deaf British actor (Sophie Stone). Cass and a few other characters speak BSL (British Sign Language--which, yes, is a totally different language from American Sign Language) throughout both episodes, and the British Deaf Association praised the episodes for helping break down barriers for Deaf actors.

In particular, the Chair of the BDA said:

What was most heartening was that the Deafness of Sophie’s character, Cass, is incidental to the plot.

But that turns out to be not entirely true! In fact, Cass's Deafness is critical to the plot!

But before we get to that: how is the language itself presented, and made accessible to the typical hearing viewer?

In the opening scene, we have Lunn, later identified as Cass's interpreter, SimComming "Can I go in?" (to the mysterious craft they are investigating], to which the response is some untranslated signing from Cass. Lunn then continues SimComming with "If it's not safe, how come you can go in?", which makes it fairly obvious what Cass was signing, even though (like the previous examples of ASL I analyzed) there are no subtitles provided.

For most of the remainder of the story, when Cass speaks, we see her sign and then get the immediate (diagetic) translation from Lunn. In a few cases, where other characters may not have seen Cass, we get clarification, like this:

Cass says he might be right. It might have been here since the 1980s, when the valley flooded. [Italics added]

Additionally, after first meeting the Doctor (i.e., not already having an established relationship with him as a translator for Cass), Lunn tries to introduce his translation with "Cass is saying-" only to get cut off:

Doctor: Thank you, but I actually don't need your help. I can speak sign. [signs] Go ahead.
[Cass signs rapidly]
Doctor: No, no, actually, I can't. It's been deleted for semaphore. Someone get me a selection of flags.
Lunn [translating]: One of the ghosts is our previous commanding officer. The other, um moley guy, we don't know what he is.

And apart from that, as long as Lunn and Cass are both present, and other characters can see that Cass is speaking, Lunn simply translated directly, without comment. The fact that Cass is almost always speaking, and being spoken to, through a translator ends up being exploited for some minor comedic effects--a possibility which The Dragon Prince completely ignored! For example:

Doctor: It's a Faraday cage. Completely impenetrable to radio waves, and apparently, whatever those things are out there. So, who's in charge now? I need to know who to ignore.
Lunn [translating]: That would be me.
Lunn: Uh, her. [pointing]

The interpreter is exploited in the opposite direction in an amusing scene at the end:

Bennet: Lunn. Will you translate something to Cass for me?
Lunn: Of course.
Bennet: Tell her that you're in love with her and that you always have been.
Lunn: What?
Bennet: Tell her there is no point wasting time because things happen and then it's too late. Tell her I wish someone had given me that advice.
[Cass asks Lunn what's happening. Lunn passes on the message. Cass looks quizzically at Bennett.]
Lunn: Oh, God, no. I was just passing on what he said. Please, don't--
[Cass grabs Lunn and kisses him.]

We also get one solid example of exploiting the language barrier to delay a translation for dramatic effect:

[Cass grabs Lunn by the lapels and signs rapidly]
Lunn: No, she's right. Neither of you can get it back.
[Cass signs]
Clara: What? What is it? What did she say?
Lunn: It doesn't matter.
Clara: Please.
Lunn: She said to ask you whether travelling with the Doctor changed you, or were you always happy to put other people's lives at risk.
Clara: He taught me to do what has to be done. You should get going.

This is shortly followed up by a lampshaded instance of Making it Obvious:

Clara: Look, he'll be fine, I promise.
[Cass signs angrily.]
Clara: Okay. Didn't need anyone to translate that.

And at one point we get a clear instance of diagetic description, rather than a straight translation, when Lunn summarizes a conversation he had been having with Cass (not translated in real time as they were the only conversants, so interpretation was not necessary) for another character:

Lunn, SimComming: It's not safe out here!
Clara: What's the matter?
Lunn: She won't let me look inside the spaceship. She says it's not safe. I'm saying it's not safe out here.

Although this is a little awkward, as the only reason for Lunn to suddenly start vocalizing seems to be to bring Clara (and the audience) into the loop, and Clara wouldn't have interjected in the conversation otherwise.

Throughout the episodes, we also get a few brief shots of Cass and Lunn conversing with each other in BSL that are never translated. Some of these could be Easter Eggs, but the brevity of the shots and the fact that the signing is often half off-screen indicate that the filmmakers intended to Make it Irrelevant; the background signing exists only to show sign language to the audience, to remind them that it is there--not to communicate any additional semantic content. Similarly, nearly every scene in which some other character is talking in Cass's presence features a shot or two of Lunn moving his hands about--usually short, often only partially visible. This is enough to remind the audience that, yes, Cass is Deaf, and requires interpretation of spoken English, and it's a subtle indicator which works much better than the closest equivalent in prose; but, it's also something of a missed opportunity. Given that Lunn's actor had to do all of that signing anyway, simply reframing the shots so that all of Cass's interpretation was available to the audience as well would've gone a long way towards improving Deaf accessibility, and breaking down barriers not merely for actors, but for Deaf people on both sides of the screen.

In one instance (at least, that I was able to notice) we see one other character demonstrating knowledge of BSL to communicate with Cass without interpretation:

Bennet, SimComming: Cass, what do we do?
Cass [via Lunn]: We abandon the base. Topside can send down a whole team of marines or ghost-busters or whatever.

And in this case, the SimCom for a short simple sentence is actually reasonably justified, as Bennet wanted to keep everyone else also looped in to the conversation.

But, more significantly, we also have instances of characters needing to communicate with Cass when Lunn is not present, who do not use BSL, such as :

[O'Donnell moves in close to Cass's face]
O'Donnell: Cass, he's alive!

O'Donnell gets close and enunciates so that Cass can read her lips! And that is all it takes to establish for the audience a) that Cass can read lips, and b) that it takes attention and effort. This is never stated outright, but it is critical information to understand the plan that the Doctor comes up with: to capture the ghosts and in a small area and get them on screen with a good enough view that Cass can concentrate on reading their lips to figure out what they are saying. That's something that Cass is uniquely good at (not superhuman like Amaya from The Dragon Prince, but good), because, being Deaf, she has had to be. And the fact that the process is still not perfect is highlighted by the haltingness and corrections shown in Lunn's interpretations of Cass's reports:

Lunn: She says they're saying the same thing, the same phrase, over and over. They're saying the dark. The score. No, the sword. The for sale? No, the forsaken. The temple.

Lunn: Cass thinks the Doctor's saying something different to the others. He's saying Moran, Pritchard, Apprentice. No, Prentis [closeup of Cass fingerspelling]. O'Donnell, Clara, Doctor, Bennett, Cass.

So, you see, Cass being Deaf is not, in fact, purely incidental, but is in fact absolutely critical to the plot--that feature of that character allows the withholding of information, which is otherwise right there on the screen if you knew to look for it, from the audience and the characters until the writer wanted you to know it, by only making it accessible to the character who ought, by virtue of her Deafness, to have developed the skill to access it.

For further commentary, the actors playing Lunn and Cass have a behind the scenes interview in which they talk about using BSL in the episodes.

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The Hidden Language of K. A. Parkinson's _Chosen Chronicles_

A Chosen Life is the first installment in the four-book Chosen Chronicles (follow affiliate links to purchase these titles), a YA hidden-world / urban fantasy series by author K. A. Parkinson. I met K. A. at the Salt Lake ComicCon (now rebranded as FanX) while she was promoting the release of the second edition, and as soon as I heard that her book featured a conlang, I had to have it!

Now, several years later, I find myself doing actual research on precisely that sort of book--so of course I have to include it in this blog series! And in a first for this series, K. A. herself was willing to answer some questions about the writing process.

Performatives aside, speech usually has little immediate and inherent impact on the state of the world, which limits the range of narrative devices that can be used to make an utterance's meaning Obvious. In the world of The Chosen Chronicles, however, the Hidden language is a magical language, whose utterances can produce immediate and objectively observable physical effects--thus, descriptions of the action in a scene are semantically connected with the spoken dialog, and either one can complement the other--or replace it, once the reader has been taught about the causal connection. And this fact is not overlooked!

The first bit of non-English we see in the book is this:

"LaUnahi." Her gut clenched when he called her that pet name, my little bird.

Which is a fairly straightforward example of non-diagetic narrative translation via apposition--prose subtitling. This word is never explicitly defined again, but it is used frequently enough that the meaning should remain fairly present in a reader's mind--if they care. And if they don't, it is sufficient to recognize the word as a nickname. Shortly thereafter, we get another case of apposition, and explicit definition:

Warmth started to flow through her fingertips as her Kuna, her gift, began to come to life. One of the side effects of being Kunamin, or one who has the gift of wielding fire, [...]

The placing of these two new word exposure in such close proximity turns out to be rather important, as the definition of a Kunamin as, essentially, a fire mage, gives the reader an immediate hint that "Kuna" does not mean "gift" in general, but rather is a specific type of gift. Additionally, it's nice to see right away evidence of morphological complexity (via the suffix <-min>), although it's a little disappointing that that is not really capitalized on--whatever morphological process is going on there, we don't see it duplicated elsewhere, so the reader can't really infer a meaning for it.

The next several exposures to Hidden phrases all follow a very formulaic pattern: Hidden phrase to start a sentence, immediately followed by a description of a physical effect. That makes it very easy for the reader to notice what is going and start making the relevant cause-and-effect connections, which are al of the meaning that matters. Occasionally, Hidden words are diagetically defined, and all of these phrases have literal meanings which are given in a glossary at the end of the book, for the most part those meanings are Irrelevant, and the functional meaning is made quite Obvious:

"To' konsh'la," she whispered and the desert sounds became almost deafening.

"Mig'nata," she whispered and felt strength surge to her arms.

"To' inreedo," she whispered, and the man's frame came into perfect focus through the darkness.

"Mig'nata!" Macy pushed every ounce of life force strength she had into her legs, increasing her speed.

"Mi'no ha!"
Two fireballs erupted from her palms.

In the next exposure, K. A. makes use of parallel structure to cement the association between cause and effect when using multiple magical phrases:

Macy took aim. "To' inreedo mig'nata!" The other side of the canyon came into clear focus and strength surged down her arms.

The ability to chain phrases like that and expect the causal relationships to be properly understood depends on the fact that at least one of these phrases has already had multiple previous exposures, thus Teaching the Reader what it means. Given that the association between "mig'nata" and strength should be established by now, the descriptions of the utterance's effects could've come in either order--but that would unnecessarily confusing, and maintaining the parallelism (aside from presumably reflecting the actual ordering of narrative events) allows for a stronger re-association of "to' inreedo" with enhanced vision.

The basic pattern is repeated several more times, as shown in these examples:

"Mi'no ha!" Huge balls of fire shot from her hands.

"Mi'no ha!" The words burst from his mouth as he threw the ball of heat.

"Radi'non!" He shouted, and a binding flash of light filled the air in front of him.

"Say the word tin'ruhl."
"Tin'ruhl!" As the word burst from his lips, a wall of dirt shot up the ground[.]

But further into the book, we start to see some additional variations on the pattern--as if K. A. finally trusts the reader to be comfortable with the idea of the Hidden language, and thus no longer in need of a comforting prose structure to contain it all the time. One word is diagetically taught to a character as its first exposure, thus also explicitly teaching it to the reader in a way that does not break the narrative flow:

"[...] Focus, ask your life force to heal her. [...] The word is lon'adras. [...]"

"Lon'adras." He whispered and the feeling of fire in his veins returned and surged toward his fingertips [...] he cringed as the broken bones shifted back into their proper place.

"Heal your hand. [...] Do you remember the word?"
"Lon'adras?"
"Yes! What do you feel?"

"Lon'adras," he whispered, and he felt the skin knitting itself back together beneath the bandage.

Note that in that second example, the details of the intended effect (rather than the immediate sensory experience) are separated from the magical phrase (by a bunch of additional narration here elided)--a trick which is licensed by the recent explicit explanation that this is the word for healing. By the final example, however, we've returned to the familiar pattern.

"Mig'nata" also gets some special treatment; it's literal meaning and description of its generic effect is give diagetically directly in the text: 

"[...] When the need arises, say the word 'mig'nata'. It means 'the body', and it will tell your life force to increase your strength. [...]"

And then we get this pedagogical exchange:

"Mig'what?" He called to Bastian.
"Mig'nata."
"Mig'nata!" Strength surged through Tolen's body and he concentrated on pushing it to his legs.

Which all leads up to my absolute favorite line in the whole book:

"Mig'nata!" She threw the razor-sharp discs as hard as she could.

Exactly once, a Hidden word is used without a definition or an accompanying description of its effect. K. A. is expecting that, at this point, the reader will have had enough exposure to and explanation of this particular word that they will just know it. Hey, someone actually tried (and pulled off, apparently, since the editor let this through!) to Teach the Reader a bit of a conlang! That is the kind of higher-level planning in secondary language usage that I want to see more of!

Finally, we get two sentences in Hidden in this book; and I'm not sure if it's coincidental, but the magical sentences are also the only magical utterances which do not have an obvious immediate physical effect to describe, which leads to a different (but still obviously stylized, even with only two examples) prose structure strategy for communicating their meaning:

"Unastrah ... Con ... Diadras." [...]
"What did you just do?" [...]
"I told the Dark it is not welcome here."

"Minradak Siadrus," she sobbed [...]. The Night Demons who headed toward them screeched and turned away.
"What did you do?" [...]
"I made this spot burial ground. Night Demons can't enter sacred places."

So, if the effect isn't visible--get another character to ask about it, and then provide , if not an actual translation, a diagetic explanation of its meaning. Note that this "get a character to ask about" it trick is actually a quite widely applied literary technique, not just for teaching languages, and explains why so many protagonists are ignorant newcomers to the story setting!

So, now you've seen what I can extract from the text, but what does K. A. have to say about her own work?

How much of the Hidden language exists, regardless of whether it is shown in the book or not?

There is definitely more than showed up in the books, but I had no desire to take it to the level of Tolkien’s Elvish language, lol. I spent a lot of time researching different languages and messing with blends of a few. I preferred Native American, my most common reference being Lakota Sioux as there tended to be more online access to dictionaries and use references.

This is a very important point! In the past when I have been asked how much of a language one needs to create, my answer has been "as much as you need to tell the story". And while the general principle that the author needs to know more than is explicitly placed in the story, in order to ensure consistency in what is in the story, also applies to languages, it is also nevertheless true that it is far too easy to fall prey to Worldbuilder's Disease. Tolkien created his languages first, and wrote a story to contain them; if you want to do the same, by all means, go for it--but if you want to write a book, duplicating his depth is not necessary!

How did you envision it being used in early drafts, and how does that differ from what ended up in the published book?

In early drafts I had a lot more of the language included, but in beta groups the same feedback kept coming in—that too much bogged down the reading and it lacked the beauty and power of using just a few words or sentences here and there. I also had to remember my intended audience—YA—and the fact that it is an instant gratification world because of movies. YA books generally have to be faster paced and deliver imagery to the mind more quickly.

This helps to highlight something I hadn't really considered before--yes, medium affects the techniques that will be most effective in integrating a secondary language into your story, but so does genre. Certain audiences will be more receptive to secondary languages, and to different techniques for presenting them, than others. Definitely something I'll start paying more attention to!

Did you consciously think about how to make usages of the Hidden language comprehensible / accessible to the reader? If so, what techniques did you employ?

I did—even more so after it went to an editor, lol. My biggest concern in the beginning was flow and readability. I knew from my own experiences reading another language that I would tend to skip over something my mind couldn’t quickly decipher or make sense of phonetically. My process involved looking through several dictionaries for how to say one word, then I would adjust the spelling to be more phonetic—always imagining the cool cadences of a Native American speaking it as I did so (I can’t tell you how many times I have read and watched Dances with Wolves—I can still say several lines of Sioux from the movie, lol). When I placed them into sentences I would do the same process again to test the flow of the combined words. I hoped this would allow the language to feel more fluid in the reader's mind.

Recall from this previous post that "lack of flow" was in fact at least one reader's complaint about the conlang content in A Memory Called Empire, so this is definitely a valid concern. What flows well for one person may not necessarily flow well for another, but there is absolutely something to be said for designing a language, or at least its orthography, with its probable impact on the reader in mind--if you want it to feel natural, and you're writing for an Anglophone audience, go ahead and make all possible use of your intuitions for readable English spelling! If the whole point is to make it alien and jarring--then throw English conventions out the window, but be aware that it takes a whole other set of skills to sell the reader on that!

What was your editor's response to the language? Did they communicate specific reasons for including or removing usages of the Hidden language?

They definitely removed a lot and had me cut down quite a bit. Mostly for the same reasons my beta readers mentioned. They were concerned about readers getting bored or frustrated. Even my dictionary and Hidden facts were cut down pretty extensively from my original drafts.

This saddens me, but it is in line with what I have come to expect from semi-formal surveys of other writers and readers. Having discussed these concerns with some other members of the Language Creation Society, there is something of a consensus in that population that concerns about reader frustration (especially in the fantasy super-genre) are overblown, and the result of the few who get upset also being loud about it--but, well, we conlangers are not exactly neutral parties to give an opinion on this subject! Nevertheless, as I have mentioned before, I am hopeful that books like A Memory Called Empire may start to change both readers' and editors' minds in this regard.

And finally:

Have you had any feedback from fans about the Hidden language? If so, is it mostly positive or negative?

Mostly positive. Those who know me joked about how they never knew my mind worked like that, lol. I had several reviews say that while some of the words were hard to say aloud, they liked the flow and the fact that I included a dictionary at the end of the books to help them remember what the words meant.

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Linguistic Representation in _The Dragon Prince_

 The Dragon Prince is a Netflix-original animated fantasy series first released in 2018, with three extent seasons of 9 episodes each. It is notable for containing two magical languages, and sign language representation! Well, sort of...

The magical languages turn out to be kind of disappointing. Draconic, used for casting Primal Magic spells, is just Latin, and only occurs as sequences of single nouns or noun phrases with no real syntax. Meanwhile, the Dark Magic language is just English which has been recorded and then played back in reverse! While the language choices themselves are not particularly sophisticated, though, they are an intentional-seeming way. Both types of spells end up being used as linguistic Easter Eggs. The semantic content of spells is never explained in the show, and it does not need to be, because all that matters is their magical effects, which are obviously shown; however, if you can decode the gimmick, you discover that the spells actually do have a logical semantic relation to magic effects they cause. And using real natural languages as the basis for these magic systems allows those Easter Eggs to be accessible to, and payoff for, a much larger portion of the audience than using a conlang and having to put in the effort to Teach The Reader (or Viewer, in this case).

This highlights what I have come to realize is a significant subdivision in the Easter Egg strategy. Easter Eggs can be used in two ways:

1. As a way to make the author happy, to allow a special connection with some subset of readers without ever intending to impact the "mainstream" experience of the story, and/or to provide proof of the consistency of the world for that set of fans who will inevitably dissect the heck out of anything (i.e., the linguistic equivalent of the MIT students who proved that the Ringworld was unstable).
2. As a puzzle which is not necessary to the plot (in case it is not solved), but which readers are intended to solve, on the basis that you get more enjoyment from active involvement and solving such puzzles than you do from simply being told the answer.

A more explicit instance of the second type of Easter Egg is demonstrated by this clue I found hidden around the Evermore Fantasy Live-Action Role Playing Park during their last summer season:
 

It's not a conlang, and it's not gibberish--it's a rotation cipher of English! As such, if you find these kinds of clues in the park, it is not immediately obvious what they say, or what relevance they have to the ongoing storyline--but it's also not that hard to figure it out, and get that extra dopamine boost from having done so. Do I wish they had a proper conlang? Yes, of course! I obviously would! But simultaneously, I must admit that that would have kind of defeated the purpose of the game, as far fewer players would have had the opportunity to solve it.

Returning to The Dragon Prince, I also have to admit that playing speech backwards does lend the Dark Magic spells a uniquely weird aesthetic quality, which does not hurt the sense of immersion in the world.

Looking at a slightly higher level, there is clearly a standard translation convention in effect, with whatever the common (oral) language of the fantasy world is being represented for the audience as English. And it is not too difficult to see this translation convention extending beyond just the one language--perhaps, for example, Draconic is not actually Latin, but is an ancient ceremonial language that occupies a similar place in the world's cultural consciousness as Latin does in ours, and which is thus non-diagetically translated into Latin. And perhaps Katolis Sign Language is not actually a mix of ASL and Signed English (which, yes, are different things!), but is the major sign language that is familiar to and used by our main characters from the Kingdom of Katolis, just as ASL is the sign language that will be most familiar to the primarily-English speaking audience.

Generally, establishing these kinds of extended translations equivalencies is a... fraught decision. It is usually a bad idea to just pick some arbitrary natural language to stick in as the language of your fictional ethnic group in your fictional world, because languages are fundamental components of human cultures and personal identities, and it's just kind of a crappy thing to appropriate that someone else's culture and implicitly impose your own invented culture onto it. This is why people like George Corley of Conlangery fame argue that, if you are writing a fictional culture, you need a conlang. And indeed, many conlangs have been created specifically for that reason--to avoid possibly offending any real-world culture. Notably, Kilikki, from the Baahubali films, came about because they needed a language that sounded harsh and scary for an enemy tribe--and do you really want to put yourself out there claiming that a real person's language is inherently scary and evil?

Nevertheless, it can be done. In hidden world fantasies or alternate, for example, it is often the case that certain fictional cultures would speak certain real languages, if they actually existed. And for secondary-world fantasy, establishing a basic translation convention with the audience's primary language (in this case, English) is obviously necessary in most cases. Beyond that, there are some languages which are sufficiently widely spoken across different cultures (e.g., Spanish, French, English), or which occupy specific identifiable cultural roles that can be analogized to the culture of the fictional world (e.g., Latin), such that using that as secondary conventional equivalents is more safe.

In this case, between the use of Latin and ASL, the only one I would be potentially concerned about is ASL. But since the show is targeted at an American audience, I assume that this ends up occupying the same kind of "necessary narrative translation" space for the Deaf audience as English does for the hearing audience; and as I have not come across any kind of backlash from the Deaf community, it seems to have been the right decision for this show.

Now, with all that high level stuff out of the way, let's dive deep into the usage of ASL, which is much more than just Easter Egging! (Warning: A Few Spoilers Ahead)

Some lovely people on Reddit and Tumblr (2, 3) have provided English translations of all of the in-show-untranslated ASL dialog, which makes this a bit easier than it was with Mr. Holland's Opus. And fortunately (? or not, I guess, depending on how much you love seeing the ASL representation), ASL is primarily used by a side character who, despite having a significant plot function, only actually appears in a few episodes for a few scenes each, so we can run through all 3 seasons pretty quickly.

The first exposure we have to ASL is in season 1, episode 4, when we are introduced to General Amaya and her translator Gren. Most of the ASL in the show comes from Amaya, and is diagetically translated into English by this guy who is always following her around. Notably, just as in Mr. Holland's Opus, there are no subtitles, so other techniques have to be used! And to avoid incessant repetition of "oh look, more diagetic translation!", we'll focus on those.

In that first ASL episode, there are a couple of instance of Making It Obvious--once, when Amaya looks concerned and Gren signs to her "What's wrong?"--a perfectly natural and expected thing to ask of someone who suddenly looks worried! And again when Prince Callum is trying to get get Amaya's attention in a kind-of-annoying manner, and she turns around and signs "What?" Aside from the ease specifically of representing ASL in video rather than text, it is just so much easier to quickly and efficiently Make It Obvious with all of the additional tools available in a visual medium! (See also, e.g., the beating-you-over-the-head visual highlighting of the Martian moons in John Carter.)

Later on in that episode, we get an instance of delayed translation for establishing narrative tension (also establishing that Prince Callum, at least, also knows sign language, and so theoretically does not need the diagetic translations) when the Prince signs to Amaya to keep Rayla out of the loop--but also to indicate by the choice of language that he is trying to keep Rayla out of the loop (not actually true, insofar as that is an effect, but not a primary intent; that is, the intent is to use sign language, which Rayla does not know, to make Amaya think that Callum is not acting with Rayla--the fact that Rayla actually unaware of what Callum is doing at that point is kind of irrelevant, and ends up backfiring on him!) When Gren eventually announces to everyone, including Rayla, what Callum had said, the audience is then brought in on what a terrible idea that actually was!

In episode 5, we get an extended, untranslated ASL monologue when Amaya visits the (tomb?) memorial of her dead sister. The context makes the kind of thing that a person might be saying in that situation pretty clear (unless, I guess, you have never visited someone's grave or watched other media featuring similar scenes), but it does give you a little potential foreshadowing of what will come later if you understand it (in sort, she is apologizing for losing custody of her sister's sons, the princes), so pretty solidly in the Easter Egg category for me. In particular, if you did not understand ASL, but were told the content of that monolog anyway, it would help with figuring out the next untranslated bit: after an extended discussion about how to recover the missing princes, assigning Gren to lead the search, and warning the guards about possible betrayal, Amaya signs in private to Gren. What would you expect in that situation? A final goodbye to the trusted translator that she has just sent off on another mission? Well, yeah. That's exactly what it is: "I have trusted you as my voice, now I trust you as my will. Save the boys."

In season 2, episode 4, we finally see Amaya again, without a translator, and we hear this half of a conversion:

[Amaya signs to another office] 

General Amaya, we've searched everywhere and there's been no sign of the elves.

I think it's safe to conclude that the outpost on the Xadian side remains secret.

There, look! The signal! The outpost is secure. 

[Amaya signs some more] 

Yes, General. I'll ready a party.

The gist of what she's saying, I think, has been Made Pretty Darn Obvious by the context of how this other character is reacting to it. (If you thought it might be something like "I see elves down there." and "No. Something's wrong. Set up a search party.", congratulations! You would be right!)

When that party arrives at their destination, they encounter a Katolis soldier who is orally communicating that, yeah, everything is fine, sorry I was late with the signal, nice of you to check in but there are not problems here! Yet he is signing at the same time. At this point, it's been well established that General Amaya does not need other people's speech to be translated into sign for her benefit, so what is this soldier doing? His choice to use a sign language--and more specifically, to use the visual medium rather than the aural medium to communicate something--is all we need to know! In this case, the medium literally is the message! What he is saying out loud is for the benefit of someone else, and is a lie.

In episode 6, we have a flashback in which Amaya in comforted by her not-dead-yet sister Sarai after a fight with a monster, with both of them signing. This is straight-up Easter Egg. The exchange is completely plot-irrelevant, but if you understand it, it's funny:

    Amaya: "How do I look?"

    Sarai: "Not great, but you should see the other guy!"

This is closely followed by a statement which Sarai translates:

    "You don't need to whisper Viren. I'm deaf."

Which I mention for only one reason: up until this point, in the series, I would've sworn that Amaya was a hearing mute! As previously mentioned, she does not require translation of other people's speech, even at pretty significant range--and knowing that is important to understanding what the guard-who-was-late-with-his-signal was trying to communicate. So either she's lying, or Amaya is a truly superhuman lipreader! And that bugs the heck out of me! Compare Cole's representation in Mr. Holland's Opus--whenever Glenn is talking to him they make sure that Glenn is at close range and facing Cole, and Cole at one point even grabs Glenn's head to force him to keep his face in view for lipreading.

In season 3, episode 1, Amaya and Gren are briefly re-united, and we get something between Easter Egg and Obvious when Amaya points at Gren's beard and he signs back "We have a lot to talk about.", and an Obvious interjection when Gren informs Amaya that "Lord Viren has been arrested for treason."; given that the audience (or at least I) totally saw that coming, I think we could all figure out the meaning when Amaya rolls her eyes and signs "Wow." This is a particularly noteworthy use of secondary language because, although in he TV show format we get a great deal of additional information from body language and facial expression, one can imagine this being translated into print without much difficulty, as it is not an instance of Making It Obvious that relies solely on the immediate discourse context; rather, a proper audience understanding of that particular bit of not-English is established by, essentially, the entire preceding plot and characterization of Lord Viren, such that you have the exact same response to this news as the character does, and its precise linguistic realization is irrelevant.

That episode also features another instance of delayed translation for dramatic effect; when Amaya embarks on what is, essentially, a suicide mission, we get this exchange:

    Soldier 1: "But Amaya, you won't survive!"

    [Amaya signs]

    Soldier 2: "What did she say?"

    Soldier 1: "She said the rest of us will."

This leads to (Spoiler alert!) Amaya not actually dying, but being captured by elves, which triggers an interesting conversation amongst her captors, not in sign, but about sign:

    "The human prisoner communicates in some kind of... hand language."

    "Sign language, actually. And she probably uses Katolis sign language specifically. You see, many of the regions use different--"

    "Can you translate or not?"

    "Oh,um, yes, I was top of my class in linguistics. Although I don't suppose a hand language would technically be linguistics. What would you call it? Finguistics?"

While the "finguistics" thing is a joke (note that sign languages are languages, and are in fact studied under linguistics), this is actually parallel to a real debate in the history of sign linguistics. In the early days of sign language research, William Stokoe coined the terms chereme and cherology (from Greek χείρ / kheír, “hand”) for the sub-morphemic structures of sign languages, by analogy with phoneme & phonology for oral languages and "grapheme" for written language. Modern technical usage, however, has settled on simply using the single set of terms "phonology" and "phoneme" for both oral and sign languages, as the medium in which they are encoded is not as important as the level of abstraction being described.

But jokes aside, there's some neat linguistics communication packed into this exchange. For one thing, this is the first acknowledgement we get of an explicit non-diagetic translation convention, in that we have it confirmed that what we see on screen as ASL is actually a representation of in-world Katolis Sign Language. Furthermore, we have an acknowledgement that "sign language" is not universal--we are told that there are in fact different regional sign languages. Of course, the fact that there are multiple sign languages in-world just serves to lampshade the ridiculousness of the entire world speaking a common oral language with no barriers to communication between characters of any species or nation... but on the other hand, it is not unrealistic for sign languages to be more diverse than the oral languages of the corresponding cultures, given that Deaf communities (especially prior to modern telecommunications technologies) tend to be much small and more isolated from each other than oral speech communities. See, for example, the variety between ASL, BSL, Auslan, and NZSL (one of which is not even related to the other three) among countries in the real world, all of whose primary spoken language is English.

Later on, in the course of interrogation, we get another gem of... not so much delayed translation, but delayed description:

    "Um, oh my."

    "Well, what did she say?"

    "If my interpretation is correct, and it is... she suggested an unusual way in which your body might accomodate your sword."

Eventually (Spoilers!), Amaya is released, and we are introduced to that scene with the interrogator being interrupted after saying:

 

    "You know, I think this interrogation is going very well; you're not dead!"

which is said orally while simultaneously signing. I'm not really sure what the point of that was; did the writers just like that joke too much to make it an Easter Egg, so they vocalized it to avoid subtitles? Or are supposed to infer that the interrogator isn't really comfortable with pure signing? Because SimCom, as I mentioned last time, is really not ideal, and the interrogator is not translating for anyone else at that time.

There are only two more instance of untranslated ASL, which occur in episodes 8 and 9 of season 3. First, when Amaya and Callum are reunited, with one of Amaya's former captors in tow, we get this exchange:

    

    Callum: "Uh, looks like you have an elf friend now, too?"

    Elf: "We are not... friends. She is my prisoner."

    [Amaya smirks and signs]

This is somewhere between Obvious and Easter Egg. Some of the intended meaning is communicated paralinguistically through the smirking facial expression, but it's funnier if you get the ASL: "She thinks I'm cute; she just isn't admitting it."

And finally, so fast you could easily miss it, a quick signed "I'm OK" after Amaya is injured in battle and then picked up to be evacuated. I'm gonna call that a solid Easter Egg, 'cause you definitely can't call it "Obvious" if you don't notice there's something there to interpret in the first place, and I did not my first time through! But it's Easter Egging of a sort that can really only be accomplished in the visual medium, as text does not permit you to so easily sweep something by the audience at an author-controlled high speed!

So, there you go! Everything about language in the first three seasons of The Dragon Prince. And hey, it actually turns out to do a couple of unique and interesting things!

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Mr. Holland's ASL

So far, all of my analysis of secondary languages in fiction has focused almost entirely on oral languages--but sign languages are languages, too! Unfortunately, they are rather underrepresented in literature.

This is at least partially due to the fact that no sign language has a standard written form, and most of the various sign writing systems would be entirely opaque to non-signers (and to most signers, as well)--and more difficult to print. Perhaps the most straightforward option for printing and oral-accessibility would be something like David J. Peterson's Sign Language IPA (SLIPA)--but that's a very awkward system for general use, and not particularly intuitive. In practice, the most common way to write signed languages is to just gloss them--which is a very lossy encoding, and loses out on portraying much of the unique character of the language.

So, while trying to find any decent written portrayals of sign languages in fiction, I will start with film & TV representations.

Mr. Holland's Opus (<- Amazon Affiliate link) is a 1995 film about a high school music teacher (the eponymous Mr. Glenn Holland). It is primarily a heartwarming tale of a musician turned reluctant teacher who has a positive impact on countless students' lives over a 30 year teaching career; but not quite an hour into the 2 hour and 23 minute film, we are introduced to a major source of personal conflict for Mr. Holland: his son Cole is born deaf. The remainder of the film features numerous examples of ASL, and not a single subtitle.

Accurate to the time period, the Hollands are initially advised by a ridiculously audist pediatrician who tells them that "Gestures won't help him find his place in the hearing world." Fairly quickly, however, the frustrations of failed communication between Cole and his mother Iris leads them to put Cole in a school for the Deaf, where he can learn ASL.

Throughout the initial scenes in the school, everyone there is engaged in SimCom (simultaneous communication)--simultaneous signing and vocalizing. That's kinda sketchy, as the human brain doesn't handle trying to output two different languages simultaneously, and one medium or the other nearly always suffers, but it has been a common approach to Deaf education by hearing teachers nonetheless, and to the movie's credit it only portrays Cole engaging in SimCom (with stereotypically odd oral speech, learned by rote) twice, for very short periods.

Iris ends up learning ASL pretty well, although she constantly SimComs, while Glenn just barely gets by and often has trouble understanding his own son. This is a pretty cruddy situation for Cole, but it's great for the audience, because it sets us up for diagetic translation--Iris frequently has to translate what Cole says for Glenn, which allows the audience to hear the translation as well; and everything that Iris signs is simultaneously articulated in English already. And this isn't even unnrealistic--as a guy from my work said, "If I had a nickel for every time a Deaf person told me they missed out on a relationship with their father because, as the secondary caregiver, he never really learned to sign well... I'd have a whole bunch of nickels. At least a dollar's worth."

The first full-on ASL conversation in the film occurs when Iris and Cole arrive home after a science fair; Cole enters the room signing rapidly, to which Glenn responds

    "You wanna go to the what?"

This isn't a direct translation, but it indicates that Glenn has partial understanding of ASL, and allows us to infer most of what Cole was saying (he wants to go somewhere). This is somewhere between a straight diagetic Narrative Translation and contextually Making It Obvious.

Iris fills in the blank, while SimComming: "Stars. Cole discovered astronomy tonight."

This sets off more rapid fire ASL from Cole, which is terminated by this exchange with diagetic translation:

    Glenn: "Whoa! Slow down, you're goin' like a rocket!"
    Iris: "He wants to be an astronaut."

A bit later, we have Glenn telling a surly teenage Cole to take out the trash:

    Glen, SimComming: "Cole, take this stuff outside, it stinks."
    Iris, SimComming: "Go open the window for him."
    (Cole signs something to Iris.)
    Iris, SimComming: "Hey, don't bust my butt!"

The second chunk of this conversation doesn't directly involve Glenn, so Iris doesn't bother to translate. But her response indicates a pretty clear case of Easter Egging--Iris's response makes it pretty clear that Cole is Being A Teenager, and that's really all you need for the scene; but if you happen to know ASL, you can get exactly how Cole is Being A Teenager.

A bit later still, we have an inverse scene, where Iris is not present translate:

    Glenn, SimComming: "What happened to your eye?"
    (Cole signs.)
    Glenn, SimComming: "Sorry?"
    (Cole mimes punching himself.)

And here we have a visually-oriented instance of Making It Obvious!

The longest chunk of ASL comes up immediately after that, when Cole confronts Glenn in Iris's presence, signing too fast for Glen to understand until Iris steps in:

    Iris: "He wants to tell you something and he wants to be sure you understand."
    Glenn: "Couldn't we do this another time?"
    Cole: "Now!"

This one word is the first time we see Cole SimCom, and it is a perfect example of using the choice of language for dramatic effect. Choosing to vocalize does not add any literal meaning to what Cole is saying--but, at this point we have thoroughly established that Glenn sucks at ASL, that Cole knows this as sought out this opportunity to get his mother to translate an important conversation for him, and chooses to use one word of oral English to emphasize that he needs Glenn to understand.

Iris proceeds to diagetically translate the rest of the conversation between Glenn and Cole. At one point, Glenn turns to speak to Iris, and Cole grabs his head and turns it back around before signing:

    "I know who John Lennon is. I can't read your lips if you don't look at me."

which just serves to further highlight how poor Glenn's language skills are--despite his attempts at SimCom, we have just found out that Cole doesn't even understand Glenn's attempted signing unless he can read lips at the same time!

The conversation ends with one untranslated sign before Cole storms out. That's followed up by this exchange:

    Glen: "Iris, what does this [signs] mean?"
    Iris: "That means a**hole."

We get the diagetic translation, but with a very intentional delay to build a tiny bit of narrative tension and really highlight that specific message.

After some reconciliation, we have a scene in which Glenn encounters Cole sitting on top of a giant speaker cabinet, feeling the vibrations of music, which leads to a short pure-ASL conversation between the two which is left untranslated. And that's OK, because the actual content is Made Irrelevant--all that matters is that we see Glenn using ASL, showing that he has come to meet Cole halfway, as Cole has met him halfway by trying to develop an appreciation of music, and the two are behaving amicably towards each other.

For completeness: I did mention that there were two instances of Cole engaging in SimCom; the second is when an adult Cole, who presumably has had a decent relationship with his father for many years at this point, speaks orally for his father's benefit just before his retirement party. But there's nothing particularly uniquely interesting about that in terms of audience accommodation.

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Vance's Language of Pao

 Jack Vance's The Languages of Pao is a 1958 science fiction novel whose core science fictional premise is the forced introduction of engineered languages to the planet Pao in order to alter the culture of the inhabitants through strong Whorfian effects. We don't actually get to see much of any of the eponymous languages (which is fine, because that avoids the problem of having readers notice that they don't actually work in real life), and plenty of other people have written about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in science fiction, so I feel no particular need to rehash that--but we do get some significant exposure to the native Paonese language, and I am happy to analyze that!

I have written about Paonese before, so I don't know why it took me so long to realize that this novel would be a good basis for a blog post, but here we are now!

The first page contains a tour-de-force of linguistic info-dumping:

The plane of Pao's diurnal rotation is the same as its plane of orbit; hence there are no seasons and the climate is uniformly mild. Eight continents range the equator at approximately equal intervals: Aimand, Shraimand, Vidamand, Minamand, Nonamand, Dronamand, Hivand and Impland, after the eight digits of the Paonese numerative system. Aimand, largest of the continents, has four times the area of Nonamand, the least. Only Nonamand, in the high southern latitudes, suffers an unpleasant climate.

You may think Vance is just telling you some bland facts about geography, but, if you are paying attention, you have also just learned:

1. That Paonese has a base-8 number system.
2. That the numbers 1-8 in Paonese are something like <ai(m)>, <shrai(m)>, <vida(m)>, <mina(m)> <nona(m)>, <drona(m)>, <hiv>, and <imp(l)>.
3. That there is a word or morpheme that looks something like <(m/l)and> and means "land" or "continent" or something like that.

And you've already started to get some idea of what the shapes of Paonese words might be like. Now, it's not as straightforward as it could be--there are, after all, those <m>s and an <l> to worry about--but that's perfectly realistic. Real languages actually have edge cases like that whose correct underlying structure is not immediately obvious, because surface-level phonological or spelling rules blur the boundaries. That's why, e.g., things that aren't possible in English are impossible, but things that aren't correct are incorrect.

 Unfortunately, after that it gets... boring. There is only one actual sentence of Paonese provided, and that in a footnote:

The Paonese and Mercantil languages were as disparate as the two ways of living. The Panarch, making the statement, "There are two matters I wish to discuss with you," used words which, accurately rendered, would read: "Statement-of-importance (a single word in Paonese)--in a state of readiness--two; ear--of Mercantil--in a state of readiness; mouth--of this person here--in a state of volition." The italicized words represent suffixes of condition.

The necessary paraphrasing makes the way of speaking seem cumbersome. But the Paonese sentence, "Rhomel-en-shrai bogal-Mereantil-nli-en moun-es-nli-ro." requires only three more phonemes than, "There are two matters I wish to discuss with you."

 You could hardly have a more clear-cut case of whack-you-over-the-head-with-it Narrative Translation. The narrator isn't merely giving you a translation, he's giving you a morpheme-by-morpheme gloss, with the intention of highlighting the Whorfian characteristics of the Paonese language as "presenting a picture" rather than "describing an act". If you pay close attention, though, you can discover that the word for "two" is in fact "shrai" (not "shraim"), which provides insight into several other digits as well.

Our remaining exposure to Paonese comes almost entirely through names or titles, whose meanings are all Irrelevant or Obvious. Consider the opening to Chapter II:

PERGOLAI, AN ISLET In the Jhelianse Sea between Minamand and Dronamand had been pre-empted[....]

Pergolai--it's the name of an island. It might have a literal meaning in Paonese, but that's not relevant to its use as a name. Jhelianse--it's the name of a sea, and once again that's all the reader needs to know. A little further in:

To the right sat his brother Bustamonte, bearing the title Ayudor

 Ayudor--apparently, it's a title that can be held by the ruler's brother; there may be culturally-specific details that justify a unique title rather than translating it as "prince" or something, but what exactly those are never comes up, so the reader doesn't need to know!

This sort of thing happens quite a lot, but not exclusively with Paonese (as there are plenty of people and places not from Pao who also needs names), and the techniques used are not unique to secondary languages--everybody has to know how tooo introduce new proper names!

There is one additional mention (as opposed to use) of a Paonese word that is not a proper noun:

"An expansion upon the Paonese vitality-word praesens, with an effort at transposition into Breakness attitudes."

Which is a pretty clear-cut case of Making it Irrelevant; we are given a vague indication of the word's semantic category, but it's really just a throwaway mentioned as part of a quoted title. If the word itself holds any significance, it is only to show us another example of the possible range of Paonese word-shapes.

So, The Languages of Pao shows some significant sophistication right at the beginning, but then just kind of... gives up on making real use of the Paonese language. Perhaps the most significant thing we can learn from this is that, despite a lack of formal resources for studying techniques, and fairly limited popularity, the baseline sophistication of secondary language use in science fiction has improved significantly since 1958!

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Rabbits, Smeerps, and Empires

It has been nearly a month since my last post, a delay which can be blamed entirely on A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (Amazon affiliate, yada yada).

A Memory Called Empire is a very linguistically interesting book; but despite featuring one-and-a-half secondary languages, it isn't particularly interesting from the point of view of my established framework for analyzing the usage of such languages. Arkady Martine is doing other things entirely, and it has taken forcing my sister to read it so that we can have book club, pondering a bunch, and serendipitously coming across several other analytical resources to get a handle on what I want to start to say about it.

AMCE is set primarily in the capital city / on the capital planet (it's an ecumenopolis, so they're the same thing) of the empire of Teixcalaan, and features numerous words of the Teixcalaanli language. Only individual words though; no sentences or extended phrases. Dr. Martine has unfortunately not been available for interview yet (though I hope that will change in the future), so I cannot yet know the answer for sure, but I have to wonder if this limited deployment of the language was all she ever intended or if it represents what was left after editorial cuts, as I do know other authors have faced reduction of linguistic content to make their books more marketable. This reddit post, which reads, in part

I'm having trouble with some of the titles and it pulls me out of the story every time.

I feel like I'm a fairly robust reader with at least an average reading level, but I get stuck every time I come across Teixcalaan. Ezuazuacat and asekreta are problematic too. And don't even try with Teixcalaanlitzlim.

is fairly representative of the attitudes I have encountered when surveying Anglophone readers and writers on their opinions about secondary language use, and it seems that editors are aware of this, which makes it all the more pleasantly surprising that any of the books I have reviewed so far ever got published!

Either way, though, it seems to have been the right choice, because AMCE got past those prejudices to be awarded the 2020 Hugo for Best Novel. If a novel with as much linguistic focus as AMCE does have (and despite not showing the language as much as I would've liked, it does have quite a lot) can win a Hugo, maybe this marks a turning point where trusting readers with secondary languages will become more normalized, along with broader encouragement for authors to include secondary languages in the many scenarios where it makes sense to do so.

While AMCE does not meaningfully expand on my typology for low-level language-showing techniques, though, it does exemplify a higher-level principle I like to call Don't Call a Smeerp a Rabbit (and as you can see from the link, I am not the first person to have come up with that). "Don't Call a Rabbit a Smeerp" is a dictum that comes from the Turkey City Lexicon, and it basically means "don't engage in false exoticism"--if your sci-fi or fantasy story features a creatures that looks and acts exactly like a rabbit, just call it a rabbit, not a smeerp.

False familiarity, however, is just as dangerous--especially when you are writing a story whose central themes are about engagement with an exotic foreign culture, and what impact that has on one's personal identity. If you have a creature that doesn't look like a rabbit, doesn't act like a rabbit, or doesn't fulfill comparable cultural roles as a rabbit... don't call it a rabbit! Similarly, if you have a government officer whose qualifications, social position, and official duties don't match up with a clerk, or a secretary, or a director, or anything else you can think of... call them asekretim. (I mean, not literally, 'cause your story isn't set in the Empire of Teixcalaan, but you get the idea!)

Incidentally, Semiosis by Sue Burke, which I have reviewed previously, is also a good example of not calling a smeerp a rabbit, although it approaches the issue from a different direction; rather than borrowing a foreign-language word for a foreign concept, the characters of Semiosis are presented with the issue of coming up with English names for entirely new alien creatures in an environment where no one else is going to tell them what to call them. And while the fippokats do have the word "cat" incorporated into their name, despite not actually being cats (a perfectly normal feature of human naming practices, as exemplified by animals like Guinea pigs and sealions), they are not just called "cats"--or "rabbits", or "kangaroos", all of which they share some salient features with. They are called fippokats, because to imply that they are not alien by coopting an existing English word would do a disservice to the reader and make it more difficult to understand their role in the story.

Arkady Martine makes excellent use of distinctive phonology to separate the Stationer culture, as represented by their names, from the Teixcalaanli culture, as represented by... lots of words that aren't their names! She also demonstrates regular phonological correspondences and adaptations between borrowed names which are cognate between the two cultures, something which you can't do without at least two languages available to show (and opportunity which shows up much less frequently than showing one). But getting back to those names... Teixcalaanli names, like, e.g., Chinese names and unlike Anglophone names, are compositional and meaningful; the cultural significance of particular naming choices is explained in the book, and choosing a proper Teixcalaanli name is part of the process of naturalization for new Teixcalaanli citizens. Making that part of the culture accessible to the reader thus, somewhat counterintuitively, actually requires presenting the names not in reader-facing Teixcalaanli, but in translated form!

Poetry is also a significant feature of Teixcalaanli culture, to the extent that highly regimented styles of verse are central to everyday political discourse--so, you might think that ACME would be a perfect vehicle for extended secondary-language poetry, such as Tolkien inserted in The Lord of the Rings... and you thought that, you would be wrong! Quoting from somebody else's interview with the author:

Teixcalaanli poetry is explicitly supposed to be in complex meter, and sometimes also in complex rhyme — this is that skillset use again — but I deliberately ignored that when I wrote the poetry for the book, because, well — writing in English meter wouldn't match up with what the Teixcalaanli meter would be. And also I'm terrible at metered poetry. I can fake being a genius political poet in free verse, but all my attempts at metered poetry come out twee as hell. The choice to gesture at poetry instead of trying to achieve the heights of the form let me not get trapped in having to be really, really good. It's a shortcut. But I wanted readers to think that Teixcalaanli poets were incredible, whether or not that particular reader liked English poetry — so I didn't want to trip them up with English poetry poorly done, or which might ring false or silly and throw them out of the story.

As much as I am personally saddened at not getting to see actual Teixcalaanli poetry, this is both a brilliant method of successfully portraying the characters as more brilliant than the author, as well as a breath of fresh air in light of all of those trite fantasy / horror scenarios in which someone translates an ancient inscription in a cursed tomb (for example) and it just happens to work as perfectly rhymed iambic pentameter in modern American English.

 Dr. Martine also does an excellent job of gesturing at the complexities of grammar, pragmatics, and translation without actually showing the language itself. The main character, Mahit, a new ambassador to the Empire, consciously thinks about her command of language, and shows how good she is at it by describing the ways in which she adjusts her speech to seem less competent, more provincial, and less threatening; or to break out complex high-register grammatical constructions to prove that she is competent and threatening, as needed. In the real world, this is comparable to a politician like Barack Obama knowing when to code-switch into AAVE to connect with a black urban audience, and when to stick to prescriptively-correct standard General American Broadcast English. Or in fiction to Danaerys Targaryen making use of a translator until it is politically expedient to reveal that, in fact, Valyrian is her native tongue.

As for the nuts-and-bolts of how you actually pull that off... well, I don't have that broken down into a blog-post sized analysis yet. But go read the book, because Arkady Martine clearly knows how to do it!

Putting linguistics per se aside for a moment (gasp!), Arkady Martine employs linguistic knowledge as a central feature in a larger goal of examining the interaction of cultures. As the child of a former Air Force pilot who got assigned to a desk job at the US Embassy in Brussels, Belgium for a while, and as a former Christian missionary in the former Soviet Union, Mahit's experience as an outsider admiring and then living in a foreign culture, and connecting with that culture through its language resonated with me deeply. And after recently reading A Literary Case for Hard Science Fiction, I feel like AMCE could reasonably be called hard social scifi. That's not a pair of adjectives that usually goes together when describing science fiction, but if "hard" science fiction gains value over literary "realism" by forcing us to be aware of the impact of the physical world that we live in on the stories that we experience in this world... well, AMCE employs a solid understanding of history, sociology, urban planning and linguistics to force us to be aware of the impact that the cultural world we are embedded in has on the stories we experience. Today's episode of the Mad Genius Club blog discusses similar issues with regard to HBO's historical drama Chernobyl. And I am all for it!

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