Babel: Or, the Necessity of Violence

Babel, by R. F. Kuang, is a 2022 Alternate-History low-fantasy novel about translators who perform enchantments for the glory of the British Empire. The magic is fictional, but the translation theory is real: the Oxford translation class lectures are a legit callback to grad school. Why are translators performing magic? Because true translation is fundamentally impossible, and magic arises from the sometimes-subtle, sometimes-vast differences in meanings between attempted translations from one language to another.

Naturally, there is quite a lot of non-English representation in such a novel. Our main character, Robin, is a native speaker of Cantonese, so the first example we get is a a string of orthographic Chinese characters, which I cannot type easily to reproduce for you here--but, we immediately get diegetic transcription and translation:

'Húlún tūn zǎo,' he read slowly, taking care to enunciate every syllable. He switched to English. 'To accept without thinking.'

Note the conventional use of italics for non-English text. Here we get three parallel representations of the same bit of language, allowing the reader to understand what it actually looks like written, approximately how it sounds via romanization, and approximately what it means through Robin's translation of what he just read.

Robin is quickly introduced to the non-magical responsibilities of translation and interpretation:

This all hinged on him, Robin realized. The choice was his. Only he could determine the truth, because only he could communicate it to all parties.

The book is chock full of this kind of stuff--not just directly representing other languages, but explicitly teaching the reader about real concepts in linguistics and translation theory through the mode of having the characters learn and discuss them. Skipping ahead a bit, here is a taste of one of the theory lectures:

'The first lesson any good translator internalizes is that there is no one-to-one correlation between wrds or even concepts from one language to another. [...] If [there was], then translation would not be a highly skilled profession - we would simply sit in a class full of dewy-eyed freshers down with dictionaries and have the completed works of the Buddha on our shelves in no time. Instead, we have to learn to dance between that age-old dichotomy, helpfully elucidated by Cicero and Heironymous: verbum e verbo and sensum e sensu. Can anyone--'
'Word for word,' Letty said promptly. 'And sense for sense.'

And a bit of philosophizing later on reminded me rather strongly of the aliens from The Embedding:

We will never speak the divine language. But by amassing all the world's languages under this roof, by collecting the full range of human expressions, or as near to it as we can get, we can try.

And in fact, this is not a bad description of the project of natural language documentation and typology. 

The next instance of non-English representation makes use of footnotes to provide a non-diegetic translation for what he character already understands:

Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium atque ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant.
Robin parsed the sentence, consulted his dictionary to check that auferre meant what he thought it did, then wrote out his translation.*
*'Robbery, butchery, and theft - they call these things empire, and where they create a desert, they call it peace.'

Although in this case, the translation does exist in the story, and so could've been included in-line, that is not so for all of the footnotes, some of which exist entirely outside of the story. For example:

for a full year Robin thought The Rape of the Lock was about fornication with an iron bolt instead of the theft of hair.*
* A reasonable error. By rape, Pope meant 'to snatch, to take by force', which is an older meaning derived from the Latin rapere.

I could continue with a detailed analysis of every sample of non-English language, as I did exhaustively for some other books earlier on in this series--but I would end up quoting from about a thrid of all pages in the book, and we'd be here all day! The range of integrative and interpretive techniques in use is actually pretty well covered by those few examples I have quoted so far. But what's really unique about the book is the extent to which it confronts the reader with concepts that you might not otherwise have to face outside of a graduate-level course in linguistics or translation, and in ways that are actually relevant to the plot. Consider:

What was a word? What was the smallest possible unit of meaning, and why was that different from a word? Was a word different from a character? In what ways was Chinese speech different from Chinese writing?

That matters for understanding the magic system and for understanding the nature of the relationships between characters. This is a masterclass in science fiction with linguistics as the underlying science... except that it's technically fantasy instead of science fiction. There's refreshingly not a single whiff of Whorfianism or UG anywhere--as there shouldn't be as those concepts would not have existed in the historical period in which this story is set!

The book also briefly addresses The Forbidden Experiment--and contributes to foreshadowing the true villainy of one of our antagonists by having him seriously entertain it as a possibility (which is unsurprising, given how he has up till then manipulated the lives of Robin and his friends).

I shall leave off with one more quote on semantic theory:

Does meaning refer to something that supercedes the words we use to describe out world? I think, intuitively, yes. Otherwise we would have no basis for critiquing a translation as accurate or inaccurate, not without some unspeakable sense of what it lacked.

 

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True Biz & A Literature of Sign

So, remember that whole thing about A Literature of Sign, and how the heck are you supposed to put ASL into a book for an English audience when ASL has no standard orthography?

Well, Sara Nović does some stuff. True Biz is a 2022 novel about the administration, students, and families of students of the fictional River Valley School for the Deaf boarding high school. It's straight-up realistic fiction, practically literary, exploring civil rights and what it's like to grow up deaf in a hearing world--really not my usual genre, but dangit, I liked it anyway, and it's certainly linguistically interesting. There is so much linguistically-interesting stuff, in fact, that I gave up and stopped putting in bookmarks after page 87 out of 381 in the hardcover edition--so, I will not be quoting every example of non-English representation in this review, just a representative sample that's indicative of the range of techniques used.

The first notable thing Nović does in this novel is not use quotation marks to set off dialog, even when characters are speaking orally. It's a little jarring at first, but I got used to it fairly quickly. I am not sure what the authorial intent behind this decision was, but for me it had the effect of turning off (or rather, failing to turn on) my internal voice when encountering dialog, thus distancing my experience of the text from the mental audio loop. Which I could totally believe is part of the intent, since it's a book about Deaf people!

One of our viewpoint characters is Charlie, a severely hard-of-hearing girl whose parents opted for a cochlear implant that doesn't really work right, resulting in language deprivation. She begins learning ASL when transferred to River Valley, and her experience is contrasted with that of Austin, a native signer from a multi-generational Deaf family. Charlie doesn't alwasy understand everything that is being said to or around her, in ASL or in English, and Nović represents this with underscores inserted into dialog in place of words that Charlie missed. Where relevant, there misunderstandings are resolved diegetically--so you, the reader, understand exactly as much and in the same way Charlie. For example:

[The headmistress] looked back at Charlie. _____ here at school will be key, she said. As with any language.
The what? said Charlie.
The headmistress removed a notepad from beneath a pile of paperwork.
IMMERSION she wrote.

Immediately before this, we get a nuanced introduction to simcomm (simultaneous communication), although it is not explicitly referenced that way.

To sign and talk at the same time was an imperfect operation, the headmistress warned, and one Charlie wouldn't see much of at River Valley after today. Charlie longed to find meaning in the arc of the woman''s hands, but that meant looking away from her lips, something she couldn't afford to do.

ASL conversations are all translated into English in italics, but Nović captures some of the spatial nature of ASL by arranging the dialog in columns according to the speaker, so each speaker's ASL dialog is spatially separated on the page just as their signing spaces would be separated in reality. Even when quoting a single ASL speaker, not in a conversation, their words and dialog tags will be confined to a distinct column separated from the flow of the main text, emphasizing the spatially-confined nature of the ASL utterance. The first example of such a conversation is as follows:

You hungry?

Hi, sweetie. How's school? All set up?

Getting there.

How was the meeting?

Fine, she said.
The girl struggled in mainstream.
No surprise there.

I'm sure you'll fix her right up.

We will. Come eat.

Right at the beginning of the book, I was uncertain whether this was intended to be a book for a Deaf audience, or a book to explain Deafness to a hearing audience. One particular feature shifted me solidly to the "this is for us hearies" side, though--the periodic inclusion between chapters of non-fiction explanatory notes on aspects of ASL and of Deaf culture and history that may be relevant to understanding whats going on in the adjacent chapters. This feels like a form of paratext, but where linguistic paratext usually takes the form of, e.g., name pronunciation guides in the front matter or back matter, or glossaries in an appendix--all presentations which can be easily skipped over if the reader doesn't care about them--this is interleaved with the main text, so it must be engaged with. This seems like an excellent way to present additional information about a minority culture in the real world, but I am uncertain how well it would translate to, for example, explaining a conlang in a fictional world. I was slightly reminded of this by the fictionally-non-fictional excerpts from the eponymous guide in Brandon Sanderson's The Frugal Wizard's Guide to Surviving Medieval England (review forthcoming), so it might be workable.

Finally, Nović occasionally includes schematic illustrations of signs inline in the text. Most pervasively, each chapter is headed with an illustration of the ASL fingerspelling handshape for that chapter's viewpoint character's first initial. In a couple of places, however, where Charlie is learning new signs, dictionary-style schematic illustrations of complex signs are included in parallel with the italicized-English translations. This is not at all space efficient, so it can't be used everywhere, but limited deployment works to help teach the reader a small number of signs and provide an initial mental image to help inform how you interpret subsequent conversations as signalled by the ASL-specific page formatting. 

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Stridulation in Landscape with Invisible Hand

Landscape with Invisible Hand is a 2023 sci-fi film based on a book of the same name from 2017, taking its title from a work of art created by the protoganist in the story. It is set in a world that has been economically colonized by aliens known as the Vuvv--though it is unclear where that name comes from, as their language is unpronounceable by humans. And, that's why we're doing this review!

The sounds of the Vuvv language are produced by stridulation--rubbing together pads on the ends of their appendages.

A Vuvv, seen rubbing pads together mid-sentence.

The Vuvv in the film are seen making a wide variety of articulatory gestures, which suggests the possibility of a range of distinguishable stridulation sounds which could form the basis of a phonemic inventory. However, this variety is not reflected in the accompanying audio. According to IMDB,

The unique sound of the alien Vuvv language was created using dried out coconuts with nails in them, rubbed against mossy rocks.

The inspiration for the sound of the alien Vuvv language came from a line in the book that the film is based on that describes the Vuvv language as "someone walking forcefully in corduroys."

Now, there is no inherent reason why a fully fleshed-out language could not be articulated by rubbing coconuts with nails in against rocks... but between the experience of actually listening to the film, and the fact that IMDB doesn't list any language creator or consultant in the credits, I'm pretty sure they didn't bother. Also note that Vuvv language lessons for humans are a thing in the film, so we know that the relevant acoustic patterns are audible to humans, and it's not a matter of just not bothering to represent stuff that is theoretically there but not perceivable by the human characters or audience, as would be the case in, for example, a film adaptation of Little Fuzzy. (It's possible that the glyphs for Vuvv writing actually mean something, but I don't have high hopes for that.) Awesome idea for an alien language, and the presentation of the fictional language works for the film, but it's a little disappointing that there isn't more there. On the other hand, if Phil Lord and/or Chris Miller are reading--hey, you still have a chance to make Project Hail Mary the first major film to feature a fully fleshed-out alien language not pronounceable by human actors! And it would really be a shame to deprive audience of the opportunity to learn to recognize Eridian words right alongside Ryland Grace...

But anyway, back to Landscape--there's really just one consistent choice of integration techniques to make the Vuvv dialog comprehensible to the audience. It's 100% diegetic translation, which is carried out automatically by translator boxes that allow the characters in the scene to understand the Vuvvs talking to them. Meanwhile, all of the Vuvvs we see on-screen seem to be receptively bilingual--they can't pronounce human languages, just we can't pronounce theirs, but they can comprehend English when spoken to. This arrangement actually works out really well--since translation is necessary for the characters, this nicely avoids the need for any additional integration mechanisms just for the sake of the audience. I.e., we don't need to worry about the possible need for subtitles. And that's a darn good thing, because a few possible integration techniques are taken off the table by the simple fact that this is a fully fictional language, rather than an artificial-but-real conlang--there is no meaning actually encoded in the Vuvv speech, so there's no way to expect the audience to extract what isn't there!

So, while I am disappointed at the lack of depth, we can take at least two good lessons from this film:

1. Certain settings and stories lend themselves naturally to specific secondary-language integration techniques, and theoretically you could consciously choose to structure your story to take advantage of a particular technique. (I don't know if this is the case, but I would not be surprised if that was the case here--maybe they gave everybody translator boxes specifically to avoid having to do subtitles?)
   
2. Stridulation! Man, I'd love to see someone tackle this as a modality for a real alien conlang.

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Three Miles Down

Three Miles Down is the latest Alternate History novel from the prolific Harry Turtledove. In 1974, marine biology grad student Jerry Stieglitz is recruited by the CIA to assist with a secret operation to raise a sunken Russian nuclear sub... which turns out to be a cover story for an even more secret operation to raise a crashed alien spacecraft. Why do they need a marine biologist? Because Jerry has been studying whale vocalizations and trying to decode them, making him one of the best-qualified people on the planet to potentially decipher an alien language in a first-contact scenario.

This sounds like the perfect book for me, no? Well, don't get me wrong, it is a good book, and if you want a spy thriller featuring a bunch of classic SF authors, this is the book for you!--but I was left dissapointed on the linguistic front. We don't actually come face-to-face with the aliens themselves until the last few pages, and the story wraps up before Jerry ever has to try actually talking to them. This is not Turtledove's first novel involving alien contact, and others (notably, the Worldwar series) do put human-alien interaction more front-and-center, so I'm gonna have to go re-read some of those older ones and see how the language barrier was handled--I hadn't taken a single formal class in linguistics or literary analysis the last time I read through A World of Difference, for example! (But hey, Harry--if you ever feel like writing a sequel, and you need advice on portraying the process of establishing communication in detail, hit me up!)

However, there is some Russian (because they're messing around near a Russian sub, so Russians show up) and some Yiddish (because Jerry is Jewish) which we can look at to see what techniques Turtledove employs for integration. When Jerry gets ont he radio with a Russian ship, we are mostly treated to conventional non-diegetic translation of the conversation into English, but there are some Russian words thrown in; for example:

"I read you loud and clear," a Russian voice answered in his headphones.
"Talk slow, pozhaluista. My Russian nye khorosho."

We've got a lot of context clues just in this tiny excerpt to establish the translation convention and the fact that they are actually speaking Russian--a "Russian voice" answers,  Jerry is talking about his Russian, and we get a few untranslated words thrown in as well, italicized to set them off as foreign. This is similar to the overall technique that Graham Bradley used in Kill the Beast, where untranslated French words are thrown into the mostly-English representation of the dialog just to periodically remind us that the characters are actually French. Note that Turtledove chose to us a Romanized transliteration of the Russian, so Anglophone readers can have some hope of figuring out what it ought to sound like, rather than putting the orthographic Cyrillic in the text.

The next interesting bit involves fome diegetic code-switching, with non-diegetic translation for the sake of the reader (quoting as little as possible to avoid spoilers):

"[...]If you don't want to get dealt in to whatever people can learn from that spaceship, go ahead. Laugh at me. And yob tvoyu mat'."
His Russian TAs and profs had all warned him never to say that: 

At first, I thought Turtledove had chosen to render that in Russian so as not to offend the Anglophone reader, or at least "soften the blow" since foreign insults tend not to have the same emotional effect as those in your native language. But then he goes right ahead and gives the English translation on the next line (which you will note I have cut out from my quotation), and it hit me that exactly the opposite thing is going on: Jerry is explicitly trying to insult the person he is talking to, and knows that speaking in the audience's native language will both provide a greater emotional impact and remind them that, yes, Jerry does understand Russian himself. That's some excellent sociolinguistics right there.

And the next interesting bit subtly provides some insight into Russian culture:

After a while, the man in the outdated black suit looked in and asked, "You would like dinner?"
"Da, Georgi Pavlovich. Bolshoye spasibo," Jerry answered. He still had no idea of the Russian's family name. First name and patronymic were enough for politeness.

Now, my ability to analyze this objectively is a little strained by the fact that I already speak Russian, so what I think was made obvious is confounded by what I already know, and might not perfectly reflect the experience of the naive reader. But I think Turtledove has done a pretty good job here. "Da", as the equivalent of "yes", was introduced in an earlier conversation in the book, so Turtledove is doing just a little bit of Teaching the Reader here, but beyond that: Jerry is clearly addressing the guy who just asked a question, and we can recognize his name, Georgi, in the response. Jerry is choosing to respond in Russian to be polite because Georgi has just demonstrated that his English isn't perfect, by asking a grammatically-ill-formed question. The narrator tells us that Jerry doesn't know Georgi's family name, so we can conclude that "Pavlovich" is not his family name, and infer that it must be the patronymic, and that that is the formula for polite address in Russian. And you can probably make a good guess that "Bolshoye spasibo" is some variation on "thank you" because we know that Jerry is specifically concerned with politeness. Perfect exchange, dense narration, no notes.

There's a little bit more Russian, and I've completely ignored the Yiddish, but that should be sufficient to cover the most linguistically-interesting bits.

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Larry Niven's Grammar Lesson

"Grammar Lesson" is a 1977 short story by Larry Niven is his Draco Tavern series, conveniently collected in a single volume since 2006 which you can acquire at that preceding Amazon Affiliate link.

It's short--less than 5 pages--and I had completely forgotten about it until it came up in a comment on my earlier post about Linguistics as the Science of Science Fiction. I finally managed to unpack my Larry Niven collection and find that short story collection in particular to verify the details of the story, so here we are!

The bulk of the story is a Chirpsithra (a recurring sort of alien in the Draco Tavern stories) relating to the barkeeper a story explaining how they were able to win an interstellar war, because they were willing to evacuate planets that they had previously settled. The supposed reason for this willigness is that the Chirpsithra language, Lottl, refers to inhabited planets with "extrinsic" possession, rather than "intrinsic" possession, while humans are too attached to our homes because we fail to distinguish different kinds of possession.

This is a neat example of linguistics inspiring a science fiction story--I don't know off-hand of any other examples where grammatical alienability is a key part of the story--but it's kind of disappointing in a few ways, as well. The story-within-a-story comes up as the eponymous Grammar Lesson as a result of the barkeeper making a mistake in Lottl grammar when speaking to his Chirpsithra patron, despite having studied the language for nearly 30 years. Supposedly, this is a particularly difficult feature to acquire, because, according to the Chirpsithra, "All [human] languages seem to use one possessive for all purposes." And, well, that's just not true! Niven did put that statement in the mouth of an alien, who presumably isn't familiar with all the languages of Earth, and even included a hedge, so it's possible he knew it was false, but it is a very potentially-misleading setup for the average Anglophone reader with no linguistic training of their own. In fact, there are tons of different types of possession that are grammaticalized in various human languages--and even English makes subtle distinctions in the uses of the "Saxon genitive" (i.e., adding an apostrophe-"s" to things) and the analytical genitive using "of". Thus, I find it rather unconvincing that a human who is capable of learning an alien language at all would have that particular trouble with it after using it on the job for nearly 30 years.

Additionally, this comes down to another instance of sci-fi Whorfianism--the existence of different types of possessives in their language made the Chirpsithra capable of concieving and acting on a military strategy that would've been impossible for humans, given our more constrained languages. And yet... retreating and salting the fields is a strategy that humans who did not have a grammatical alienability distinction in possessives actually came up with multiple times in the real world. And it didn't need to be Whorfian! There are all sorts of other ways that this kind of grammatical quirk could be integrated into a sci-fi story that have nothing to do with exemplifying or manipulating the speakers' psychology. Brandon Sanderson actually gives a good example of this in the Mistborn trilogy... which is something I shall have to discuss after I get my hands on Secret Project Four and can do a Big Unified Sanderson Linguistics Post.

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Xenolinguistics: A Review for Authors & Conlangers

Xenolinguistics: Towards a Science of Extraterrestrial Language is a collection of 17 papers on a variety of aspects of potential communication with aliens--how likely is it to happen, how would we recognize alien language if we came across it, what might it be like, and how could we interpret it. Also available from Amazon if you want to send me some sweet affiliate cash... or you could just take the difference in the Routledge and Amazon prices and send me a donation directly.

The short version: Some of the papers are better than others, and I don't agree with all of them, but that's probably a good thing--it means I'm not stuck in an echo chamber, and the collection shows a diversity of viewpoints on the subject. Overall, I have found it quite enjoyable.

The long version:

General Thoughts

Not every paper is obviously useful for conlangers or authors, but several come with what I thought was solid conlanging inspiration, as well as good ideas for scifi writers to exploit about how alien languages might differ and actionable information about writing realistic contact and decipherment scenarios. The ordering of the papers was sometimes odd; for example, several of the papers refer to Hockett's Design Features, which are somewhat out of date and quite easy to critique (for example, asserting that language must occur in the audio modality, which ignores the entire existence of sign languages)--but Chapter 16 (third from the end) finally gets around to properly contextualizing them, and explaining the need to modify them to better apply to xenolinguistics. And it's formatted with endnotes. I mean, really--everyone knows footnotes are better!

Ch. 1: Introduction

Just a couple of pages to explain that, yes, we are aware that there are currently no actual aliens to talk to, but we find this to be a useful framing for generating questions about linguistic research. Consequently, many of the included papers are very explicit about trying to examine human language from an external point of view, or in terms of how we could expect human language to be different if altering certain specific parameters of environment or physiology in a controlled thought experiment.

Ch. 2: Many Ways to Say Things

The broad outlines are very much in line with my own thoughts on the topic--there are, indeed, many possibilities for encoding linguistic information for communication. It misses out on the fact that human language does sometimes use continuous analog encoding, and implicitly dismisses the sign-first hypothesis of language evolution. However, the idea that language might be enabled by the availability of a secondary sensory channel (i.e., humans mostly use audio languages because hearing is not as important as sight to most people, and thus there is extra attentional capacity available) is intriguing.

Ch. 3: Intentional Signals

Investigates the utility of a Gricean framework for identifying, as a prerequisite to decoding, non-human continuation--and points out the weaknesses! E.g., that Griceanism implies that human toddlers are incapable of "intentional signalling", because they lack a theory of mind--and any theory that requires us to evaluate the psychological modelling capability of another being's mind before deciding whether or not they are "really" using language is not particularly useful as-is. This article has made me think that an improved understanding of the diversity of human linguistic psychology is a necessary prerequisite to interspecies communication--the neurotypicals will never manage it on their own.

Ch. 4: Getting out of Our Skin

A short paper with an important insight: we should look at interspecific communication on Earth for ideas about how to communicate with aliens. Apparently, creating an inter-species pidgin is far more common than adopting another species' existing native communication system--a feature which is represented in Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary!

Ch. 5: Communicative Resources Beyond the Verbal Tier

Extreme TL;DR: Aliens won't understand how our physical bodies relate to our use of language, and we won't understand theirs, so we'll have to actually think about that explicitly. You should read this paper, because I can't do it justice.

Ch. 6: How Studies of Communication Can Inform SETI

Cites ways in which animal communication systems differ in how they encode information compared to human speech (thus, we should look out for these features in alien signals), and describes a procedure for training birds to respond to human speech, which could be adapted as a basis for establishing communication with aliens. Reminded me of H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy, which hinges on the fact that no one bothered to check if the Fuzzies used speech outside the human audio range.

Ch. 7: Patterns of Communication of Human Complex Societies

I kinda bounced off this one. It seems to be saying that we just need a better understanding of communication in general, and how different communication systems evolve with the environments in which they are used. There might be more to extract from it, but it'll take a few more reads to puzzle out.

Ch. 8: Interstellar Competence

Catalogs the minimum features we can expect to have in common with any aliens with whom we could communicate over interstellar distances, and how humans can control our responses to maximize success in the absence of any additional information about the aliens themselves.

Ch. 9: Why Do We Assume That We Can Decode Alien Languages?

We have yet to decode a single complex animal language, and even lost human languages are Really Hard--sometimes impossible. So, we're gonna have to get real lucky to have the kind of shared context necessary to give meaning to alien signals.

Ch. 10: Xenolinguistic Fieldwork

This was the reason I bought the book! I read a draft of this paper before publication, and I needed to see what the rest of the volume was about. I may be biased, but this was the best chapter--it certainly has the most useful information for authors thinking of writing about alien contact. Claire Bowern, author of Linguistic Fieldwork: A Practical Guide, explains the basic components of fieldwork and how they will need to be adjusted for working with aliens. We are terribly unprepared for this, partly due to lack of, e.g., off-the-shelf recording devices for signals humans can't perceive, and partly because we are not actually that good even at documenting human languages yet. We need much more investment in tools and training.

Ch. 11: Investigating the Foundations of Meaning in a Xenolanguage

Provides an overview of all of semantics (but not pragmatics!), and which components of semantic models might be assumed to be not-just-human universals. This article specifically notes the inadequacy of the Swadesh list for bootstrapping alien vocabulary as it is rooted in human embodied experience, and highlights how differences in alien psychology may affect their conceptions of semantics.

Ch. 12: A Linguistic Perspective on the Drake Equation

Since we don't have data to answer the question, let's focus on better defining the question itself. What factors influence the probability that we could talk to aliens? Unlike Chapter 2, this article recognizes the possibility of non-discreteness (in human SLs). More intelligent aliens may have metalinguistic structures we haven't thought of.

Ch. 13: Cognition, Sensory Input, & Linguistics

A controlled gedankenexperiment in how different sensory abilities might influence language, written by a blind author. The key assumption seems to be that lack of sight may lead to encoding more spatial information, outsourcing the gathering of such information to the collective sensorium of the speaker community. Kinda reminded me of the Deaf concept of "Eyeth" which I was introduced to in Sara Nović's True Biz. This is a solid source of conlang inspiration, although I wonder about the assertion that there are no human languages with specialized terms for the sonic properties of spaces or specific timbres. Seems like a question for Asifa Majid.

Ch. 14: The Design Features of Extraterrestrial Language

Basically just lays out the size of the problem, without solutions. Lots of potentially useful references, though. Maybe there's more here, but the tone of the writing makes me disinclined to spend a lot of time on it.

Ch. 15: Universal Grammar (The Chomsky Chapter)

Argues that universal mathematical principles mean that alien languages will work like human languages... but the convergent similarities being argued for are so Minimal as to be essentially useless for recognition or analysis, and the authors even admit that they are not considering the "externalization system" (i.e., the actual observable parts of language used for communicating) before dismissing understanding it as a mere "engineering problem". I'm not really a fan of modern Chomsky to start with, and this kind of paper is why. This YouTube video is referenced in the endnotes.

Ch. 16: Where Does Universal Grammar Fit in the Universe

Properly contextualizes Hockett's design features! And significantly improves on chapter 15 by arguing for the possibility of more significant convergent structural similarities between human and alien languages due to common "third factors" (i.e., shared physical and information-theoretical constraints). If you just want to read one of the two, read this one, not Chomsky's. Got some neat ideas about different ways alien linguistic cognitive could conceivably be limited compared to humans'. I will be mining this chapter for sci-fi linguistics ideas.

Ch. 17: Learning & Adaptation of Communication Systems

Investigates the effects of physiological and environmental variations of the acoustic output of human-like vocal systems, and argues that 1) alien language systems must have a learning component to account for natural variations in these parameters, and 2) aliens who are unrealistically similar to humans may nevertheless communicate with signals whose acoustic forms are unrecognizable to us.

Ch. 18: Writing Systems & METI

Discusses the design of messages to extraterrestrial intelligences, and argues that writing systems themselves are a valuable source of information about humanity. (Also, aliens might not have alphabets--we're special that way!)

Overall, my recommendation is positive. It's not a perfect book, but it's got some good stuff in there. However, my purposes might not be yours, so I have tried to give an overview of each chapter that will let you evaluate whether or not this collection will be useful to you.

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