What If Marvel Audiences Had to Read Subtitles for Mohawk Dialog?

Episode 6 of season 2 of Marvel's What If... ("What if... Kahhori Reshaped the World?") features Mohawk people and Spanish conquistadors each speaking their own languages on screen, and, excepting a few seconds at a time of English narration, Marvel & Disney+ have trusted audiences to actually read subtitles for nearly all of a 30-minute episode. Good for you, Marvel!

There's a neat trick going on with the subtitling to distinguish the two languages, providing some extra context for people who might not have the ear to easily recognize that the Native Americans and Spaniards are indeed speaking different not-English languages: Mohawk is subtitled in white text, while Spanish is subtitled in yellow text. Not much to analyze there--it's just neat.

However... now I get to rant about subtitles a little bit.

The white and yellow subtitles provided in the "default" presentation of the episode for Anglophone audiences are implemented as "open captions"--text that is "burned in" to the video image, and cannot be dynamically changed. If you switch the language to, say, Spanish, the English subtitles for Spanish dialog don't go away; if you switch to French, the short sections of English dialog are translated to French, but that's the only difference. You have to turn on French closed-caption subtitles separately, and they will display over the burned-in English.

I can only assume that this was done because Disney's streaming platform doesn't support any sort of formatting in closed captions. And sadly, I can't get too mad at Disney in particular for this, because nobody else does any better--Amazon Prime Video has terrible captions, Netflix has terrible captions, Paramount+ has terrible captions, YouTube has terrible captions. And there is no good excuse for any of this. The DVD captioning standard allowed for everything this episode does and far more back in 1996! And yet, nobody really made full use of the possibilities aside from Night Watch, with Lord of the Rings coming in second place. As Pete Bleakley has reminded me (Thanks, Pete!), digital broadcast television, via the CEA-708 closed captioning standard, has had multicolor, positionable closed-captions since the late 1990's, with wide accessibility starting in 2009. Web video, of course, lagged significantly behind, but for a well over a decade now even web browsers have had the built-in capacity to do, as closed-captions, everything that this What if... episode does, and far more.

Come on, streaming companies. If you're going to do captioning at all, please, do captioning right. It's not that hard!

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The Linguistically Interesting Media Index

The Year of Sanderson

Brandon Sanderson has never put a conlang in a book. But he is aware of them, and has done stuff with fictional languages and naming practices. Brandon Sanderson also speaks Korean; not only is he bilingual, but his second language is not just another European language. It's something very different from English which I might expect to have provided him with a greater degree of metalinguistic awareness than the average author, and raises my expectations for linguistic sophistication in his books.

In my review of Larry Niven's Grammar Lesson, I wrote

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.

This is that post. Now, I have not read everything that Brandon has ever written, and I have forgotten some of what I have read, so this will not be completely comprehensive, but we can start with that example from the Mistborn trilogy. (<- Amazon Affiliate link.) A large portion of the plot in the later stages of the story revolves around the interpretation of an ancient prophecy, which is complicated both by magical interference that alters the records, and by actual linguistic drift. Whatever language they speak on the planet Scadrial (which realistically has just one standard language amongst its human inhabitants, given the global level of control exercised by the immortal Lord Ruler) in the Mistborn era, it evidently has an English-like system of strictly gendered animate pronouns, whereas the ancient language of the prophecy has an epicene (gender neutral) third person--a feature which Brandon may have been aware of from Korean! This complicates the process of translation, as any given translator must make a choice about how to render this pronoun in the modern language, which biases the interpretations of the modern characters in plot-significant ways. Good job, Brandon! The names are just.. eh, they're fine. But on the bright side, there is so little in the way of native names and non-English cultural terms that the field is wide open for any conlanger who might be hired to create a proper language--there's very little restriction imposed by the existing linguistic cannon!

The bulk of this review, as you can tell from the title, will focus on the four books from the Year of Sanderson: Tress of the Emerald Sea, The Frugal Wizard's Handbook, Yumi & the Nightmare Painter, and The Sunlit Man. (<- All Amazon Affiliate links.)

It turns out that The Sunlit Man has the most linguistic content to comment upon, so I'll be going through the books in reverse publication order. There is still little enough that I can do a nearly-complete listing of the interesting bits.

Starting on page page 2 of the Dragonsteel Premium Hardcover Edition, we get this:

The man shook him, barking at Nomad in a language he didn’t understand.
“Trans . . . translation?” Nomad croaked.
Sorry, a deep, monotone voice said in his head. We don’t have enough Investiture for that.

which is packed with information: there is translation magic, it's not working right now so we'll have to actually deal with the consequences of a language barrier, but we should expect it to start working eventually because explicitly mentioning it here makes it a massive Chekhov's gun, so we won't be getting a language-learning montage.

Page 21 has two bits of secondary language representation, with usages of diegetic translation and contextual irrelevance:

Another of the officers nodded, staring at Nomad. “Sess Nassith Tor,” he whispered.
Curious, the knight says. I almost understood that. It’s very similar to another language I’m still faintly Connected to.
“Any idea which one?” Nomad growled.
No. But . . . I think . . . Sess Nassith Tor . . . It means something like . . . One Who Escaped the Sun.
...

Glowing Eyes gestured to Nomad. “Kor Sess Nassith Tor,” he said with a sneer, then kicked Nomad again for good measure.
A few officers scrambled forward and grabbed him under the arms to drag him off.

For all I know, this connects with stuff in the Stormlight Archive, which I haven't read yet because I'm waiting for the series to be complete, but since I know from his own public statements that Brandon has not created any full conlangs, I kinda suspect this is ad-hoc--but it works because there is little enough there that the possibilities for how to analyze it and justify the translation are practically unrestricted, and it's impossible to prove any inconsistency. But, we also know that whatever this language is, it is definitely not just a relex of English, because Brandon had enough awareness to not allow for a word-for-word matchup! (I'd guess that "nassith" is some kind of participle, but like I said, interpretations are pretty much unrestricted with this little data.) In the second instance, we could try to make some guesses about what "kor" means based on the surrounding contextual actions, but ultimately it just doesn't actually matter, except that the glowy-eyed guy is emphasizing something, which we get from the italics.

Page 28 gives us a Failure To Communicate and a reminder of why translation magic isn't working, and that Nomad needs to be working on fixing that--i.e., reiterating that we ain't gonna see Nomad doing any monolingual fieldwork. After that, we get all the way to page 64 before we get some more metalinguistic description:

He said this in Alethi on purpose, which wasn’t his native tongue. Previous experiences had taught him not to speak in his own language, lest it slip out in the local dialect. That was how Connection worked; what Auxiliary was doing would make his soul think he’d been raised on this planet, so its language came as naturally to him as his own once had.

So, we get a name for a language that Nomad actually knows, we know that it isn't his native language (so maybe that'll come up later?), and we get some more details of how the translation magic actually works, which turns out to be probably the most sensible way to do it!  

Pages 71 and 79 tell us about the linguistic environment on this particular planet:

“Is this the stranger? What is his name?”
“I was not graced with such information,” Rebeke said. “He doesn’t seem able to understand the words I speak. As if . . . he doesn’t know language.”
Zeal made a few motions with his hands, gesturing at his ears, then tapping his palms together. He thought maybe Nomad was deaf? A reasonable guess, Nomad supposed. No one else on this planet had tried that approach.

So, apparently there is only one acoustic language on this planet (which turns out to be quite reasonable under the circumstances, as it was in Mistborn), and people are not generally aware that there can be other languages. However, there is also at least one sign language--so, yay for sign representation, and, wow, that implies quite a lot about this very tiny society that's struggling to survive. How the heck do they maintain a sign-using language community when there probably aren't that many deaf people around? But, moving on to page 79:

“I offer this thought: do you suppose he’s from a far northern corridor? They speak in ways that, on occasion, make a woman need to concentrate to understand.”
“If it pleases you to be disagreed with, Compassion,” Contemplation said, “I don’t think this is a mere accent. No, not at all. Regardless, there are more pressing matters.[...]”

it turns out that at least some people do have an awareness of dialect continua! Which, in contrast to the situation on Scadrial, absolutely should exist in this setting. 

On page 133, after getting his translation magic to work, Nomad manages to explain the concept of other languages to a local:

“Why do you do that?” Rebeke asked. “Talk gibberish sometimes?”“It’s my own language,” he said. “In other places, Rebeke, people speak all kinds of words you wouldn’t recognize.”

And then on page 175, we get an in-character acknowledgment of the underlying language barrier:

“Wait, how tall are these mountains?” Nomad asked.
“Tall,” Zeal said. “At least a thousand feet.”
A thousand feet? Like a single thousand?
At first, he assumed that the Connection had stopped working, and he hadn’t interpreted those words correctly.

Not much to say about that aside from, hey, any representation of someone actually having realistic struggles with a non-native language is a rare thing and it's nice to see it acknowledged.

On page 238, we get a little background on the Alethi language that Nomad knows but is not his mother tongue, and also a word in his actual mother tongue with diegetic translation:

They called themselves the Alethi, but we knew them as the Tagarut. The breakers, it means.

On page 290, we get a fun cultural note:

“You blessed fool,” Hardy said. “We’re all a group of blessed fools.”
Wait, the knight says. Is that fellow using the word “blessed” as . . . as a curse?
“It’s a conservative religious society,” Nomad said in Alethi. “You use the tools you’re given.”

This is a good acknowledgment that the common sources of curse words vary from culture to culture. The way that Quebecois French speakers swear is etymologically quite different from how the overlapping English-speaking Canadian community swears! It's also worth noting here that for the most part, Brandon uses a non-diegetic translation convention with dialog tags clarifying the diegetic language when it is other-than-standard to indicate the variety of fictional languages present in this setting.

Page 342 is a comparative gold mine, where we get some information about Nomad's mother tongue and about the local culture:

“It is the name I deserve. And it sounds a little like my birth name, in my own language.”
“Which is?”
“Sigzil,” he whispered. [...]
“Nomad,” Compassion said. “A wanderer with no place. That name no longer fits you, Sigzel, because you have a place. Here, with us.” She said the name a little oddly, according to their own accents.
...

“We name you Zellion,” Contemplation said. [...]
“It means One Who Finds,” Compassion said. “Though I know not the original language.”
“It’s from Yolen,” he whispered. “Where my master was born.”

So, now we know that, whatever the word for "nomad" is in Nomad / Zellion's mother tongue, it is phonetically close to "Sigzil"; and we know that the local language has at least slightly different phonological rules, such that they can only approximate it as "Sigzel"; and we've got a probable participle or relativized verb from from a third language, from a named planet so we can potentially correlate that with information from other books in the Cosmere. I really want to emphasize here that, although Brandon isn't being particularly innovative with interpretive techniques (we've just got straight diegetic translation going on), and there are no actual conlangs backing this up, Brandon is still managing to include references to realistic linguistic features that highlight differences that should exist between different fictional languages, which does a lot to add linguistic depth to the setting even without a fully constructed conlang or even a worked-out naming language.

On page 374, we get a couple more names of languages, including, finally, an identification of (a clear Anglicization of) Sigzil/Nomad/Zellion's mother tongue:

“Rosharan,” the man said in his own tongue. “Can we speak in a civilized language, please? Do you speak Malwish?”
Zellion shook his head, pretending not to understand and hoping they didn’t speak any of his native languages. At least he could honestly claim ignorance of Azish, having been forced to overwrite the ability to speak that with the local language.

And that is confirmed on page 413:

It was more of an Alethi thing actually, not an Azish one.

And there we have it: The complete overview of linguistic representation in The Sunlit Man.

Yumi & the Nightmare Painter has a very different approach to linguistic representation. Our two lead characters, Yumi and Painter (aka Nikaro) speak related languages (spoilers: one being a descendant of the other), and this is referenced to explain why they can understand each other, but there is no practical indication in the interactions between Yumi and Nikaro that there are any noticeable differences in the languages (thanks again to some magical translation shenanigans). There is a mention near the end of the book that people from Nikaro's city cannot understand those from Yumi's when the general populations finally meet, so they are in fact different languages, but for all that it impacts foreground character interactions, they might as well be speaking exactly the same language. Accordingly, there is much less material to catalog and analyze.

On page 3 of the Dragonsteel Premium Hardcover Edition, we get an introduction to the term "hion":

After losing his staring match, the nightmare painter strolled along the street, which was silent save for the hum of the hion lines.

which is thoroughly described by the following several paragraphs. But then on page 10, we get introduced to the term "yoki-hijo", with far more ambiguous translation:

The Chosen. The yoki-hijo. The girl of commanding primal spirits.

Are these all different titles? Or does "yoki-hijo" mean "The Chosen"? Or does it mean "the girl of commanding primal spirits"? This gets resolved by implication on page 13, where we have an example of appositional translation:

Yumi was one of the Chosen, picked at birth, granted the ability to influence the hijo, the spirits.

OK, so "hijo" means spirits, so "yoki-hijo" probably means "the girl of commanding primal spirits". That's a lot to pack into the word "yoki" and the semantics of whatever construction is implied by the juxtaposition. Quite a potential challenge for any conlanger who might try to engineer a proper conlang compatible with the textual evidence. (Spoiler: I'd bet the "hi-" in "hion" and "hijo" are meant to be related.)

On the next page (14), we get explicit translation by the narrator (who happens to be Hoid):

Liyun, her kihomaban—a word that meant something between a guardian and a sponsor. We’ll use the term “warden” for simplicity.

Back on page 12, we get introduced to the word "tobok", with a definition implied by context in the process of getting dressed:

Then the tobok, in two layers of thick colorful cloth, with a wide bell skirt.

And explicit translation for the term "getuk":

Torish clogs—they call them getuk—feel like bricks tied to my feet.

"Kihomaban" and "getuk" appear nowhere else after they are introduced and defined, so they seem to serve the sole purpose of providing scene setting--they tell you something about what the language they come from sounds like, and Hoid providing definitions reminds you that these people Are Not Speaking English. "Tobok" gets reused throughout the novel as a borrowed-into-English cultural term for this specific type of clothing, but never in dialog or thoughts by the actual characters. This word is apparently inspired by "bok", the Korean word for "clothing", which backs up the general Korean-inspired aesthetic of the whole book.

Also on page 14, we get an explicit discussion of historical linguistics and grammar:

Yumi quickly rose. “Is it time, Warden-nimi?” she said, with enormous respect.
Yumi’s and Painter’s languages shared a common root, and in both there was a certain affectation I find hard to express in your tongue. They could conjugate sentences, or add modifiers to words, to indicate praise or derision. Interestingly, no curses or swears existed among them. They would simply change a word to its lowest form instead.

This obviously, and Brandon has publically admitted, directly ripped off from Korean and Japanese. But much like "kihomaban" and "getuk", we don't really see this surfaced in the text; instead, dialog is annotated with parenthesized "(lowly)" and "(highly)" where relevant. That's not really something I would've predicted would work, and the fact that Brandon is massively famous and popular already means that I can't really use this book as evidence that it's a good idea. Maybe it's a failed experiment. But, I haven't actually seen any complaints about it in any reviews so far, so maybe that's a positive signal. I probably need to do a survey about this--comment if you have thoughts!

A good bit later, across pages 44 and 45, we get the common nouns "kon":

“Six? A bowl normally costs two hundred kon.”
...
He laid a ten-kon coin on the counter,

Which in context is pretty obviously a unit of currency. After that, all the language evidence is in  proper names of people and places. For Yumi's time period (and thus Yumi's language), we have:

Personal Names: Chaeyung Dwookim Gyundok Honam Hwanji Liyun Samjae Sunjun Yumi
Places: Torio Gongsha Ihosen
Common Nouns: getuk kihomaban tobok

For Nikaro's time period, we have:

Personal Names: Akane Gaino Guri Hikiri Ikonora Ito Izumakamo Lee Masaka Nikaro Shinja Shishi Sukishi Takanda Tatomi Tesuaka Tojin Usasha Yuinshi
Places: Fuhima Futinoro Jito Kilahito Nagadan Shinzua
Common Nouns: kon hion

That's a decent corpus of words for a conlanger to start working with. The Nikaro-era names are pretty clearly Japanese-inspired, while the Yumi-era names are more Korean-esque, which implies a quite significant level of cultural changes in naming practices and and phonological shifts between Yumi's ancient language and Nikaro's modern one.

The Frugal Wizard's Handbook for Surviving Medieval England has some explicit paratextual discussion of linguistic issues, but otherwise not much of note. There are culturally-appropriate names for the simulated time period, which is neat and reflects a commendable research effort, but actually feels a little off given that the native-to-the-world characters speak essentially modern English, not the language in which those names would have been generated. There are a few other period-appropriate terms but for the most part they just get diegetically translated. There are two excerpts from the eponymous Handbook which directly address linguistic issues; on page 67 of the Dragonsteel Premium Hardcover Edition, we get this explanation:

GUARANTEE TWO
The people on Great Britain will speak a language that is intelligible to modern English speakers. We chose our dimensional band specifically for this reason!

In other words, there's a darn good diegetic reason why there is no language barrier in this interuniversal travel situation!

And then much later on page 146:

UNINTELLIGIBLE DIMENSIONS
The population of the British Isles in these dimensions doesn’t speak a language intelligible to any known Earth language speakers. Perfect for linguists or those who want an extra challenge! Visit the speedrun section of our website for current records for full dictionary creation in the various language groups.

Which I like to point out just because acknowledgment of linguists makes me happy. On page 132, we have a situation where a proper language might become relevant, as our protagonist runs into some foreigners who do not speak I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-English; But then... it turns out that their leader does speak English after all. Oh well.

The most interesting thing about this book is the parallel between the exposition provided by excerpts from the Handbook and the more non-diegetic linguistic and cultural notes in Sara Nović's True Biz. With two examples of intercalated paratext, I've gotta think this is a solid expositional technique for linguistic information that deserves further attention. (And I've really gotta just write something up on paratext in general one of these days--especially the more traditional forms, like glossaries and pronunciation guides.)

Tress of the Emerald Sea has even fewer references to language, but there are a few. Starting on page 10 of the Dragonsteel Premium Hardcover Edition, we get a bit of description that acknowledges the existence of multiple languages and writing systems on Tress's world:

As they ate, she considered showing the two men her new cup. It was made completely of tin, stamped with letters in a language that ran top to bottom instead of left to right.

And much later on page 254, we get the sole mention of the (Anglicized) name of Tress's language, and a reference to the translation magic that we also see used in The Sunlit Man:

“Are you even speaking Klisian?” Tress asked.
“Technically yes, though I’m using Connection to translate my thoughts, which are in a language you’ve never heard of.[...]"

And while I don't want to ascribe a character's statements to the author (I have no idea how much Brandon knows about psycholinguistics or translation theory, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt), I should point out for the sake of readers with less linguistic training that 

1. Not everyone thinks in language--which will be a big "well, duh" to some of you, and absolutely mindblowing to some others. This particular character apparently does, though.
2. Thinking in one language and then translating those thoughts into another language to speak is not a good way to think. It's very inefficient, and it's not how high-level speakers of adult-acquired languages work. Whether or not you perceive yourself as thinking "in" a particular language, for communicative purposes you should be aiming to encode your thoughts directly into the target language in a single step, not doing translation in your head. I have to assume that translation magic is being used sub-optimally in this case compared to its presentation in The Sunlit Man, and there's just sufficient power behind it to make the results seem competent and fluent anyway. 

On page 94, we get introduced to a deaf character (Fort) using an assistive device (acquired from off-world--Tress's planet has a far lower technological level) which transcribes speech for him and allows him to write his reponses. Brandon makes use of bold face to indicate writing on Fort's communication board to distinguish it from acoustic speech in dialog. But the fact that such a device is both needed and useful brings up all sorts of questions about the broader society on Tress's world, which are much more interesting than the mere fact of the typographical convention used to represent it in the story.

We are told that, before acquiring his assistive device, Fort relied on lipreading, despite its limitations (and we are warned about the actual limitations of strict lipreading, so good job dispelling popular misconceptions there, Brandon!), and that this was in his childhood--so he didn't acquire language and literacy, and then lose his hearing as an adult. The Coppermind page for Fort claims that he previously communicated with a mix of sign language and lip reading, but that's not actually supported by the text--the only explicit mention of sign language is on page 448:

And Fort . . . well, he understood. Not because he knew another sign language, but because of that same bond.

And that is narration, not attributed to Fort himself, and doesn't actually indicate that he does know any sign languages. There's an earlier oblique reference on page 293:

Fort didn’t fill the time with idle chitchat, and while you might ascribe this to his deafness, I’ve known more than a few Deaf people who were quite the blabberhands.

But again, that is the narrator talking, and Hoid does not actually say that Fort is capable of using sign language--only that he has met other Deaf people who do. 

So, we have a deaf guy on a pre-industrial world who knows how to read and write. His parents cared about him enough to ensure that he was not subject to language deprivation and could learn to lipread for as much as that is worth, and then to become literate. This indicates surprisingly progressive views about deaf people, and we can also infer from other dialog that deaf people aren't particular rare on this world (because someone once met a deaf dancer as well, who might have actually been a made-up stand-in for a deaf princess--but hey, deaf princess!) It's possible that Fort did grow up with sign language, but simply has to deal with a world full of other people who don't understand it themselves, so the board is useful--but given that no character other than narrator, Hoid, ever mentions sign, and Hoid does not mention sign when we are told how Fort actually communicates, it seems that there is not enough of a population of deaf people with the ability to find and interact with each other on this world to sustain a viable sign language community. That's a weird contrast with having the social support to learn lipreading, reading, and writing, and that being common enough that one character was able to meet two socially high-functioning deaf people in not-that-many years of traveling the world. Not at all inconsistent, just kinda weird, and an interesting contrast to the situation in The Sunlit Man, where there is an awareness of sign language despite the extremely small world and corresponding extremely small population.. Maybe everyone on Tress's world is actually a horrible audist and abused Fort into learning to interface with a language he could not perceive in its intended medium, but I kinda like the idea that everyone on Tress's world is just super supportive of deaf people while being completely ignorant of the concept of sign language.

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How is Castlevania like Luca?

Remember when I reviewed Disney's Luca? It's an excellent example of how to screw up linguistic worldbuilding.

Well, I recently watched Castlevania: Nocturne on Netflix, and while it follows up on the first Castlevania series in not really trying to do anything particularly notable with language, there is one brief scene in episode 5 that completely breaks the setting for me.

Nocturne is set primarily in France, in the midst of the French revolution, with plenty of native French characters. We can thus assume that everybody is supposed to be speaking French, as there are no language barriers presented, and it would be ridiculous for all of the French people to be speaking anything else. This includes the main character Richter Belmont (a descendent of the Belmont vampire hunters we were introduced to in the earlier Castlevania series), who grew up in America and thus can be presumed to be a native speaker of English, but who, like everyone else, displays no difficulty in communicating with all the French people he now lives with.

Now, with all that background explained: at 10:45 in Episode 5, Richter Belmont says to a group of girls arranging costumes for the personifications of the revolutionary principles of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity", that, quote:

You have to be a man to be Fraternity. It means "brotherhood".

To which the reply is

"Sisternity", then.

Now, in English, that should be "sorority", if we want to parallel the derivation of "fraternity". But, I checked with some actual French people just to be sure, and my suspicions were confirmed: this is a conversation that just does not make sense in French, especially not in the historical sociological context in which it occurs. And it seems fairly obvious that the dialog was not originally written with French in mind; there are French audio and subtitle tracks available for the series now, but when I first watched it, the only options were English and Japanese. You can't even say "Fraternity means 'brotherhood'" in French, partially because a straightforward word-for-word translation comes out as the tautological "La fraternité signifie la fraternité." ("Brotherhood means brotherhood."), but also because... that's not actually what "fraternité" means. In fact, if you ask Google Translate how to say "sisterhood" in French, guess what it tells you? Fraternité! Not, incidentally, "sororité", which, while it is a valid French word, is a pretty darn rare one. "Fraternité" would be understood by everyone involved as a gender-inclusive term--besides which, "fraternité" is a grammatically feminine word in French anyway and the strictly female-coded Marianne is the artistic personification of the French Republic and all three virtues of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity!

I asked several French speakers and actual French people how they would express this conversation in French if they absolutely had to, and none of them would do it, because it just seemed stupid. Since we do now have access to a French dub and subtitles, however, let's see how they officially translated that scene:

- Seul un homme peut incarner la fraternité. Ça vient du mot "frère".
- La Petite-sœur-nité, alors.

"Only a man can incarnate fraternity. It comes from the word 'brother'."
"The little Sister-nity, then."

(French people, is that actually any better than the original English? Update: Non.)

As far as I can tell with my limited French competence, that's about the best you can do to render the intent of the original English is a way that doesn't come across as nonsenical in French, but it still turns out to be factually wrong. Women have portrayed Fraternity, and "Fraternité" does not come from the word "frère"--it comes from the Latin "frāter", which is also the origin of the word "frère", and does mean "brother"... but it also means "sibling", and the two words "fraternité" and "frère" developed independently from their common root (never forget, Etymology Isn't Destiny!)

There is really only one way to save this scene--assume that Richter is, in fact, not merely a non-native French speaker, but also an idiot, who is actually just wrong, and the women he is talking to are just humoring him because they don't feel like getting into an argument with an idiot. In that case, the use of the neologism "La Petite-sœur-nité" kinda makes sense, as it subtly highlights through non-parallelism with the Latinate "frater-" that "fraternity" does not in fact derive from "frère" just as the rarer-but-valid "sororité" does not derive from "sœur" (sister). 

But if we are generous and assume that that was in fact the intended interpretation... the writers did not do the work to properly set that up or make it obvious to the audience. Don't be like them. More precisely: don't try to do clever things that exploit etymologies and translation-equivalents of English words to imply things about some other language and culture. Even if you are using a pure-English translation convention, you've got to look into the culture that you are portraying-in-translation enough to know how their language and values will influence how they would talk about things. Sometimes you can get away with, say, using English puns and just assuming that the implied translator did a really good job of replacing an equivalent pun in the diegetic language, but when the entire content of the conversation is just dumb in the cultural context in which you have set your story... that doesn't fly.

Update: Someone asked how this is handled in Spanish, and it turns out... it's even worse:

- Debes ser hombre para ser Fraternidad. Significa hermandad.
- ¿Y eso qué tiene que ver?

See, "hermandad" is explicitly gender-neutral in Spanish, where the words for "brother" and "sister" share the same stem "herman-". Which makes Richter's statement so completely bizarre that the "sisternity" comment would itself be nonsensical--and so it is replaced with "What does that have to do with anything?" Which is honestly kind of an improvement, as it makes it seem like the characters are acknowledging that Richter is being an idiot, rather than us audience members having to infer it.

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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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Some Old Spaceship Models

Working on models of spacecraft modules this week reminded me that I once was actually quite into this kind of thing, so I dug out some old POV files of spacecraft models stored on an external harddrive from my childhood (the files, not the harddrive--that's only a few years old), and I had quite a lot of stuff saved that I had forgotten about. Apparently, I was at one point working on a model of a universal docking adapter, which I never finished:

My old spacecraft models have a number of other repeated components--engines, fuel tanks, etc.--but most of them do not have their own separate model files yet. A few which do include these rocket engine exhaust plumes:

And this RCS flywheel housing:

And it seems that I got most of the way through a decent recreation of the forest domes from the Valley Forge, from the old sci-fi film Silent Running:

And it seems I have one incomplete spacecraft design loosely based on the Valley Forge aesthetic:

And I've got a partial section of a spar intended for supporting a fission reactor, which I think was just an experiment in trying to get gold foil surface texturing to look right:

In terms of complete spacecraft models, the Minos is not fully detailed but it is a whole ship, which I used for TTRPG purposes in high school:

Here's a model of a rotating dumbell station, with the crew module at one end connected to a central airlock, and a counterweight for equipment:

Next we have a nuclear rocket design, with the engine markedly far away from the crew quarters and other ship components on a long spar:

A small asteroid tugboat:

Which is carried by a bussard ramjet:

And I played around a little bit with schematics for possibly slightly more realistic magscoops / magsails:

Here we have a large interstellar probe with instrument booms:

A gigantic tanker with three engines and a tiny little crew module up front:

And a final design vaguely modelled off the Orion concept, but not actually using an Orion pusher plate, which I called the Pilgrim:

The key feature of this last ship is the rotating passenger sections supported by cabling on winches, which swings and and out to keep the passenger modules aligned with apparent gravity as the ship switches between thrust and spin.

I've put all of these old models, my new tiling modules, and some other cruft that needs organizing, in a GitHub repository, so y'all can follow along as I clean stuff up and get those old components integrated into my new spacecraft design system.