A Brief Note on John Wick

The actual Russian dialog in the John Wick movies is, uh... not great? But, the fact that John Wick is diegetically fluent in Russian ends up kicking off the plot of the first movie, when Russian gangster Iosef tries to buy John's car. Iosef asks how much, John says it ain't for sale, then, from  the script:

                                              IOSEF
                         (in Russian, subtitled)
                     Everything's got a f[*****]g price.
                         
                                              JOHN
                         (in Russian, subtitled)
                     Maybe so... but I don't.

          Taken aback by John's fluency, he watches as John enters the
          vehicle, guns the engine, and drives off.

(Censored for sensitive eyes.)

However, that's not actually how it was filmed! The Russian dialog for that scene in the movie is as follows (or at least, my interpretation of it; the pronunciations are bad):

                                              IOSEF
                     У всего, сука, своя цена.
                         
                                              JOHN
                     А у этой суки нету.

This is closed-captioned as

                                              IOSEF
                     Everything's got a price, b[***]h.
                         
                                              JOHN
                     Not this b[***]h.

Which is not word-for-word, but essentially accurate. Given that Iosef did not expect John to understand him, we have to assume that his switch into Russian was expressing frustration to himself, even though it contains a vocative, clearly addressing the sentiment to John. Possibly, he was going to switch back into English to attempt another pitch, after reminding himself that everything has a price. And if that's what had happened, then this insertion of Russian dialog would've been just a bit of implicit character exposition, with a bit of an Easter Egg for a Russophone audience. But John responding at all suddenly changes the dynamic. That's also an implicit character exposition moment--we learn that John, despite being American, speaks Russian for some reason, which is further explicated later on. But in the scene, Iosef realizes that John must have understood him, and knows that Iosef was insulting him!  That turns the outcome of the interaction into a face-threatening issue. Now, in addition to still wanting the car which John has denied him, Iosef has to back up the implied threat of his insult to save face.

The change in dialog from the script also adds a layer of double meaning, because John has his (female) dog with him in the car. Thus, Iosef could be interpreted as insulting the dog (which--spoiler alert--he later kills), which John has a strong emotional attachment to. (It turns out the Russian word for "female dog" has exactly the same insulting double-meaning that it does in English!) Out of context, John's reply could even be interpreted as claiming that his dog is not for sale, as opposed to his car--and both interpretations are true! The same cannot be said about Iosef's statement, but the oblique association is a nice addition to the scene as filmed.

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Human Actors Shouldn't Be Able to Speak Alien Languages

Isn't a little weird that humans can speak Na'vi? Or that aliens can learn to speak English? Or, heck, Klingon! The Klingon language is weird, but every single sound is used in human languages.

Of course, there's an obvious non-diegetic reason for that. The aliens are played by human actors. Actors wanna act. Directors want actors to act. It's less fun if all of your dialog is synthesized by the sound department. But while it is an understandable and accepted trope, we shouldn't mistake it for representing a plausible reality.

First, aliens might not even use sound to communicate! Sound is a very good medium for communication--most macroscopic animals on Earth make use of it to some extent. But there are other options: electricity, signs, touch, light, color and patterning, chemicals. Obviously, a human actor will not, without assistance, be able to pronounce a language encoded in changing patterns of chromatophores in skin, nor would a creature that spoke that language have much hope of replicating human speech. But since sound is a good and common medium of communication, let's just consider aliens that do encode language in sound.

The argument was recently presented to me that aliens should be able to speak human languages, and vice-versa, due to convergent evolution. An intelligent tool-using species must have certain physical characteristics to gain intelligence and use tools, therefore... I, for one, don't buy the argument that this means humanoid aliens are likely to start with, but supposing we do: does being humanoid in shape imply having a human-like vocal tract, or a vocal tract capable of making human-like noises? I propose that it does not. For one thing, even our closest relatives, the various great apes, cannot reproduce our sounds, and we can only do poor approximations of theirs. Their mouths are different shapes, the throats are different shapes, they have different resonances and constriction points. We have attempted to teach apes sign languages not just because they lack the neurological control to produce the variety of speech sounds that we do, but also because the sounds they can produce aren't the right ones anyway. Other, less-closely-related animals have even more different vocal tracts, and there is no particular reason to think they would converge on a human-like sound producing apparatus if any of them evolved to be more externally human-like. We can safely assume that creatures from an entirely different planet would be even less similar to us in fine anatomic detail. So, Jake Sully should not be able to speak Na'vi in his human body, and should not be able to speak English in his avatar body--yet we see Na'vi speaking English and humans speaking Na'vi all the time in those movies.

And that's just considering creatures that make sounds in essentially the same way that we do: by using the lungs to force air through vibrating and resonant structures connected with the mouth and nose. Not all creatures that produce sound do so with their breath, and not all creatures that produce sound with their breath breathe through structures in their heads! Intriguingly, cetaceans and aliens from 40 Eridani produce sound by moving air through vibrating structures between internal reservoirs, rather than while inhaling or exhaling--they're using air moving through structures in their heads, but not breath!

Hissing cockroaches make noise by expelling air from their spiracles. Arguably, this should be the basis for Na'vi speech as well: nearly all of the other animals on Pandora breathe through holes in their chests, with no obvious connection between the mouth and lungs. They also generally have six limbs and multiple sets of eyes. Wouldn't it have been cooler to see humanoid aliens with those features, and a language to match? But, no; James Cameron inserted a brief shot of a monkey-like creature with partially-fused limbs, no operculi, and a single set of eyes to provide a half-way-there justification for the evolution of Na'vi people who are just like humans, actually.

Many animals produce sound by stridulation. No airflow required. Cicadas use a different mechanism to produce their extremely loud songs: they have structures called tymbals which are crossed by stiff ribs; flexing muscles attached to the timbals causes the ribs to pop, and the rest of the structure to vibrate. It's essentially the same mechanism that makes sound when you stretch or compress a bendy straw (or, as Wikipedia calls them, straws with "an adjustable-angle bellows segment"). This sound is amplified and adjusted by passage through resonant chambers in the insects' abdomens. Some animals use percussion on the ground to produce sounds for communication. Any of these mechanisms could be recruited by a highly intelligent species as a means of producing language, without demanding any deviation from an essentially-humanoid body plan.

There is, of course, one significant exception: birds have a much more flexible sound-production apparatus than mammals, and some of them are capable of reproducing human-like sounds, even though they do it by a completely different mechanism (but it does still involve expelling air from the lungs through the mouth and nose!) Lyrebirds in particular seem to have the physiological capacity to mimic just about anything... but they extent to which they choose to imitate unnatural or human sounds is limited. Parrots and corvids are known to specifically imitate human speech, but they do so with a distinct accent; their words are recognizable, but they do not sound like humans. And amongst themselves, they do not make use of those sounds. Conversely, intraspecific communication among birds tends to make use of much simpler sound patterns, many of which humans can imitate, about as well as birds can imitate us, by whistling. So, sure, some aliens may be able to replicate human speech--but they should have an accent, and if their sound production systems are sufficiently flexible to produce our sounds by different means, there is no reason they should choose to restrict themselves to human-usable sounds in their own languages. Similarly, humans may be able to reproduce some alien languages, but they will not sound like human languages--and when's the last time you heard a human actor in alien makeup whistling? (Despite the fact that this is a legitmate form of human communication as well!)

The most flexible vocal apparatus at all would be something that mimics the action of an electronic speaker: directly moving a membrane through muscular action to reproduce any arbitrary waveform. As just discussed, birds come pretty close to capturing this ability, but they aren't quite there. There are a few animals that produce noise whose waveform is directly controlled by muscular oscillation which controls a membrane, but they are very small: consider bees and mosquitoes, whose buzzing is the result of their rapid wing motions (or, in the case of bumblebees, muscular vibrations of the thorax). Hummingbirds are much bigger than those insects, and they can actually beat their wings fast enough to create audible buzzing sounds (hence, I assume, the name "humming"bird), but they are still prety small animals. And despite these examples of muscule-driven buzzing, it seems rather unlikely that a biological entity--or at least, one which works at all similarly to us--could have the muscular response speed and neurological control capabilities to replicate the complex waveforms of human speech through that kind of mechanism. But if they did (say, like the Tines from Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep), just like parrots and crows, why would their native communication systems happen to use any sounds that were natural for humans?

Now, some people might argue with my assertion that "any of these mechanisms could be recruited... as a means of producing language". That doesn't really impinge on my more basic point that an alien language should not reasonably be expected to be compatible with the human vocal apparatus, but let's go ahead and back up the assertion anyway. Suppose a certain creature's sound-production apparatus isn't even flexible enough to reproduce the kinds of distinctions humans use in whistled speech, based on modulating pitch and amplitude (which cicadas certainly can). Suppose, in fact, that it can produce only four distinct sounds. That should be doable by anybody that can produce sound ata ll--heck, there are more than 4 ways of clapping your hands. With 2 consecutive sounds, you can produce 16 distinct words. If you allow 3, it goes up to 80 words. At a word length of 4 or less, you've got 336 possible words. So far, that doesn't sound like very much. But then, there are 1360 possible words of length 5 or less, and 5456 of length 6 or less. At a length of 7, you get 21,840 possible words--comparable to the average vocabulary of an adult English speaker. The average length of English words is a little less than 5 letters, and we frequently (9 letters) use words that are longer than 7 letters, so needing to go up to 7 to fit your entire adult vocabulary isn't too bad. And that's before we even consider the ability to us homophones to compress the number of distinct words needed! So: we might argue about exactly how many words are needed for a fully-functional language with equivalent expressive power to anything humans use, but through the power of combinatorics, even small numbers of basic phonetic segments can produce huge numbers of possible words--indisputably more than any number we might come up with as a minimum requirement. A language with only four sounds might be difficult for humans to use, as it would seem repetitive and difficult to segment... but we're talking about aliens here. If 4 sounds is all their bodies have to work with, their brains would simply specialize to efficiently process those specific types of speech sounds, just as our brains specialize for our speech sounds.

Now, to be clear, this is not intended to disparage any conlanger who's making a language for aliens and using human-compatible IPA sounds to do so. It's an established trope! And even if it's not ever used in a film or audio drama, it can be fun. There are plenty of awesome, beautiful examples of conlangs of this type, and there's no inherent problem with making more if that's what you want to do. Y'all do what you want. But we should not mistake adherence to the trope for real-world plausibility! And it would be great to see more Truly Alien Languages out there.

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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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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OK, fine, I'll do Arrival

But first, we have to talk about the Story of Your Life, Ted Chiang's novella on which the movie Arrival was based.

(As usual, both of those are Amazon Affiliate links.)

For those who don't know yet, Arrival and Story of Your Life are about the arrival of seven-legged aliens (known simply as Heptapods... because they have seven legs) on Earth,, and Louise Banks's work to decipher their language so humans can talk with them. Or... well, that's what happens. What they are about is a little more complicated.

(Incidentally, I previously reviewed some of Ted Chiang's other stories.)

The novella doesn't show us any of the alien language, but it says a lot about the structure of the language and about linguistics. For example, we know about Heptapod A (the aliens' audio language) that

"The recording sounded vaguely like that of a wet dog shaking the water out of its fur."

In other words, it doesn't use human speech sounds at all. Which is exactly what we should expect from an alien language, really, even though such depictions are conspicuously missing from most movie and TV depiction of aliens--a fact I complained about already in my review of the Halo TV series. This also highlights an issue with xenolinguistics that rarely if ever comes up when doing fieldwork among humans: We might not be able to distinguish alien phonemes! We might not even physically be capable of hearing the frequency bands that contain distinguishing information for alien phonemes! Even if aliens use sound to communicate, deciphering alien languages is going to require a lot more technological assistance than deciphering unknown languages of our species does.

After hearing this recording, Louise, the protagonist and linguist of the story, tells the General trying to recruit her that

"the only way to learn an unknown language is to interact with a native speaker, and by that I mean asking questions, holding a conversation, that sort of thing."

That is... not strictly true. Lost ancient languages (e.g., ancient Egyptian, via the Rosetta stone) have been deciphered with no interaction with existing speakers. But, it's close to true--in every case where we have deciphered a lost language, there was some other source of information available that allowed us to connect form with meaning; parallel translations, or identifying relations to other known languages, etc. So, in Louise's situation, dealing with an extraterrestrial language for which no such auxiliary sources could possibly exist, I might well respond to the General in the same way. 

(If you want to see what this kind of deciphering-a-language-by-conversation stuff looks like in real life, Dan Everett--the Pirahã guy--has a demonstration on YouTube.)

But, the audio language of the Heptapods, known as Heptapod A, is not the most interesting bit of the story. The narratively-important language is Heptapod B, a non-linear two-dimensional written language with no regular correspondence to their spoken language. Heptapod B is not a developed conlang, although it has inspired conlangs like Alex Fink & Sai's UNLWS, and we do get a lot of aesthetic descriptions of it which one could use to try to create a realization of it:

Logograms are stuck together in a giant conglomeration -- sounds kinda like the 3D language of the Demons in Rosemary Kirstein's The Lost Steersman.

Argument roles are indicated by relative orientation compared to the verb -- this feature shows up in the 2D conlang Pinuyo.

Adverbs (or at least the adverb "clearly") can be expressed by regularly morphing the curve of strokes in a verb glyph, and various other semantic features can be indicated by varying a stroke's curvature, thickness, or manner of undulation; or the relative size, distance, or orientation of radicals --  this makes Heptapod B sound like a "fusional" 2D language, as described by Sai.

The overall impression of large Heptapod B utterances is of "fanciful praying mantids drawn in a cursive style" -- which kinda reminds me of Ouwi.

But lest the complexity and integration described for Heptapod B begin to seem impossible to realize for anything usable by a human... "I had seen a similarly high degree of integration before in calligraphic designs,"

So, theoretically, something which fits the design description of Heptapod B should actually be instantiable, even though nobody has actually managed it yet. (Or at least, not made it public that they have done so.) Just... actually using it would be a major undertaking, just like designing a highly-integrated bit of Arabic calligraphy.

Of course, the science fiction bit is not actually realizable--that being that learning Heptapod B, a language that does confine the expression of information to a linear format isomorphic to the flow of time, allows one to break out of the perception of time itself as linear, and see one's entire timeline as a whole.

In the novella, this does not grant anyone any special powers. It's just a vehicle for philosophical ponderings on the nature of free will, and the multiple possible formulations of physics from different points of view--linear cause-and-effect, or wholistic principle of least action. Louise's theoretical knowledge of the future does not allow her to make any different choices; i.e., "Those who read the Book of Ages never admit to it." Once you know the future, you must act it out exactly as it was always going to be.

Now, first let it be known that I actually like the film. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. And I might be slightly biased by the fact that my oldest child took his first steps in the theatre where we were watching Arrival just after it was released... That was the end of going to movies with a baby!

The film, however, is quite different from the book. Their portrayal of the language is... silly. It's quite understandable that they did not in fact fully instantiate a Heptapod B conlang, but "non-linear" writing is realized just as "writing bent into circles-per-sentence", which display absolutely none of the whole-message graphical integration which is central to the idea of the language in the novella.

Do these look like "fanciful praying mantids" to you? 

The Heptapods themselves are also not entirely text-accurate. In the novella, Heptapod legs are described tentacles, perhaps with supportive vertebrae inside. In the film they are distinctly jointed, with tentacle-like fingers at the ends. In the film, the Heptapods produce ink directly from their own bodies to write, whereas in the novella Heptapods have screens for displaying writing--or at least, they use a machine in which a tentacle is inserted for control. However: 

"I started playing the tape, and watched the web of semagrams being spun out of inky spider's silk."

So, that at least was portrayed pretty well. I have to admit, the swirling ink is a pretty cool visual.

But the more significant changes are to the core theme of the story, and the psychological effect of the Heptapod B language. 

In the novella, humans never enter the alien ship--all communication is by remote viewscreen. There is no attempt to damage the ship, and no humans are ever in danger. There is no politics involved, past Louise convincing the General to give her access in the first place. And the language has no externally observable effects. It let's Louise remember the future, but not tell anyone else about it. It alters psychology in a way that only the experiencer can know. And thus, the duality of points of view remains intact: everything observable, everything that actually happens, can be explained either as a linear sequence of cause and effect, or as a teleological process of optimizing for a known end goal, and neither system will ever disagree with the other. Yes, novella-Heptapod-B exploits a sci-fi Sapir-Whorf effect, but in a subtle way, that doesn't unleash magical powers on the world.

The film throws out all of the interesting philosophy, and just goes with "this language straight-up lets you see the future". And to make that relevant, they have to introduce personal danger, and worldwide political and military turmoil, and explicitly position the language as a tool. In the novella, the Heptapods never explain why they came. They just did. And then they left. Whereas in the film, they have to explain to Louise why they came, so that Louise will realize the power of their tool--they came because they saw the future, and knew that they would need humanity as allies. Thus, they gave humanity their language, and Louise realized that she, too, could use her resultant knowledge of the future to make decisions about the present, just like the movie-Heptapods did. And so Louise's magical abilities brought about by learning an alien language allow her to use information from the future to stop a war. Woohoo.

It's still a good movie, and it's a movie that uses linguistics as the science for its science fiction of which there are not many, and it actually does a halfway decent job of portraying a realistic linguist doing actual fieldwork--admittedly in a very weird environment. But not only does it reach for the absolute bottom of the barrel in terms of what you can do with sci-fi linguistics, exploiting the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to give someone magic powers, it does so despite being derived from an original story which is probably the best usage of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that's ever been written, and just throwing that away.

So. Go watch Arrival, it's a good movie. But then, go read Story of Your Life. It's so much better.

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Rylan & Last Starfighter

Nowadays, we are awash in an ocean of geeky sci-fi and fantasy media content--but, it was not always so. There once was a time when a single person could easily list every significant live-action film with fantastical content in the last decade, own them all on VHS, and watch them all in a weekend movie marathon. When I was a small child, The Last Starfighter was one of those rare and precious sci-fi films that my family had on VHS, and I loved it.

(Beware the Amazon affiliate link! If you click it, and buy the Blu-ray, you might end up giving me some money!)

The Last Starfighter was revolutionary in a number of ways. It took the kid protagonist out of the suburbs and into a trailer park. It emphasized the 3D nature of space for navigation and combat--spaceships don't all get conveniently aligned in a flat plane and all facing the same way up! It had the heaviest use of CGI since TRON, and while we wouldn't call the results "photorealistic" today, it was the first film to attempt photographic realism in computer generated imagery.

But that's not why you read this blog! You wanna know what the linguistic content is like!

The Last Starfighter does feature alien dialog from the Rylans, but not a proper conlang, or even a sketch of one--according to the Director Commentary, it's all gibberish. But, it's remarkably well-constructed gibberish! If you're going to do gibberish, The Last Starfighter ain't a bad reference to emulate! (Unlike, say, the Jabba's Palace scene in The Return of the Jedi.)

The alien dialog is entirely confined to a fairly short sequence in between Alex (our human MC) entering the Star Car for transport to Rylos and being given a translator device so that he (and the audience) hears everything for the rest of the movie in English. Some of that dialog is very difficult to hear clearly, as it is diegetically filtered through PA speaker systems in the background of the scenes, and the subtitles don't transcribe it. However, I managed to transcribe a few bits for reference:

[On approach to the Rylan base in the Star Car]
Centauri: Rita. Ritana. Ritana.
Traffic control: Ritana. Ritana sanswela. Ritana.

[Greeting, when Star Car door opens]
Rityensi. Kita / Kritar (pronunciation seems to flip between rhotic and non-rhotic versions over several repetitions of the word; would be good to get multiple sets of  ears on it)

[While gesturing through a door]
Kritar ina

[While receiving uniform]
Incredulous Official: Isanjay!
Centauri: Isanjay? Onimatswela! Prita, Prita!
Hula!

[Calling for Alex's attention]
Iai. Kita / Kritar

Throughout the sequence, the filmmakers make heavy use of environmental and actor-emotional cues to communicate the intended meaning (making the exact meaning of the words Irrelevant, and broad gist Obvious), while simultaneously allowing the audience to participate in Alex's confusion at being thrown into contact with this alien culture, and showing through the use of an alien language that it is, well... an alien culture!

There is little enough there that the writers are not at risk of falling afoul of self-contradiction--there's enough freedom to induce a meaningful language behind these utterances if you wanted to. But at the same time, there is enough repetition of phonetic elements to make it feel cohesive and consistent, and re-use of common elements in the same situations. E.g., "Kita", combined with a beckoning gesture (cross wrists with palms inward), is pretty clearly something like "come here" / "go this way". There are lots of 'R's, 'T's, and 'I's, and the "swela" element occurs twice in different contexts--it sounds like a suffix, but maybe it's a distinct word.

Finally, Alex is presented with an automatic translator device pinned to his shirt collar, "so that people don't have to listen to that for the rest of the movie" according to the Director's Commentary. I, for one, would've been fine listening to that for the rest of the movie... but if you have that kind of bulk of dialog, it really would've required actually constructing a proper conlang! So, the writer & director knew their limits, and constructed the film accordingly. What I find quite odd, though, is that the Director's Commentary calls out the use of the automatic translator device as "cheesy"! On the one hand, that's a little overly self-deprecating in light of the ridiculously broad usage of Universal Translators in other SF media--notably, Star Trek. On the other hand, it's nice to hear a filmmaker explicitly acknowledging that not using that trope would have been better. And, while various Star Trek series and episodes really deserve their own separate posts, it is worth noting here that more recent Star Trek productions have been better about not completely background the existence of the translator mechanism--just to point out a couple of notable examples, Star Trek: Prodigy starts out in an environment where prisoners are isolated and unable to communicate with each other because they are not given access to universal translators (implicitly acknowledging that it is a real in-world technology, rather than strictly a narrative convenience); and in season 2 of Star Trek: Discovery Saru's sister expresses confusion about how she is able to understand Michael (who, to her, is an alien)--because, as a pre-technological alien, the existence of translator devices has not yet been explained to her. So, despite its imperfections in the linguistic department, we can identify The Last Starfighter as also being revolutionary in explicitly acknowledging the need for and existence of translators as in-universe technology in a way that is relevant to the audience experience!

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Marvel's Multilingual Eternals

Marvel's Eternals showed up on Disney+ yesterday. So, I watched it.

My expectations were low, and thus I was pleasantly surprised! 

The most obvious linguistic thing about it is that it features a bunch of different languages in dialog! Including Babylonian, for which Assyriologist Martin Worthington was consulted, and ASL.

But, for the most part, its usage of them is non-notable. It's just using subtitles all the time, all over the place.

I suppose that is kind of notable, however, insofar as it demonstrates that you really can do that. In case there was still any doubt, it seems that movie audiences are just fine with reading subtitles--so if that's keeping you from writing a screenplay featuring a secondary language, get over it!

Now, Eternals does not have the best audience review score ever (78% right now according to Rotten Tomatoes), so you might be thinking "well, what if the people who hated it hated it because of subtitles? I don't want to drive away 22% of my potential audience!" So, I read every audience review on Rotten Tomatoes, to find out exactly why people liked or disliked it. (Well, skimmed; there are a lot of audience reviews!) And in all of those reviews, I could only find one that kinda sorta obliquely may have been related to language issues:

"Like why is there even a deaf chick? How does that help the story?"

So, I'm pretty sure subtitling was not the problem. Go forth, screenwriters! Let your characters be multilingual, secure in the knowledge that if you can't figure out anything more interesting, you can just subtitle them, and it'll be fine!

There were, however, two actually interesting things done with Babylonian & ASL early on in the film: First, we have a brief shot in which ALS is diagetically interpreted into, not English, but Babylonian, while simultaneously being translated in English subtitles for the audience. Three languages at once (two diagetic and one non-diagetic) is not something I have seen before, and certainly something that is much more suited to the medium of film than to prose. Second, we have this line spoken (in English) by Ikaris:

"If I want to spend more time with you, I need to get to know them."

as an explanation of why he had just spoken his previous line in Babylonian. In other words, the writers are showing Ikaris learning a new languages specifically in order to insert himself into a social position that that language will give him access to! Good job with the (probably unintentional) sociolinguistic awareness! This nicely ties back into my comments on Toolmaker Koan, regarding the need for a secondary language to serve some purpose in the story. Without some secondary language in play (which one in this case being dictated by the setting), would have been missing a tool to establish Ikaris's character development.

Now, let's look back at that Rotten Tomatoes review: why is there a "deaf chick" speaking ASL? How does that help the story? Well, sadly, it didn't help the story quite as much as it could have. Several scenes show Makkari relying on lip-reading to understand lines spoken by other characters who totally knew sign language as well, and could've signed to her. But, for some reason, they just... didn't, always. Nor were the unique advantages of the visual vs. auditory medium ever exploited--e.g., to communicate more effectively in noisy environments, or without attracting attention by making noise. And without those kinds of plot-integrated justifications, we are left wondering why a godlike Celestial like Arishem would create an Eternal hero with an apparent sensory disability. Nevertheless, the use of ASL, and the associated insertion of a Deaf character, does have a purpose in the story even if it doesn't have relevance to the plot--it's simply characterization. Why should there be a Deaf character? Well, because why not? Why shouldn't there be a Deaf character? She is there to challenge the audience's implicit conceptions of what a "default" character type is, and to provide representation with which an additional audience segment can identify. Now, there is almost always a way to make the secondary language plot relevant, whether signed or auditory, as Michaelbrent Collings did with Portuguese in This Darkness Light--and I do fault the writers of Eternals a bit for not bothering to find those ways. But simply representing someone from a different speech community is a totally valid reason to have a secondary language all by itself, despite what certain Rotten Tomatoes reviewers might think.

It is also worth noting that, as in The Dragon Prince, ASL is used to establish a second narrative translation convention alongside English. While we can assume that, in the contemporary scenes, the Eternals are in fact speaking English when they appear to be speaking English, and thus may actually be speaking ASL when they appear to be speaking ASL, this cannot be the case for the historical scenes, in which none of them would ever have heard of English or ASL yet, let alone had a chance to learn those languages. (Some media sources have reported that they actually created a whole new sign language for the movie, but that's a severely misleading headline--in fact, the actor Lauren Ridloff and her husband Douglas, who was the film's ASL consultant, just created new ASL name signs for the characters.) Thus, the Eternals circa 5000 BC were presumably using some unspecified fictional alien sign language, which is merely represented as ASL no-diagetically for the benefit of the modern audience

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Linguistically Interesting Media Index

1.  Alien Communication in Semiosis
2. The use of French in Kill the Beast
3. Learning Portuguese in This Darkness Light
4. Integrating a Conlang in A Game of Thrones
5. Fictional Linguistics in Reading the Bones
6. Why Disney's Luca is Bad, Actually
7. Disney's Conlangs
8. Barsoomian & John Carter
9. Rabbits, Smeerps, and Empires
10. Vance's Language of Pao
11. Mr. Holland's ASL
12. Linguistic Representation in The Dragon Prince
13. The Hidden Language of K. A. Parkinson's Chosen Chronicles
14. British Sign Language in Doctor Who
15. Война et Paix: French in the Great Russian Novel
16. Into the Night of Language Diversity
17. The Mandalorian & Tusken Sign Language
18. Shadowscent: The Darkest Conlang
19. The Steerswoman & the Wood Gnome
20. The Transgalactic Guide to Solar System M-17
21. The Steerswoman & the Outskirters
22. Rosemary Kirstein vs. The Enderverse
23. The Language of Power: Unanswered Questions
24. Language Planning in the Enderverse
25. The Other Ted Chiang Stories
26. The Toolmaker Metaphor
27. Marvel's Multilingual Eternals
28. Secondary Languages in Time and Heterogenia Linguistico
29. The Trilingual Fiction of Eric James Stone
30. A Literature of Sign
31. Linguistics as the Science of Science Fiction
32. Rylan & The Last Starfighter
33. Decoding Sangheili in Halo
34. How Can We Portray Languages In Games?
35. OK, fine, I'll do Arrival
36. Linguistics & Andy Weir
37. The Sci-Fi Linguistics of Babel-17
38. The Sci-Fi Linguistics of The Embedding
39. Xenolinguistics: A Review for Authors & Conlangers
40. Larry Niven's Grammar Lesson
41. Three Miles Down
42. Stridulation in Landscape with Invisible Hand
43. True Biz & A Literature of Sign
44. Babel: Or, the Necessity of Violence
45. How is Castlevania like Luca?
46. The Year of Sanderson
47. What if... Marvel Audiences Had to Read Subtitles for Mohawk Dialog?
48. Review: Reading Fictional Languages
49. A Brief Note on John Wick
50. Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

The Mandalorian & Tusken Sign Language

A long time ago, in a language community far, far away, a bounty hunter negotiated with some desert nomads in a sign language....

Two episodes of Disney's The Mandalorian feature on-screen portrayals of a constructed sign language: Tusken Sign Language or Tusken Raider Sign Language. Since Star Wars is a Disney property now, and it is in fact Disney's The Mandalorian, I suppose this makes TSL Disney's fourth actual conlang, after Atlantian, Kumandran, and Barsoomian. The Star Wars franchise, however, is not really known for its linguistic sophistication (Greedo, whom Han shot, for example, just speaks random phrases of garbled Quechua; portrayal of alien languages in Star Wars generally has been the domain of sound designers rather than linguists or conlangers), and this bit of conlang representation came about essentially by accident: sign language was specified in the script, and someone on the crew suggested that, if they are going to portray signing, they really ought to get an actual Deaf person to consult, and that Deaf person (one Troy Kotsur, who also plays one the Tusken Raiders) decided to come up with a conlang!

Essentially all of the publicly-available information about this process comes from one almost-8-minute video interview (with English transcripts) done with Troy by The Daily Moth, a dedicated ASL news site. Of course, information about the language itself is also extractable from the scenes in which it occurs, and a Tusken Raider Sign Language Facebook group has been established to study and decipher it; as of now, very little deciphering has actually occurred, but Troy is a member of that group, which gives it some legitimacy, and leaves open the possibility that one might actually get authoritative answers if one asks questions there.

Of course, none of this would've happened if some sort of sign language had not been specified in the script in the first place, which raises the question of why anybody thought that signing should be in the script! George Corley of Conlangery suggested to me that it might be because the Tuskens' vocalizations were already established as the sounds of braying donkeys, which doesn't really lend itself to a proper language--but that presupposes that the writers actually cared about portraying a plausible language in the first place, an assumption that I find heavily suspect given the portrayal of Frog Lady's supposedly-linguistic vocalizations in the same show. Wookiepedia claims that the Tusken language is a multi-modal combination of vocalizations and sign, but that seems to be a retcon to explain the appearance of sign language in The Mandalorian, not a reference to a common source that The Mandalorian may have drawn from, and the questionably-canonical Star Wars: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know (updated edition; note that these are, as usual, Amazon Affiliate links) already claimed consistent English translations for particular (transcriptions of) Tusken vocalizations. The most plausible explanation to me comes from this tweet by Star Wars Autograph News, which claims that it is "undoubtedly" a reference to Plains Native American Sign Language.

So, how is this new language actually used? As with Disney's previous use of Kumandran and The Dragon Prince's portrayal of ASL, The Mandalorian completely eschews the use of subtitles in favor of a combination of Making it Obvious and diagetic translations / explanations (with the shortage of direct translations in the on-screen source material making fan decipherment rather difficult!)

Unlike Raya and The Dragon Prince, The Mandalorian is clearly not aimed at a child audience, so they don't need to worry about the literacy level of their viewers. Why then, would they avoid subtitling? I expect a large part of it is just the biased expectation that audiences won't like them, but whether or not it was actually on purpose, I think the decision actually worked out for the best in this context. One could argue that subtitling of Tusken would be appropriate because Mando speaks Tusken and Mando is our viewpoint character--but, Mando is not a first-person main character, and there is essentially no dramatic irony in the series as far as Mando is concerned. If we, the audience, know something, then Mando also knows it, but the converse is not true; we do not know everything that Mando knows, and that is on purpose. He is supposed to be a mysterious figure. If The Mandalorian were a serial novel rather than a TV show, it would be told in limited third person, not first. Thus, we shouldn't necessarily have subtitles for the same reason that we don't get voiceover narrations in this show: we are not supposed to be inside Mando's head. If someone else in the scene is confused, we should be confused.

That said, let's get finally get into the nitty-gritty stuff!

Tusken Sign Language first shows up briefly in Chapter 5: The Gunslinger, with this conversation:

[Mando signs to the Tuskens.]
Calican: "What are you doing?"
Mando: "Negotiating."
[More back-and-forth signing.]
Calican: "What's going on?"
Mando: "We need passage across their land."
[More back-and-forth signing.]
Mando: "Let me see the binocs."
Calican: "Why?"
[Mando tosses the binocs to one of the Tuskens.]
Calican: "Hey! What?"

This already shows that mix of diagetic explanation and Making it Obvious. While some of the signs are pretty iconic, Troy is probably the only person who can give us a complete literal translation, but the context makes it easy to reconstruct a basic outline. Mando is negotiating, he hands over the binocs, they conclude--he must have agreed to trade the binocs as payment for passage across Tusken land.

While there's not much here, this minimal interaction is narratively necessary to establish in a low-stakes setting the fact that Mando knows the Tusken language and has reasonably amicable dealings with them, so that that skill can be employed with much higher stakes later on, and there is indeed considerably more representation of Tusken Sign, along with Tusken vocalization, in Chapter 9: The Marshal.

Initially, we see some signing with Irrelevant content during the desert crossing montage shot, while Mando sitting around campfire with Tuskens. This is just showing us the language for flavor, and to remind the audience that Mando has that skill.

For the most part, the remaining Tusken language is handled with minimal diagetic explanation, with the audience taking the point of the view of Cobb Vanth. E.g.,

[Mando engages in multi-modal communication with Tuskens]
Cobb: "Hey partner, you wanna tell me what's goin' on?"
Mando: "They want to kill the krayt dragon, too."

and later: 

[Tuskens add more tokens to their battle map.]
Cobb: "That's more like it. Where are they gettin' the reinforcements?"
Mando: "I volunteered your village."

with a few instances of what may be more direct translation in the form of indirect reported speech:

Mando: "He says your people steal their water, and now you insult them by not drinking it."
"They know about Mos Pelgo, they know how many Sand People you killed."
Cobb: "They raided our village! I defended the town!"
Mando: "Lower your voice."
Cobb: "I knew this was a bad idea."
Mando: "You're agitating them."

and direct reported speech:

Cobb: "What are you telling them?"
Mando: "The same thing I'm telling you. If we fight amongst ourselves, the monster will kill us all."
Mando, SimComming with English, slowly: "Now, how do we kill it?"

And in one instance, they actually exploit the unique capacities of the visual modality to allow Mando to report on someone speaking in sign at an extreme distance, via binocs:

[Tusken signing at long distance]
Cobb: "What'd he say?"
Mando: "He says it's sleeping. If we listen carefully we can hear it breathing."

I somehow doubt that the show's writers planned ahead to introduce a sign language just to allow that one scene to work (if they hadn't, a walkie-talkie would've served just as well), but hey, now you know that that's something you can do! 

So, that's Tusken Sign Language in The Mandalorian! If you liked this post, please consider making a small donation!

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Into the Night of Language Diversity

Into the Night is a 2020 Belgian Netflix-original series (apparently inspired by the Polish sci-fi novel The Old Axolotl [beware the Amazon Affiliate link!], although I see very little resemblance myself; it feels to me more like an SCP Tale in the 001 Daybreak canon, just without the shambling blob monsters), which has an ensemble cast of characters from a wide range of linguistic backgrounds--and it fully embraces that fact! There is no single language shared by all of the characters (although between French and English we have them all covered), and no on-screen translation convention; everyone is portrayed as speaking the language they would really be speaking at any given moment. The official language of the series as indicated by Netflix is French, and that does seem to be the most common language spoken throughout the series (which is sensible, given that the story starts in Belgium), but I'm not actually sure it's a majority--and if it is, it's clear that other languages are not treated as second-class. If you don't turn on the subtitles, you have to just know every language that's spoken in order to follow the plot; like War & Peace, it does not have a primary language with affordances to make secondary languages accessible--it just is fully multilingual. As such, there is not much to say about the techniques it uses for language affordance; it's just subtitled! You could maybe make an argument for a couple cases of Making It Obvious, but they're not really trying; and I can think of one case of diagetic translation, but that's because the original speaker was mumbling and would've been unintelligible otherwise regardless of the audience's linguistic prowess.

Unlike War & Peace, however, the sheer diversity of languages represented on screen (French, English, Flemish, Russian, Arabic, Italian, Turkish, German, and a throwaway bit of Mandarin right at the beginning) means that you can't actually expect any significantly-sized audience to actually know all of them. No matter who is watching, you will need subtitles at some point--so Into the Night just goes all out and subtitles everything, uniformly. So, given a sufficient number of subtitle tracks, it does not need to assume its audience speaks any of the featured languages--the viewer can pick whatever linguistic representation they need, without changing the video. At the moment, Netflix only offers subtitles in English, French, and Chinese, but all three language groups are in pretty much the same boat. Which leads me to the intriguing conclusion that this is a bit of story-telling media with no primary narrative languages.

Now, there are ways of telling stories with no spoken or written language at all--wordless picture books, mime shows, LEGO assembly instructions--and that's a whole interesting area of study to get into on its own. Heck, you could probably do interesting stuff with a series of statuary forming 3D "frames", although I don't know of any examples myself. And if that interests you, I must recommend the work of Dr. Neil Cohn, the Visual Linguist, and his Visual Language Lab, which looks at conventions of graphical representation and how they support storytelling either in conjunction with or in absence of written language across different cultures.

But that's not really my thing. My thing is explicitly analyzing the narrative use of secondary languages. And while, as I have just explained, Into the Night doesn't really do the secondary language thing, the way that it manages to not do it is fascinating. I can't imagine that this is the first bit of media to do something like this, but it's the first one I've noticed, and it just blows my mind, even if for no other reason that helping to better define the boundaries of my area of interest. And what it is doing is something that I just cannot imagine working very well in any other medium. You could imagine, for example, a multilingual opera with the libretto printed in a variety of languages in the play book for the audience to follow along, but that suffers from dividing the audience members' attention between page and stage. I am told that modern opera productions sometimes display the translations on screens for the audience, but then you are implicitly choosing a privileged language for at least that performance--the whole audience, regardless of background, is forced to rely on a single language chosen for the cinematic captions. And since subtitling relies on multimodal perception, or at least multichannel perception--you can read the subtitles while listening to the actors' spoken dialog, or read subtitles in your foveal vision while remaining aware of signing on another part of the screen (although Into the Night in particular does not happen to feature any sign language), you really can't do it in print or audio. (Although, perhaps the War & Peace trick of having a audience-language foreground track superimposed over a uniform diagetic language background track might work for audio format? I don't know how annoying that would get if used so continuously; someone should try it!) This form of storytelling is something that is just fantastically well suited to the very specific medium of home-viewed video with selectable subtitles. It's not specifically a streaming video thing; you could imagine this being done on DVD, for example. But has anyone?

So, anyway. That's a thing you can do with video, apparently.

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British Sign Language in _Doctor Who_

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

In particular, the Chair of the BDA said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Linguistic Representation in _The Dragon Prince_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Amaya signs to another office] 

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

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

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

[Amaya signs some more] 

Yes, General. I'll ready a party.

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

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

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

    Amaya: "How do I look?"

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

This is closely followed by a statement which Sarai translates:

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

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

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

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

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

    [Amaya signs]

    Soldier 2: "What did she say?"

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

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

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

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

    "Can you translate or not?"

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

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

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

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

    "Um, oh my."

    "Well, what did she say?"

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

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

 

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

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

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

    

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

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

    [Amaya smirks and signs]

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

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

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

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