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.

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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A Literature of Sign

Last month, I came across the article Toward a Literature of Sign Language, by Ross Showalter, and I thought "This is exactly what I write about! I have to find some way to use this!"

Sign languages have a body of literature; there are Deaf poets who compose in ASL, Deaf storytellers who perform in ASL, and I am certain the same is true for other sign languages; their literature is merely encoded in video, rather than text. And that's totally valid on its own... but if you want to include Deaf, or otherwise signing, characters in a book for general audiences, relying on video isn't going to cut it! So how do you incorporate sign into English text, when no sign language currently has a widely-accepted standard orthography?

I have written about sign language representation in fiction 5 times before (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)--kind of a shockingly large proportion given that this is only my 30th entry in the Linguistically Interesting Fiction series--but 4 out of those 5 examples are of sign language in movies or TV; only one, in Rosemary Kirstein's The Steerswoman, involves depiction of signing in text. Two.. and a half strategies are used there--mostly, a combination of simple translation into English, narrow translation that attempts to preserve the syntax of the underlying sign, and descriptions of the performance of signs. All three of strategies which Ross acknowledges, although narrow translation comes very close to glossing, a strategy which author and ASL interpreter Kathy MacMillan explicitly rejects. Ross has a slightly more poetic take on the issue:

Therein lies the contradiction of this method: to render ASL in written English with its syntax intact is to create a strange tension. There is the grammar of ASL, preserved and captured only in syntax—but syntax is only part of a language. To try to render ASL in writing is to suspend yourself halfway between ASL and English.

To do justice to ASL, we need to treat it on its own terms.

And yet, simply translating into fluent English isn't a whole lot better! Why? Well, for all the same reasons that you might want to include any examples of secondary language in Anglophone fiction! Because language is identity. To quote Ross again:

If you use sign language, you sublimate yourself within the Deaf community. You step away from English and the mainstream for a space and language outside standard expectations.

To see sign language and English as interchangeable ignores the cultural legacy that comes with sign language. It ignores the storytelling already shared through signing.

If you're going to include French, then include French, like Graham Bradley did in Kill the Beast--if you just let it all be English, you lose the cultural immersion of the language. And if you are going to include ASL (or any other sign language), then include ASL, for goodness' sake! If I may be permitted a smidge of hyperbole: if you just turn it all into English, then what even was the point?

Ross does not offer a complete solution to writing sign into literature, but he does propose a perspective: signs are made with the body, and portrayal of sign must center what the body does. I suspect, therefore, that out of all the portrayals of signs in The Steerswoman, Ross would be most pleased with the brief instances in which the shapes and gestures are directly described. (Slightly more exploration of the physical-description approach to signs is undertaken in The Lost Steersman, a later book in the Steerswoman series, in which this approach is forced by the fact that the viewpoint characters don't actually understand what is being signed, and so it cannot be translated; but, that's about signs made by sometimes-murderous aliens which might only be paralinguistic anyway, so not really the best example of human sign language representation, although perhaps useful for technical reference.)

For my own part, I have written one story (for submission to an anthology; sadly, not accepted, so who knows when it will find another potential home) which involves signing, when two people who speak unrelated sign languages meet underwater, where they cannot speak orally. Having read Ross's point of view, I feel pretty good about how I handled things there; each character's individual point of view is written with their thoughts rendered in English, because something must be made comprehensible to the reader, but what they each sign is described from the other character's point of view in physical terms, as handshapes, poses, and motions.

Now, is that the best way to do it? I have no freakin' idea. I'm not Deaf; I don't even speak ASL. I think sign languages are neat, and I've studied some of them as a linguist, just like I've studied Coptic, Warlpiri, and Ingush, but that doesn't mean I can actually speak any of those! I am not a member of the Deaf community, and I can't give advice on how they would like to be represented in written literature.

But, like Ross, I'd sure as heck like to see more people give it a try.

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Secondary Languages in _Time_ and _Heterogenia Linguistico_

Heterogenia Linguistico is a manga series about a field linguist / ethnologist exploring a fantasy realm and documenting the languages and cultural practices of fantastical races.

Time is a Hugo-award-winning long-form webcomic / animation hybrid thing, published as the 1190th strip of XKCD in 2013 about far-future humans occupying a dried-out Mediterranean basin discovering that the ocean is about to flood back through the straits of Gibraltar and destroy their home.

What could these two bits of media possibly have in common? They both integrate secondary languages using techniques uniquely suited to the comic / graphic novel medium.

Additionally, both are ambiguous in their possible usage of a narrative translation convention! It is possible, though unlikely due to the large time span for linguistic evolution to take place in, that the main characters in Time actually do speak English. Meanwhile, though I read Heterogenia Linguistico in English translation (which obviously establishes a translation convention by virtue of the fact that it was literally translated, in the real world), the original is in Japanese, and seems to originate in a fantastical analog of Japan--so the human characters might very well be intended to actually be speaking Japanese. These things are not always clear-cut! However, Heterogenia Linguistico does display an explicit translation convention insofar as all speech which the main character understands is presented on the page as English (Japanese)--thus ensuring that the reader remains on the same metaphorical page as the viewpoint character.

Time features one full conlang (first appearing in frame 2658, externally labelled "Beanish" since its speakers appear to wear beanies), and one fictitious language (first appearing in frame 2865, externally labelled "Unglish" since it's... not actually English).

Beanish is presented in its own unique script. This has the effect of making it obvious to the reader that they, just like the main characters, are not expected (and thus not required) to understand what is being said. In fact, it short-circuits any attempt at understanding, as the invented script eliminates any possible phonetic cues that might prompt a reader to try... well, reading it! While theoretically this could be done in purely-written media (and written media like War and Peace will on occasion include examples of secondary natural languages in their native scripts, even when those scripts differ from the primary script of the work), it is considerably more difficult to do both for technical reasons (the need to create custom fonts or embed images) and for audience-compatibility reasons; encountering an unreadable script switches one's brain from "visual language processing mode" into "generic image processing mode", and/or triggers skipping over that span of incomprehensible text to the next bit that you can recognize, and that kind of cognitive interruption is more unexpected and more jarring in running prose than in the context of a comic panel, where you are already primed to take in narrative-relevant information from the whole image rather than just text, and in where the eye is already practiced at skipping between non-contiguous dialog sections.

In frame 2703, Cueball makes an attempt at speaking Beanish, and subsequently is excited that he has finally learned a word, giving a diagetic translation of it; however, in subsequent frames, we discover that he is aware of the "gavagai problem" (which previously came up in John Carter (of Mars)), and is unsure of the precise meaning of the word after all. Still, this is probably the best entry point we have into the decryption on Beanish--which is, as of yet, still incomplete. Despite the lack of a decryption, however, we can be confident that Beanish really is a consistent conlang, rather than simple visual gibberish, for two reasons: internally, it has regular repeating structure that looks language-like (although, so does the Voynich Manuscript, and plenty of people are convinced that that is just very cleverly-constructed nonsense); and externally, Randall Munroe has stated that he got a linguist to create it for him! Thus, rather than being purely a matter of Making It Irrelevant, the use of Beanish in Time seems like a very long-term example of Easter Egging, having presented Beanish as a puzzle to be solved.

Unlike Beanish, Unglish is partially comprehensible, with some difficulty, to Time's main characters. To convey that same experience to the readers, Unglish is presented as distorted English text, with smudging, odd grammar, and overlaid words. This is kind of the opposite of Making It Obvious--it is Made Unobvious, but accessible with difficulty. Again, this is an approach that simply could not be done with anything like comparable effectiveness in a different medium.

All dialog from Time, including images of the Beanish and Unglish text, with links to the source frames, can be found transcribed here.

In comparison, Heterogenia Linguistico, despite having more dialog and being explicitly about linguistics, shows much less sophistication in its presentation of secondary languages. As noted earlier, it simply translates everything that the main character can understand; but what about things that main character can't understand? Unlike Time, it neither presents a textual representation of non-human languages (except for a few personal names, which are approximately-phonetically transcribed), nor does it visually distort words to impede easy comprehension. Instead, partially-understood speech is peppered with black boxes--kind of like redaction bars--replacing words, morphemes, or just weirdly-pronounced sounds. Much like the unique script of Beanish, the use of obviously-non-linguistic blocks of blackness makes it very clear to the reader that they are not meant to understand, and that that is in fact part of the intended experience; if the reader is missing something, that's fine, because the viewpoint character is also missing something and will act accordingly. As the narrative progresses, and main character gains better familiarity with local languages, the distribution of redaction boxes shifts from context words almost entirely to function words (articles, prepositions), which (especially with the visual and narrative context) leaves the complete meaning easily recoverable while sill conveying the idea that the main characters language competence is still not perfect. This partial redaction approach to secondary language representation is still something that I don't think you could get away with in any other medium... but it is very similar to something that you could get away with in English literature a Long Time Ago; in particular, works like H. G. Wells's The Time Machine occasionally simply replacing bits of dialog with dashes, as illustrated in the line:

“Where’s——?” said I, naming our host.

in which it appears that the author simply couldn't be bothered to come up with a name that really should have appeared in dialog.  If that were an established modern trope, it could probably be extended to representation of secondary languages with very explicit Make It Irrelevant messaging--but I would not recommend actually trying it outside of a comic strip setting!

While Heterogenia Linguistico is less sophisticated than Time in its handling of secondary language content, it nevertheless is a decent example of linguistic science fiction, largely focusing on alternate modalities for interspecies communication, like in Semiosis. And, of course, it is one of very very bits of popular media (like Disney's Atlantis) which have a linguist as the main character, so it gets points for that! But wait, you might be thinking, didn't I say it was fantasy? Well, yes... but it leans on linguistic science, and presents fictional linguistic scenarios to be scientifically analyzed. It may be within a fantasy setting, but none of the linguistics is explicitly fantastical; there is no telepathy, or Whorfian determinism, for example. And that is enough for me to call it linguistic sci-fi, even if its set in a fantastical background. A sample of the linguistic fictions that it explores:

1. A color-based writing system derived from the color-based language of Krakens (which can alter their skin color at will, just like real-world octopodes and squid), which appears to be used logographically / semasiographically as it is not phonetically connected to the speech of the Lizard People who use it.
2. A werewolf community which uses anomalously little acoustic speech because they can obtain so much social information through smell instead.
3. A language that uses primarily ingressive rather than egressive sounds.
4. An interspecies lingua-franca that uses a different phonetic inventory for each species that uses it, tailored to their articulatory abilities.
5. A sign language based on full-body dance movements as an interlanguage for an avian race which cannot make humanoid-like speech sounds and lacks hands for humanoid sign languages.

I'd like it better if some of these things were developed as actual conlangs and more fully integrated into the text (you'd think they'd have to do something for the color writing... but it's a black-and-white comic, so they nicely sidestepped that!), but the ideas are pretty cool on their own.

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The Linguistically Interesting Media Index

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

Rosemary Kirstein vs. The Enderverse

The Lost Steersman is the third book in Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman series (previous entries of which I reviewed here and here, and the next of which I review here).

This will not be a completely spoiler-free review; so, if that bothers you, I recommend clicking on those Amazon affiliate links, buying the books, reading the books, and then coming back here to see what I have to say about them!

Now, here is a book that gets into some serious linguistic speculation! And somehow, the chunkiest of the currently-published volumes also manages to spend most of its time on a hard left turn away from the main series plot, while diving deep into things (such as the eponymous Lost Steersman, and the nature of demons) which were hinted at as background in the first two books and providing a huge amount of fascinating new worldbuilding detail.

The worldbuilding exploration is instigated by a series of demon attacks on the town of Alemeth--which conveniently gives us, the readers, as well as Rowan, our first insight into what "demons"--which have so far existed firmly "out of frame"--actually are. The subsequent discovery that the formerly-lost Steersman is in fact the only person to have acquired a "magical" talisman that can keep the creatures at bay--and that this is in fact intimately connected with the story of how he became lost to the order and later found again by Rowan--kicks off an adventure well beyond the boundaries of the known world to discover where all of these demons, previously presumed to be nearly extinct, are coming from, and why.

In the end, the story of the lost Steersman and the demons seems to me to bear a great deal of resemblance to Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead (book 2 of the Ender series), which deals with the interactions of humans with the alien Pequeninos on their homeworld Lusitania. To recap (or just spoil it if you haven't gotten around to reading a book from 1986 yet), the Pequeninos' reproductive cycle requires males to die--and thus ritualistically killed, such that they can reproduce, is considered a major honor. One which, of course, they wish to provide to their favorite human friends, without anyone bothering to talk about the situation first, even though there's enough of an established relationship that they totally could have, thus leading to serious misunderstandings. In fact, this isn't actually all that far off from the background inciting incident for the whole Ender series, in which the alien Formics don't realize that individual humans are sentient, and so don't think accidentally killing a few is a big deal.

Now, the Ender series are not bad books; in fact, they are very commercially successful books! But I don't think it should be too controversial to claim that the repeating circumstances in which aliens don't realize that killing humans is "bad, actually" are a little bit... contrived.

The conflict between humans and demons in The Lost Steersman is, on the other hand, much more reasonably motivated, with causes firmly rooted (at least in part) in human history--conquest of territory, and driving back of invaders. Initially, humans do not realize that demons are, in fact, people--and, most likely, demons don't realize that humans are people either. That's not too far off from the situation between Formics and humans in the Enderverse... except that "first contact" in the Steerswomen's world is between low-tech, nomadic peoples who have no means of communicating with each other, which makes the mistake far more reasonable than when you first encounter an alien in a friggin' starship. And, well, even if humans had figured out that demons are people much earlier on... let's be honest, they would've committed committed genocide anyway to take over their land. The humans of the Steerswomen's world are, after all, in the process of terraforming it and destroying all native life to make way for human habitation (as revealed in the last book), even if the current major players don't remember that that's what their cultural traditions are for.

Key to the misunderstanding is that demons do not communicate vocally, but rather visually--through sculpture. So when the lost Steersman is shipwrecked on their shores, losing evidence of their much more advanced maritime technology, the native demons see only unusual invasive animals to be driven away or eaten--and the humans see only monstrous animals trying to kill and eat them, and quite reasonably retaliate! Eventually, Rowan is able to deduce that the "magical talisman" that allowed the lost Steersman to survive and make his way back to human civilization--eventually bringing vengeful demons in pursuit--is (of course!) not magical at all, but merely a physical word in the demons' language, which they recognize and respond to.

Unfortunately for other humans, this word is impossible to replicate, because demon words are not sculpted from environmental materials; rather, they are produced by demons' biology. In particular, they are an exaptation of females' ability to excrete material for forming egg cases--which means that only female demons are actually capable of direct speech! Males can understand, and can collect discarded utterances and re-arrange them to communicate, but only in secret, as (at least in the particular demon society to which we are introduced), they are immediately executed if caught trying to speak. And this is in fact depicted as a complete language, not just a finite code, with females capable of gluing together individual word-objects into larger 3D sculptural discourses--although there does seem to be some innate, instinctual component to it, based on demons' consistent reactions to the talisman that keeps our human protagonists safe among them.

Sadly, the demon language is not actually deciphered to any significant extent, and I am skeptical that it has actually been worked out as a proper conlang due to the alien boldness of the premise. Nevertheless, it is a fascinating and bold premise, and I would love to see someone try to create something that would fit the descriptions in the book!

We also see a bit more exploration of sign language, which featured in book one, as a result of Rowan attempting to decode and replicate (as well as a human with only two arms can) the demons' paralinguistic postural body language (which is the only method of spontaneous communication available to males). If the demons can be made to understand the concept of sign language, I would love to see this used as a bridge for communication between demons and humans in future stories. 

Stay tuned for my thoughts on the next entry in this series; and in the meantime, if you liked this post, please consider making a small donation!

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The Steerswoman & the Wood Gnome

The Steerswoman is the first of what is currently a four-book series by Rosemary Kirstein, with more entries apparently planned. It was originally published in 1989, with the latest book so far, The Language of Power, coming out in 2004. (See also my reviews of books 2, 3, and 4.)

The setting is what appears to be a low-fantasy world slowly making its way to a scientific revolution via the actions of the eponymous Steerswomen to collect knowledge and explore the world. Several items and events seen by the characters as "magical" are easily (or less than easily) identifiable to an attentive reader as entirely mundane and technological in nature, which gives the story a somewhat similar feeling to other stories like the earlier Dragonriders of Pern, or the more contemporaneous Black Trillium. As of the end of the first book, however, it is not entirely clear whether this will turn out to be a full-on sci-fi in disguise, like Pern, or if some of the magic will remain unexplained and fundamentally magical. (As an aside, all three of these series happen to be written by women and have female main characters--which is unfortunately notable when it comes to "classic" sci-fi and fantasy!)

The plot threads dealing with physics and chemistry make it feel almost like a mystery novel at times, as the characters investigate mysterious events, although there is an extra level of dramatic irony present given that we, the readers, exist in a post-Isaac-Newton society which allows for solving these mysteries must faster than the characters can! And I think the author is to be commended for not falling victim to presentism and allowing the characters to realistically struggle with their existing physical preconceptions, rather than having genius-level flashes of insight about things that are only obvious to us because we have been taught the answers.

The Steerswoman has very little surface-level linguistic content, which puts it outside the realm of things I would usually review and analyze, but there is a great deal of recognition of linguistic knowledge; while the Steerswoman's world seems to have a single universal human oral language, that fact is not entirely taken for granted by the Steerswomen, and several characters do in fact comment on the dialectal and accent variations that exist throughout the world, and how they can be used to identify someone's origins and social affiliations. And it turns out that there is some surface-level linguistic content... exhibiting a sign language!

I have been looking for examples of books with sign language representation, so finding this entirely by accident in a book I was reading for other reasons was kind of nice! In particular, while they appear only incidentally in this first book, the Steerswoman's world contains multiple seemingly-intelligent non-human cultures, the most salient of which are the Wood Gnomes--small humanoid creatures who communicate via sign language with humans. (It is unclear if they also have their own oral language or not.)

In my initial research on how sign language might be represented in print, I came across this article specifically about ASL language and culture for writers; while the central focus of that article is not about portraying the language itself, it does have one very straightforward bit of advice: whatever you do, don't gloss. To quote:

Glossing, a tool that is often used in ASL textbooks and courses to help students remember ASL syntax, uses the words that most closely align to ASL signs and puts them in ASL order.  Words in gloss are always written in the present tense and in capital letters.  For example, the gloss of the ASL translation of the English sentence, “Where is your car?” would look like this:

YOUR CAR WHERE?

Glossing can be a valuable tool, but it is extremely limited because it does not show use of space or nonmanual signals (for example, eyebrow and mouth movements and body shifts, all of which serve a grammatical function in ASL).

Worse, when glossing appears in fiction, it gives an incomplete picture of the language and makes deaf characters sound primitive and limited in communication.  What’s wrong with using standard dialogue conventions and replacing “said” with “signed”?:

“Where is your car?” she signed.

And you know what? That seems like pretty darn good advice. Almost obvious advice. I certainly wouldn't recommend word-for-word translations of oral languages, either--and I have yet to ever come across that as a secondary-language incorporation technique in the wild, which suggest to me that most-if-not-all authors also see that as an obviously bad idea. Yet there does seem to be a temptation to do it with signed languages, as that is the only exposure to sign language examples in print that many people have ever had. So what else are you gonna do? In the absence of standard sign orthographies, it doesn't seem like there are really any good options other than not actually showing the sign language at all, and relying entirely on free translation with language-specific dialog tags as suggested above.

So, what does The Steerswoman do?

A typical example of Wood Gnome conversation can be seen in this excerpt from the beginning of chapter 9:

    Rowan turned back to the wood gnome and addressed him in the language of hand signals that his people shared with humans. "Where woman?" she gestured.
    "Woman in bed," he replied, obviously meaning Rowan.
    "No. Other woman." She pointed to the bed with Bel's clothing.
    "Fur-woman. Noisy woman gone. Throw rock at me."

This isn't quite free translation, and it's not entirely clear what the broken-English representation is really meant to represent. Is it effectively word-for-word gloss? I don't know, but at least it is easy to read, not-all-caps block text!

Later on, Rowan encounters a deaf man who appears to communicate through some combination of iconic gestures and home sign. We are introduced to him and his communication style as follows:

    [The woman] tapped her assistant on the shoulder as he made to unload another crate. Pausing in his work, he watched intently as she indicated Bel and Rowan and pointed from the boxes to the door; then he nodded pleasantly at the pair; he was deaf.
    [...]
    Attracting the disheveled man's attention again, she attempted to give him a more difficult, complicated instruction. Eventually comprehending, he led the way.

And a little later, we get some Wood Gnome Sign Language again:

    At the top was a second landing, and there the man put down his crate, indicated those carried by the women, then indicated the floor. When they complied, he pointed at Rowan and Bell, back down the stairs, pointed at himself, and made a motion toward a short corridor behind him.
    Without thinking, Rowan replied in the wood gnome language of gestures. "I understand. We go down now."
    These particular phrases were simple and obvious, easily comprehensible to an intelligent person; but the formality of the gestures, and the fluid naturalness of their use, surprised him. It was more than pantomime, it was language, and he seemed to recognize something of this. 
    With a look of surprise and concentration, he repeated a phrase, pointing at himself, then extending his index finger near his right temple. "I understand." He said it twice, testing the moves.

Notably, although the signs cannot be directly written, there is some attempt in this passage to represent the actual diagetic language through partial descriptions of the forms of the signs. The last paragraph could even be analyzed as a classic example of appositive subtitling. And on general principle, I appreciate the explicit acknowledgment than sign language is language, at the same level as oral language, and distinct from non-linguistic gesturing. This deaf man has no real significance to the larger plot (although the context of this interaction with him does provide some additional clues for the reader in solving some scientific mysteries), so I can only assume that he was included specifically to allow the author to make this point!

Our final narrative exposure to him is as follows:

    When Rowan delivered [the crate], she could not help speaking to the man again. "Work finished." Those signals were more abstract, and she amplified them with gestures indicating the stairs, the box, herself, and the man, and a negative shake of her head.
    He watched in fascination. Then, with the crate precariously tucked under one arm, he replied, "I understand." He paused, thinking, the hesitantly added, "You go down now."

Although it is rather limited, I was also quite pleased by the representation of sign language, and it should provide a decent basis for comparison with other works.

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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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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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