Some Thoughts on AllNoun

AllNoun is a constructed grammar by Tom Breton. It does not actually claim to be a constructed language, because it has no vocabulary--one simply borrows vocabulary as convenient from whatever source language you like to slot into the AllNoun grammar (typically English vocabulary). AllNoun was originally inspired by Glosa, which has a single syntactically flexible lexical class with syntactic functions disambiguated by heterogenous function words. The aim of AllNoun was to take that one step further--eliminate the function words, and produce an entirely monocategorial grammar. In the process, AllNoun became one of the earliest documented language projects to invent the argument-tagging approach to verblessness, as is also seen in Machi, which I previously reviewed.

The central conceit of AllNoun is that any word, with any semantics, can serve either referentially, or as a role marker. This is explained quite vividly in the following excerpt from the AllNoun FAQ:

Question:
Aren't there really two classes of noun, the "parts" and the "roles"?

Answer:
No, they really are interchangeable. Words may tend to be more useful as
roles or parts, but any word really can fit in either category.

As a limiting example, consider that in his column (and later book)
Metamagical Themas, Douglas Hofstadter once asked, in complete
seriousness, "Who is the Dennis Thatcher of America?". By this he meant,
"Who or what in America plays the same role that prime minister Margaret
Thatcher's husband plays in England?"

It seems to me that if the proper noun "Dennis Thatcher" can be a role,
then anything can be.

This is a feature that I have not seen totally replicated in in any other conlang yet, which is kind of a shame. However, despite this gem of a core concept, AllNoun is on the whole a failure. And I don't feel particularly bad about saying that, since Tom himself has been open about problems that he saw in AllNoun a few years after its initial publication. However, I think Tom is not entirely correct about what the real problems actually are. I'll just go through them one-by-one:

Problems?  My treatment of adjectives is the big one.  It treats
subsective and intersective adjectives well enough, but its
intersective mechanism is not sufficient for nonsective adjectives.
For instance, a "former friend" is not any sort of friend, and not
easily seen as a member of "the set of all former things".  "Alleged
thief" is not the intersection of all thieves and all "alleged things"

This is a legitimate issue, but not as big of one as Tom seems to think. If you regularize the syntactic semantics of English adjectives, you get the same problem--but English merely allows lexical specification of modifier semantics (as do most natural languages). Granted, doing that in AllNoun would disrupt the engineered simplicity and elegance of the syntactic system, but there is another solution, which I employed in WSL: just treat non-intersectives as relations between the target of modification and the final referent. Anything can be a relation (or role) in AllNoun,  so why not non-intersectives?

Another difficulty, which Paul Doudna pointed out to me, is that it is
unclear how propositions are to be expressed.  At the time, I believed
that a top-level nominal should be interpreted as existential.  Eg, to
say "I ate the apple" you'd express "an eating of the apple by me in
the past", and it would be understood as existential "(There is) an
eating of the apple by me in the past".  However, it isn't as
expressive as I would like.  Paul also suggested it was weak at
expressing fictional contexts, which aren't really existential, but
I'm not sure it's any worse than natural language.

This basically comes down to a an aesthetic concern, rather than a functional one. Which is perfectly legitimate--if Tom doesn't like how the predication structure turned out, that's entirely his prerogative. But it does not constitute a functional failure of AllNoun as potential grammar for a language.

Non-declarative moods (questions, imperatives) worked clumsily, by
using the declarative mood.

And yet, there are natural language which get by just fine with little or no formal marking of different moods. So why shouldn't AllNoun?

Expressing determinacy ("the", "an", "some") was always clumsy.
Determiners more than any other natural words want to modify the
nominal adjacent to them, which is totally contrary to AllNoun.  So I
ended up with a lot of examples that simply did not express
determinacy.

And again, there are plenty of natural languages which get by just fine with no articles and no grammaticalized definiteness system. So why shouldn't AllNoun?

Relative clauses, while they worked, tended to not be linear.  Eg, you
could express "apple *that I ate*", but AllNoun did not neccessarily
make the relation of the relative clause to the matrix clause
immediately clear.  Eg, one might say:

	    (apple (eat agent:me time:past patient:^)).

...where it isn't clear until the end of the relative clause that it
is about the apple.  Of course it's not neccessarily so:

	    (apple (eat patient:^ agent:me time:past))

And yet again, there are plenty of natural languages that keep you in suspense with important structural information saved till the end, and plenty of natural languages which don't even have embedded relative clauses at all, instead relying on parataxis. So if AllNoun doesn't handle relatives very well... who cares? That's no reason it can't still be perfectly functional for communication!

Finally, Tom does make a very good point about general semantics:

>  The : also seems to inherit some

>  of the many different uses of the possesive and "of". 

Yes.  In a philosophical sense, I believe that relatedness is basic in
communication.  Any communicator in any language has to, at some basic
underlying level, recognize a relation just because it is named,
without additional underlying mechanism.

David Gil, with his theory of associative semantics in Isolating-Monocategorial-Associative (IMA) language would certainly agree!

So, having sung the praises of AllNoun in contradiction to its author why do I think it's a failure? Because, while AllNoun is not a bad basis for some sort of language, it completely fails to meet its own primary design objectives. From the Introduction to AllNoun:

AllNoun has only one part of speech, which is largely but not entirely
analogous to nouns in other languages. Thus the name AllNoun.

Words are never inflected in AllNoun. It is a 100% isolating language.

 And yet, it fundamentally relies on semantically-significant punctuation. Either the punctuation symbols are inflections, in which case AllNoun is not100% isolating, or they are function words, in which case AllNoun does not, in fact, have only a single part of speech. Tom was not unaware of this objection, and addresses it in the FAQ:

Question:
Aren't the punctuation markers non-noun parts of speech? So it's not
really _all_ nouns, is it?

Answer:
I suppose in a very abstract philosophical way, one could consider
punctuation a part of speech. If that were the case, then we would say
that (say) English had not only nouns, verbs, etc. but also commas,
periods, and so forth, for maybe 13 or 14 parts of speech.

But generally we don't, in any language. Perhaps because there is no
useful sense of a vocabulary of punctuation.

In any case, I'm satisfied that AllNoun is nearly as homogeneous as
possible. IMO if punctuation markers are an anomaly they are a
neccessary one.

But this is a false equivalence; natural languages can be, and were for many, many centuries, written entirely without punctuation, and still retain their meaning. Punctuation serves to make reading easier, through a variety of means such as marking sentence types, more generally marking clause or other constituent boundaries, and giving hints to prosody--but it does not, by itself, have semantic content. AllNoun punctuation, on the other hand, makes up a much larger proportion of the system than it does in any natural language--comparable to a typical distribution of function words--and utterly indispensable to encoding meaning. Indeed, the entirety of AllNoun as a "constructed grammar" consists in the rules for how to use the punctuation! Furthermore, Tom acknowledged that, if AllNoun were to be spoken, the punctuation must be pronounced, and described his proposed pronunciations as "words":

Q:  So how are you going to pronounce the punctuation? ( ) : ^

A:  As I see it, the best way is to treat groups of one or more
punctuators _infixed between part and role_ as pronounceable words, and
also include single parentheses. That way multiple infix-pronounciation
can efficiently join into a single word, except for free parentheses
which could stack.

11 short verbal symbols are required:
:   ):  :(  ):(  ^:  )^:  ^:(  )^:(  ^   )^  )   (
0   1   2   3    4   5    6    7     8   9   a   b


The symmetries above should be reflected in the sounds. Here is an
unofficial proposal for how it might be sounded:

:   ):  :(  ):(  ^:  )^:  ^:(  )^:(  ^   )^   )   (
awf af  oof if   aws as   oos  is    awsh ash ath ooth
/Of/   /Uf/      /Os/    /Us/        /OS/     /&T/
   /&f/    /If/      /&s/    /Is/        /&S/     /UT/

So a sentence like...

    beat boy^(chase dog^(catch cat^(eat mouse^(leave maid cheese^
    table:on.

...might sound like...

    Beat boy awshooth chase dog awshooth catch cat awshooth eat mouse
    awshooth leave maid cheese awsh table off on.

So, I rest my case. AllNoun is not, in fact, made entirely of nouns, or any single part of speech. Furthermore, AllNoun does not, in fact, represent the simplest that a grammar could possibly be. It is not "as homogenous as possible", nor are punctuation markers a "necessary" anomaly--and this is easy to prove by construction, if we simply demonstrate the existence of actual monocategorial grammars. These can come in two types, as far as I know to date:

1. Concatenative / combinator grammars.
2. IMA grammars

Concatenative grammars are based on combinatory logic--or, more specifically, the parenthesis-free SKA calculus, all of whose morphemes belong to a uniform class of combinators with differing arities. Once again, we must mention Fith--Fith does use more than one formal part of speech, which is a legacy of its origin as an artistic language for fictional aliens, but it is a concatenative language, and as such didn't strictly need more than one part of speech from an engineering point of view. One could argue that differing arities make for different parts of speech--but then, for consistency, we would have to consider intransitive, transitive, and ditransitive English verbs to all be different parts of speech as well, and no one does. Nevertheless, we still have another option: David Gil's IMA grammar, introduced in the paper How Much Grammar Does It Take To Sail A Boat? In such a language, the lexicon is strictly monocategorial, with all words belonging to the syntactic class S (or Sentence), and the grammar is strictly isolating and associational. In other words, the only syntactic rule is that two words or phrases that are next to each other can form a larger constituent, and the two parts of a constituent are interpreted as being associated with each other in some way. Unlike concatenative grammars, which are completely structurally unambiguous, an IMA grammar is almost maximally ambiguous--exactly how to group words into a parse tree, and exactly what kind of association each grouping has, is all left up to context and pragmatics. It may seem that no language could possibly actually function that way, and indeed all human languages do have some function words at the very least; however, contrary to Tom's intuition, they aren't often strictly necessary. They exist because, in the words of William Annis, "people be extra", and as David Gil demonstrates, it is actually possible in some languages to find surprisingly extensive examples of people conversing in pure IMA form, without resorting to any function words. It works because language always exists in a larger context, and people are really good at pragmatic inference.

So, there you go. That's how simple a grammar can really be.

So, what of AllNoun? I have rather complicated feelings towards it. Not until sitting down to write this review did I realize that, actually, there's quite a bit that it does well. If we ignore what its creator wanted from it, and treat it as just another loglang, it's pretty neat. It could serve as a great basis on which to construct other languages with other goals, and it does at least one cool thing that I really think is worth playing with more extensively. But I really want to dislike it. From the first time I ever encountered it, it always struck me as a wrong thing--not the way to do what it was supposed to do, and in the unfortunate position of being one of the standard examples of "verbless language" for a generation of conlangers, and thus promulgating a very flawed view of what a minimalist language can really be. It was not until many years later that I formalized my idea of "spitelanging"--creating conlangs just to prove other people wrong about what a language could or could not be like--but early exposure to AllNoun may very well have been the initial spark that primed me to take up that cause!

Some Thoughts... Index

Some Thoughts on Machi Languages

Machi and Bogomol are a pair of alien languages created by Terrance Donnelly for the mantis-like inhabitants of Amaterasu, a fictional Earthlike planet of Epsilon Indi (who are also called machi).

The machi's vocal apparatus acts much like a flute, producing 15 distinct notes per individual. The machi have a limited ability to actively adjust their vocal tract length to vary their fundamental frequency (useful when singing to bring different individuals in tune). Nevertheless, the range of fundamental frequencies available to a given individual varies as they grow (and thus as their vocal tract grows), and between individuals--thus, Terrance accurately realized that, just like human speech which must be produceable by a wide range of differing human vocal tracts, and unlike engineered languages like Solresol, machi languages could not be based on specific absolute pitches. Humans recognize phonemes despite varying absolute frequencies by comparing the ratios of multiple resonant formants. Similarly, machi languages use multi-note "syllables", which can be reliably identified by the ratios between successive notes; the eponymous Machi language uses two-note syllables, with the syllable count increased by allowing for staccato vs. legato articulation and the use of rapid triplets in place of individual notes. In contrast, Bogomol words are structured as sets of three-note syllables, with no distinctions of articulation type.

Unfortunately, Terrance seems not to have been able to fully commit himself to the idea that individual syllables could be disambiguated on their own. In the description of Machi, it states

Since a machi can theoretically have any fundamental pitch, it is customary for strangers to precede at least the first few utterances with a "reference" syllable consisting of the speaker's lowest pitch, first in long, and then in short, duration.

And for Bogomol:

Instead of a formal, established syllable, Bogomol machi simply precede their utterances when necessary with a long note at their fundamental tone as reference.

This seems very forced an unnatural to me. Even in the absence of simultaneous frequency ratio information, as when interpreting lexical tone in a register-tone language or when listening to single-formant whistled speech, humans are quite capable of inferring the appropriate baseline for a given speaker from a short series of successive notes, and never have to consciously communicate about that baseline. I would expect that aliens who are physiologically restricted to something roughly like whistled speech would only get even better at that. If we take the in-world premise of the documentation seriously, however, the surface level evidence of this cultural practice of the machi can, I think, be saved, by interpreting the human documentarian as an unreliable narrator who misunderstands the purpose of these simple utterances--they could be simple paralinguistic utterances, e.g. for floor-claiming or introduction, which entirely by chance happen to be useful to English and Russian-speaking investigators for identifying individuals and their individual scales.

The grammars of Machi and Bogomol are quite different--although, the surviving documentation on Bogomol grammar is quite sparse, such that I might call it a "fictional language" rather than a "constructed language", especially since the in-world documentation (which states that research on Bogomol is extremely difficult due to the remote environment in which its speakers live) supports the hypothesis that its grammar may have never been worked out in detail in the first place. What is documented for Bogomol, however, is a very neat conceit; all Bogomol content words are highly polysemous, but, rather than expecting the correct meaning to interpreted from discourse context, Bogomol sentences are always concluded with a "rank" specifier, which retroactively specifies the correct set of meanings to activate. This similar to an idea I've had bouncing around for a while to use pre-posed "domain specifiers" to reduce lexical ambiguity, but by choosing to shift that function to the end, Bogomol universally gains an implicature effect similar to what can be done with Fith by choosing to float arguments on the stack. I don't find it particularly realistic, as I doubt any intelligent species would put up with the necessity for that level of poetic processing in every single utterance, but as a sci-fi conceit it is neat.

Machi is a verbless language using the relational-tagging strategy, using special label-words to identify all of the roles played by all of the participants in an event without needing a distinct verb phrase to specify the event itself. Objects and labels are the main parts of speech (so it is clearly not a monocategorial language), and it also has a heterogenous class of syntactic function words, which it calls "parsers", for coordination, listing, and subordination. Overall, by not going all the way to monocategoriality, and maintaining the lexical-functional distinction, but instead inventing new lexical parts of speech slightly different from what is common in human languages, I feel like Machi does an excellent job of looking like a plausible alien language in grammar as well as phonology.

Some Thoughts... Index

I Wrote & Illustrated a Book

If you've followed me for a while, you might know that I have been developing a 4-dimensional video game. I last wrote about it back in January of 2017, in this series of posts.

Well, 5 years later it's still not ready for public release, because I have a day job and am not a full-time game developer. However, last year, I realized there was a way to bring the joy of higher-dimensional maze navigation to the masses much more quickly!

The result is this book: Maz3s: Puzzles in Three Dimensions

Just like the video game presents you with a 4D maze which can be viewed only in 3D slices, this book contains 3D mazes presented in the form of 2D slices (which nicely fit on a 2D sheet of paper). Unlike the video game, however, you can in fact see all of the slices at the same time, side-by-side. Originally, I had planned on putting successive slices on successive pages, so that the 3D structure of each maze would actually physically exist in the structure of the book--but I was informed that that would be unnecessarily difficult; perhaps for the sequel!

Solutions to each maze are provided in the form of "driving directions" if you want them--but the book also includes generic instructions and suggestions for higher-dimensional maze solving techniques.

Maz3s is currently available in English for Kindle and in paperback format. Translated editions with instructions and solutions are in progress for Spanish, French, Chinese, and Russian. If you are willing to write a review, or want to help with further translated editions, email me or DM me on Twitter for a free PDF copy.

Praise for Maz3s:

"I was astonished at how fast I started giggling. Delightfully fun concept, skillfully executed. The world needs more Maz3s!"

                --Best-selling author Michaelbrent Collings

"Just let me finish this next one...."

                --My Dad

"My dad stayed up past his bedtime because he was having too much fun with it."

                --Me

The Trilingual Fiction of Eric James Stone

If you haven't heard of Eric Stone, yet... well, you probably don't read a lot of SF short stories.

Eric is a master of short stories, in a wide range of spec. fic. genres–sword & sorcery, space opera, alternate history, and more. He's been published in uncountable magazines and anthologies (well, technically, they are countable–finite, even!–but there's enough of them that I didn't feel like counting), and is a winner of the Writers of the Future and Nebula awards. He is currently serializing the epic fantasy novel Heir of the Line on Kindle Vella, and has two single-author short story collections: Rejiggering the Thingamajig and Other Stories and The Humans in the Walls and Other Stories.

We'll be looking at some of those stories, but my real reason for writing this review is Eric's near-future sci-fi thriller Unforgettable.

(As usual, all Amazon links in this article are Affiliate links–so if you feel like giving Eric some money, I'll get a small cut.)

Eric is trilingual in English, Spanish, and Italian, and has a great love for Russian techno/pop music (a fact that I discovered when we carpooled to WorldCon in 2011). With this background, I expected to see more secondary language representation in his stories when I started looking for it, but it's actually surprisingly sparse. His knowledge of Italian  shows up on only one page of one story–"Tabloid Reporter to the Stars", which appears in Rejiggering the Thingamajig and Other Stories (to the best of my knowledge, anyway, though perhaps there is a story I missed; if it wasn't in one of those collections, it wasn't easily available on my bookshelf for perusal). And that is only three words!

"If they are gray humanoids with bulging heads, they greet you as an old friend, eh, paesano?"
There was Italian ancestry on my mother's side, so he'd taken to calling me paesano, countryman."

"Paesano" is initially introduced here in a syntactic position which makes it Obviously a term of address. However, in this case, the specific meaning is not Irrelevant, as it used to establish something about the main character's background. Thus, we get an immediate follow-up with semi-diegetic appositive translation. (The diegetic status of comments by a first-person character narrator made to the audience is somewhat unclear.)

He though a moment, then laughed. "Buffo. But what you think? [...]"

Here we have an interjection, which is the classic form of Making it Irrelevant. If you happen you know Italian, or just look it up, it turns out to be a semantically appropriate interjection, but if you don't, it just doesn't matter. 

He nodded. "Interessante."

This usage I would class as a very specialized form of Making it Obvious; specifically, Eric is relying on the semantic and graphological similarity of the Italian "interessante" and the English "interesting" to allow the expected Anglophone reader to infer appropriate meaning. This is a dangerous thing to do, but note that he's got a metaphorical parachute here–the scene makes sense with no dialog on this line at all. He nodded, and we all know what that means. So, we could read this as an instance of Making it Irrelevant if we wanted to. This, we will see, becomes a pattern!

I particularly expected to encounter some Spanish in Eric's alternate history Argentinian Empire stories–"By the Hands of Juan Perón" and "A Member of the Peronista Party", both collected in The Humans in the Walls and Other Stories. But, well... I didn't! Most of the dialog in both of these stories would be in Spanish, necessitating a standard narrative translation convention to make it accessible to the Anglophone audience. As we saw in Graham Bradley's Kill the Beast, it is entirely possible to break the translation convention for short periods in order to Show the underlying diegetic language, which in that case is used to help better establish the setting and the cultural background of the characters. Is this perhaps a matter of what works better for a short story vs. a novel or novella? Probably not, but then, I haven't reviewed a lot of short stories yet, and unlike Eric, I am not a master of the form!  I did ask Eric himself what was going on here, and he does not remember whether he thought about this issue or not when writing those stories–an unfortunately extremely common authorial response, and a large part of the reason for me writing these reviews!

Now, onto the juicy bits. Eric James Stone's only trilingual work, the novel Unforgettable, somewhat surprisingly makes use of the language that he is not actually fluent in, featuring a little bit of transliterated Russian in addition to Spanish (and a smidgen of Portuguese, which I guess actually makes it quadrilingual). The plot does meander through Rome for a bit, so there was opportunity for showing off some Italian, but that opportunity was not taken. A number of other languages are relevant (notably, Farsi), but not explicitly shown in the text.

Conveniently, Eric uses the typical convention of italicizing non-English text, so it was fairly easy to skim through for every example. (Whether or not this is a good convention in other respects is a whole other question–one which I may have to find a way to address at some point.) Our first exposure to not-English comes in this scene:

The warm scent of melted cheese escaped from the top box. "Sesenta y dos euros," I said.
The guard said something in rapid-fire Spanish.
With a shrug, I said, "No hablo bien. Americano."
"Who order pizzas?" asked the guard.

The first bit of Spanish is essentially Irrelevant (or perhaps, an Easter Egg); it's something that a pizza delivery guy would say, but if you don't get it, it won't impact the scene. The second bit is Made Obvious by the context of the surrounding two lines–the guard says something in Spanish, then switches to English in response. We are helped out by the similar-to-English word "Americano", but you can probably figure out that this says something like "I don't speak Spanish good" (or the moral equivalent thereof) even if you've never seen or heard a single bit of Spanish in your life.

Next, we get straight diegetic translation:

Then, pretending to remember something, I added, "Seventh floor. Piso siete."

Semi-diegetic explanation:

"¿Dónde está el baño?" I asked.
That was the most useful phrase in the world, for me at least. I could ask where the bathroom was in fifteen different languages.

 And more semi-diegetic appositive translation:

The sign on the door read Criptografía Cuántica–Quantum Cryptography–so it looked like the CIA's source was right on the money.

Next, there's a bit of scene-based Making It Obvious:

"¡Alto!" said the guard, swinging the gun toward me.
I raised my hands.

What does a guard say while pointing a gun at you that makes you raise your hands? (It's not a literal word-for-word translation, but nothing ever is.) 

And then we get something which looks a lot like relying on graphological familiarity again:

"I warned you not to trust her," I said.
"Silencio," said Carlos.

Now, the last bit of Spanish we encounter turns out to be fairly critical to the plot. If you actually speak Spanish, it could even constitute a spoiler–a pretty extreme case of Easter Egging:

We raced past a sign that read Laboratorio de Entrelazar. I stopped running, forcing Yelena to stop as well. Did that mean laboratory of something-lasers?
[...]
At the far end, a pencil-thick shaft of bright violet light hit a prism and split into two weaker beams that extended into holes in the wall.
"That must be the entrelazar," I said.

This is especially fascinating in light of the cases we have previously seen where Eric seems to rely on graphological similarity to English to get the reader to infer the correct meaning. In this case, the character, who also does not actually speak Spanish (as he explained to the guard when dropping off pizzas), is the one making the graphological/phonological inference, and presenting that "translation" to the reader. But in fact (spoiler alert! highlight to read):

"What did it say on the lab door? The exact words?"
"Laboratorio de Entrelazar."
"Entrelazar? You're sure about that?" His voice was excited.
"Yes. What does it mean?"
"Literally, it means to interlace. [...]"

And if you want the rest of that sentence, you'll have to go buy the book yourself!

I find myself absolutely fascinated by this repeated feature of Eric's secondary language use of relying at least partially on graphological similarity to prompt understanding–and its subversion! This is the first genuinely new technique I have encountered since This Darkness Light, reviewed in episode 3 of this series. It is somewhat dangerous, as it makes additional assumptions about the expectations and background knowledge of the reader than other techniques do, and thus I would never recommend trying it in isolation, but its a neat thing to do when you can back it up with a safety net of other techniques.

There is far less Russian representation. First, we have these repeated uses of diegetic translation:

I said, "Nye dvigat'sya," and added, "Don't move," in case he was bilingual.
[...]
I aimed the gun at him and said "Nye dvigat'sya. Don't move."

And then a bit of Making It Obvious:

"Then I will go and catch a plane. Do svidaniya." She walked to the door and opened it.

You're talking about leaving, opening a door, what's the most likely thing to say? (If you guessed "Goodbye"--or, more literally, "until meeting", give yourself a pat on the back. But not too many pats, because the whole point was to make it not that hard!)

And our last smidgen of secondary language is that bit of Portuguese:

I looked at Luiz. "Qual problema?" I asked in my limited Portuguese. He rose cautiously to look over the bar, then stood up all the way. "Sorry, senhor. I think I see gun. Maybe is camera?"

Again, we have some reliance on graphological similarity, but with the safety net of really being kind of Irrelevant--if the protagonist said nothing to Luiz, and if Luiz left out the vocative, no critical meaning would be lost.

If you liked this post, please consider making a small donation.

The Linguistically Interesting Media Index

P. S. The title of this post is kind of a lie, but only because of my own technical terminology; a proper trilingual work would be one which does not need to put any work into integrating multiple secondary languages, because it is in fact written for a trilingual audience and has no "secondary" languages. This is, in fact, closely connected with the issue of whether or not it is a good idea to identify secondary-language content with italics.

It's been a while since my last post in this series, and I blame Ken Liu entirely for that. I had intended to do reviews of some of his short stories, but some of them are just so dang depressing that it kinda put me off the whole project for a while. However, I have thoughts on A Desolation Called Peace (the sequel to A Memory Called Empire), The Termite Queen, and a bunch of Ken Liu stories in the pipeline, so stay tuned!

Weird Worlds: Cronus

 < Fornax | Introduction to Xenobiology

Cronus is a cold world only slightly larger than Earth. The average surface temperature is approximately -150C, similar to Blue Crystal, with an atmosphere composed of 4 bars nitrogen, 2 bars of methane, 0.5 bars helium, 0.3 bars hydrogen, 0.1 bars of argon, 0.1 bars of neon, and traces of more complex hydrocarbons. At these pressures, methane and ethane are liquid on the surface, and methane powers a weather cycle just like water on Earth. Like our own solar system's Titan, Cronus features an orange blanket of high-altitude tholin smog produced by photochemistry. Unlike Blue Crystal, the surface pressure is not high enough to liquify nitrogen.

Also like Titan, the solid surface of Cronus is composed primarily of water ice, with about 10% admixture of ammonia ice (precise ratios varying by region). Surface geology is complex, with rocks composed of a wide variety of hydrated minerals. Unlike Titan, the ice crust is relatively thin, and underlain by a silicate crust and mantle. It is not known if a continuous water/ammonia ocean is present between the water and silicate layers, but silicate volcanism produces hot water/ammonia pockets with large loads of dissolved minerals, driving cryovolcanism on the surface which builds mountains and replenishes surface supplies of heavier elements.

Life on Cronus is based on a mixed methane/ethane solvent, with cells based on azotosomes--bilayer membranes composed of relatively small molecules with polar nitrile heads in the interior and short hydrocarbon tails interacting with the methane/ethane mixture. Unlike Earthling lipid-based vesicles, Cronus's azotosomes fundamentally depend on a mixture of different nitrile molecules for their stability; the largest single component in acrylonitrile, but while flexible pure acrylonitrile vesicles can be constructed, the lowest-energy state is a crystalline solid. Much like water and ammonia in combination form a eutectic mixture with a freezing point far below that of either pure substance, inclusion of additional nitrile molecules produces a "eutectic" membrane structure which strongly resists crystallization.

Due to the thinness of azotosome membranes, they do not contain complex membrane-embedded structures. Instead, equivalent macromolecules are attached to the inner and out surfaces of the membranes, giving Cronian cells a nearly-universal extremely rough texture. This also helps to account for the low solubilities of most materials in cryogenic methane, as the rough surfaces improve capture and adsorption of any rare solutes that a cell may encounter, and a large amount of chemistry in fact occurs in the exterior cellular environment. It is theorized that Cronian protolife may have originated as autocatalytic patterns on rough crystalline sheets, which later evolved to produce mixed-species eutectic sheets that could fold into independent vesicles. In its modern state, however, having developed cellular interiors, Cronian life does rely on the compartmentalization of membrane-bound vesicles to retain useful molecules at much higher concentrations than would be available otherwise, thus vastly improving control and reaction efficiencies, and to store genetic material. As on Blue Crystal and other worlds with aprotic solvents, electrochemistry is accomplished through electron conduction and intramolecular charge separation.

Cronian biochemistry is unusually sparse in its elemental repertoire. While trace heavier elements are available from weathering of aqueous rocks, none are strongly soluble. Thus, Cronian life relies almost exclusively on carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen to build itself, with occasional inclusions of oxygen. Silicon is virtually unknown; although silanes would be useful functional molecules, the lack of surface-exposed silicate features means that, unlike on Blue Crystal (an even colder world), any silanes that might be geologically produced are hydrolyzed water-magmas long before they would be available to the surface biosphere--and silica grains are completely inaccessible, except as inert grains upon which microorganisms might grow. The limited elemental repertoire has the consequence that Cronian functional molecules are, on average, much larger than their Earthling equivalents. Conveniently, this serves to increase cellular surface roughness! Even so, life is sparse in the fluid column of Cronus's seas, with even photosynthetic life concentrating heavily on the seafloors, where rare low-solubility materials settle out. As on Blue Crystal, water is used for structural purposes by Cronian life, serving equivalent functions to silica, calcium carbonate, and hydroxyapatite for building cell walls and skeletons.

Photosynthesis is predictably hydrogenic, based on consumption of liquid methane and ethane and atmospheric nitrogen to produce complex nitro-organic molecules. Respiration is, conversely, hydrogen-breathing, consuming complex hydrocarbons and atmospheric hydrogen to regenerate methane and ethane. Large amounts of energy, however, can be stored in azides and polyazoles; large, nitrogen-rich molecules, which are much more stable in the cryogenic conditions of Cronus than they are in Earth standard conditions, serve functions very roughly equivalent to fats as compact energy stores, though the high reactivity of azide groups is also very useful in a wide variety of common metabolic cycles. As a result, Cronian biomass usually poses a serious detonation risk if warmed to Earth-standard temperatures, and conventional laboratory study of that subset of Cronian biomolecules which remain stable in human-compatible conditions should be done only after isolation and purification is accomplished in cryogenic conditions.

Free oxygen is poisonous to Cronian lifeforms, but, due to the low temperatures, not acutely so. Similarly, the low temperatures are the only serious risk to human life. Surface exploration is thus possible with suitably insulated and heated suits. Offworld transport of Cronian lifeforms requires maintenance of at least 3 bars of pressure, and temperatures between -140 and -180 C. Below 180C, most Cronian life will be killed by methane crystal formation; above -140, most lifeforms will have died, and there is attendant risk of gas explosion.

Weird Worlds: Fornax

< Brimstone | Introduction to Xenobiology | Cronus >

It has been said that "carbon chemistry is the chemistry of life, silicon chemistry is the chemistry of rocks". Of course, this is a severely oversimplified point of view, based on the limitations imposed on stable carbon chemistry by the high temperatures and ubiquity of water on Earth; many other biospheres incorporate silicon in a variety of ways. However, Fornax challenges this statement in another way: the chemistry of life and the chemistry of rocks are not necessarily entirely disjoint!

Fornax bears the highest-temperature biosphere currently known, and is likely near, if not at, the limits of what chemical biosystems can support. Fornax is in some ways a hybrid of our own solar system's Venus and Mercury--closer in size to Venus, and with a non-negligible atmosphere, but with an elliptical orbit even closer than Mercury's, with a 3:2 spin-orbit synchronization. Daytime surface temperatures reach 900C, but can drop as low as 400C at night. Due to these temperature variations, which would be exacerbated by a 1:1 tidal lock, the orbital eccentricity and consequent lack of 1:1 tidal locking are critical for the survival of the Fornaxian biosphere. While photosynthetic biospheres can exist on water-based "eyeball" worlds, so long as there is sufficient water for atmospheric or glacial processes to continually replenish the dayside supply, the much lower-abundance materials which serve as Fornax's biosolvents would be expected to entirely freeze out on any similar worlds which have a permanent dark side.

Fornaxian life is based on an ionic liquid solvent system consisting of a mixture of metal chlorides and fluorides. The major metallic species are iron, calcium, sodium, magnesium, potassium, and copper. The surface atmospheric pressure is 0.52 bars, consisting of 0.3 bars of sulfur dioxide, 0.2 bars of nitrogen, 0.01 bars of carbon dioxide, and less than 0.01 bars each of sulfur, argon, aluminum trichloride, iron dichloride, zinc dichloride, copper (I) chloride, and silicon tetrafluoride.

Biochemistry in this environment is based on halogenated aluminosilicate polymers with additional metal ion and metal oxide functional groups. With carbon integrated only as a relatively rare heteroatom, this constitutes the most thoroughly silicon-based, as well as hottest, biosphere yet known. While tetravalent silica is roughly equivalent to carbon in Earthling biochemistry, aluminum serves a role similar to nitrogen, with regular aluminum substitutions in silicate polymers introducing local negative charge concentrations and trivalent structures. Such aluminum substitutions, creating replicable surface charge patterns, are a key feature of the clay-substrate hypothesis for the origin of prebiotic chemistry on Earth; it is an intriguing possibility that Fornax may be an example of a world where autocatalytic aluminosilicates were able to make the jump to full independently-evolving genetic and autocatalytic biosystem directly, rather than simply providing a prebiotic template for the development of more typical replicator systems. Oxygen functions similarly to hydrogen in colder biosystems, saturating excess silicon and aluminum valences and forming weak intermolecular bonds.

Like carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus are also occasional heteroatoms in Fornaxian biochemistry. As on Earth, phosphorus circulates almost entirely in the form of phosphate ions and nitrogen is regularly fixed from the atmosphere and returned to gaseous form when biological materials decay. The fixing of nitrogen is, however, simpler than the equivalent process in Earthling biology, as they high ambient temperatures significantly reduce the activation energy hill that must be overcome to split N2 molecules.

The dominant cycle for producer-consumer energy metabolism on Fornax is still based fundamentally on oxygen; autotrophs split oxygen from silicate and alumina groups to form aluminate anions, halogen-substituted silicates, and desaturated siloxanes. However, free oxygen at Fornaxian temperatures would rapidly recombine with any newly created reduced biomolecules. Thus, as on Oxio and Brimstone, autotrophic organisms consume sulfur (in this case, purely in gaseous form) to bind oxygen and reduce its chemical activity. Biogenic production of sulfur dioxide on Fornax is similar to biogenic production of oxygen on Earth, resulting in the high proportion of SO2 in the atmosphere. Heterotrophs inhale sulfur dioxide to oxidize silicon and aluminum(and occasionally other metals), and exhale waste sulfur, while also regenerating soluble halogen ions in the process. Substituting oxygen bonds for fluorine bonds, however, is not energetically favorable, as the silicon-fluorine bond is among the strongest chemical single bonds known; this leads to Si-F bonds being preserved in catabolic metabolism, eventually resulting in the release of waste silicon tetrafluoride gas and the depletion of soluble fluoride ions. Autotrophic organisms must therefore periodically expend energy to capture atmospheric SiF4, partially incorporating the bound fluorines into new biomolecules and returning the rest to solution.

Fornaxian conditions are immediately lethal to humans, and no practical mechanisms for supporting long-term habitation are available. All close-range exploration must be done by robotic remotes. However, the lowered temperatures of the Fornaxian night have resulted in most organisms developing resistance to freezing. This makes offworld transport of biological specimens for laboratory study surprisingly straightforward.

Commentary

This world was inspired by Feinberg & Shapiro's highly underspecified "Thermia" proposal (Life Beyond Earth, 1980), in which they suggest that silicates could form biomolecules above 1000C. However, Petkowski, Bains (of "Many Chemistries Could Be Used to Build Living Systems" fame), & Seager (in "On the Potential of Silicon as a Building Block for Life") point out that silica doesn't look so good for forming biological structures when all of the oxygen-network bonds are as labile as hydrogen bonds in a 1000-degree melt, and Feinberg & Shapiro didn't really explain what kind of distinction (if any) they had in mind between solvent and partially-solvated structures.

However, many salts, which can form ionic solvents, and silica-containing minerals, melt into solution at well below 1000 degrees, and others are solid up to much higher temperatures. Since I have been doing rather a lot of thinking about Hal Clement's Sarrians (who live at a mere 500 degrees), slightly lowering the operating temperature, introducing an ionic solvent, and throwing in sulfur to modulate oxygen metabolism seemed like obvious compromises to bring Thermia to "life".

Weird Worlds: Brimstone

< Oxio | Introduction to Xenobiology | Fornax >

Brimstone is a small sulfur-rich world, similar to a slightly larger and warmer version of Oxio, or a much larger and hotter version of our solar system's Io. Like both Oxio and Io, Brimstone is a moon of a gas giant, which allows tidal heating to compensate for the lack of primordial internal heat to maintain tectonic activity and transport sulfur from the core to the surface despite being small enough to have lost most of its low-mass volatiles. Having formed in a hotter environment, Brimstone had a lower primordial water fraction than Oxio, leading to a less oxidized modern environment more chemically similar to Io, with large quantities of elemental sulfur and a 0.66-bar atmosphere composed primarily of sulfur dioxide (0.3 bars), carbon dioxide (0.25 bars), and nitrogen (0.1 bars), with traces of carbon disulfide, carbonyl sulfide, a variety of carbon tetrahalides, argon, xenon, and sulfur vapor. The average surface temperature is 132 degrees Celsius. Sulfur is a close analog on Brimstone for the function of water on Earth, as it is both the primary biosolvent and the driver of weather systems, with clouds and rain of liquid sulfur. Weather systems are generally less violent on Brimstone than on Earth due to the lower heat of vaporization (approximately one quarter that of water) and lower vapor pressures of sulfur, resulting in less potential rainfall and enlarged desert regions. However, sulfur vapor also undergoes much more significant, non-ideal alterations in density with changes in pressure, as the equilibrium of molecular structures shifts between heavier and lighter sulfur ring structures.

The liquid phase consists almost entirely S8 rings, with just under 7% concentration of lighter species. The small concentration of S2 and S4 structures is, however, critical to Brimstone biology, as they are much more easily transported across membranes than the large S8 rings, and provide much more convenient feedstocks for sulfur-involved reactions. On long time scales (compared to typical reaction speeds), S2 concentrations will naturally re-equilibrate as S2 molecules are removed from solution by pumping or consumption in anabolic reactions, but several highly conserved enzyme complexes exist specifically to cleave S8 rings into S4 and S2 groups to feed into other reactions. Large S8 rings are, however, sometimes used directly in the synthesis of large polysulfides. While sulfur-sulfur bonds lend rigidity and insolubility to many Earthling protein complexes, sulfur chains induce improved solubility in the Brimstone biosystem, and carbon-carbon double bonds serve an analogous structural purpose at Brimstone's higher temperatures (similar to Vitrium biology).

Sulfur is a nonpolar solvent, and as such dissolves several small hydrocarbon species. However, it is also a weak Lewis acid (electron acceptor), and so preferentially dissolves Lewis bases (electron donors), and is not a lipophile. Additionally, while some bioavaiilable hydrogen is retained in the form sulfuric acid and hydrogen halides, hydrocarbons are also quite rare, as on Oxio, being substituted with halogen-rich equivalents. Fluorine, chlorine, bromine, and iodine are all highly active in Brimstone biology, as organohalogen groups exhibit higher solubilities with increasing halogen atomic number; functional groups with different halogen terminations are thus selected to precisely control the solvent activity of different macromolecules. Bilayer membranes are composed of long-tail fluorocarbons (essentially, teflon) with solvent-facing nucleophillic thiol heads. With sulfur being both aprotic and non-polar, Brimstone biology cannot rely on ion pumping for energy management purposes, and so relies exclusively on intramolecular electron transport, as on Blue Crystal (a world which is otherwise quite different in nearly every way!)

As on Oxio, energy metabolism is primarily oxygen-based, though mediated by sulfur oxide molecules. Photosynthesis is weakly oxygenic, as there are several non-oxygenated atmospheric carbon sources available (namely, carbon disulfide and the carbon halides), with all oxygen liberated from CO2 being re-bound in sulfur dioxide. As the formation of both carbon disulfide and carbonyl sulfide are endothermic (being produced as as hormone molecules and by lighting and UV-light activated atmospheric reactions), sulfur is a complete bystander to the respiration process, serving only as a vehicle for oxygen. Catabolic reactions of SO2 with typical energy-rich biomolecules (such as fluorolipids) produces CO2, carbon tetrahalides, and elemental sulfur as byproducts. In fact, all atmospheric halides are biogenic in origin, resulting from the breakdown of organohalogen molecules whose halogen content was originally organically fixed from geological sources.

Unlike water, ammonia, nitrogen, and sulfuric acid, but like the iron carbonyl used on Cannonball, molten sulfur is not a transparent fluid. Thus, photo-active structures, such as retinas and photosynthetic pigments, cannot be deeply embedded inside the fluid. Eye and leaf structures thus mirror those on Cannonball and Rust, and the photopic zone of oceans, lakes, and rivers is limited to the upper few millimeters, and most marine creatures completely lack eyes (similar to the situation on Vitrium, though for different underlying reasons). Unlike Cannonball's iron carbonyl and Rust's hydrogen peroxide, however, elemental sulfur is not subject to photodegradation, so protective pigments are not required. The default color of most organisms is therefore a orange-yellow to red, based on the color of the molten sulfur solvent itself.

In low concentrations, water vapor and elemental oxygen are minor irritants to Brimstone life. Exposures to oxygen levels suitable for human life, however, generally results in spontaneous combustion. The Brimstone atmosphere is highly toxic to humans, and temperatures are rapidly lethal. In-person exploration of the planetary surface is possible in a positive-pressure refrigerated environment suit, but is generally considered impractical and discouraged due to the potential damage to the native lifeforms. Refrigerated habitats may be built on the surface, but most exploration must be conducted via robotic remotes. However, the relatively low temperatures and pressures required to support Brimstone life make offworld transport of biological specimens relatively straightforward. Frozen specimens (below 112C) may be safely transported in human-compatible environments, as long as they are contained to prevent contamination from toxic off-gassing.