Linguistics & Andy Weir

If you have read one book by Andy Weir, it's probably The Martian (also available in a classroom edition, with less swearing!); or perhaps you have seen the movie, starring Matt Damon!

Unfortunately, there isn't much interesting going on with linguistics or language representation in The Martian. However, Andy Weir has published two other space-adventure hard-SF books: Artemis, set on the Moon, and Project Hail Mary, which goes interstellar. And they actually do some neat stuff which isn't covered by previous books I've reviewed!

The protagonist of Artemis is bilingual in English and Arabic. For the most part, this is just an interesting bit of character-and-world-building background, which ties in to her national origin (not white or American), which in turn ties in to the economy of the titular city of Artemis. The vast majority of the time, she speaks English, and there are couple of brief bits of dialog that are italicized to indicate, aha, this is not English, she's speaking Arabic now. But, there is one absolutely brilliant line of transliterated, but not translated, Arabic dialog, which occurs when Our Heroine is being bothered by a tourist:

"Ma'alesh, ana ma'aref Englizy," I said with a shrug. [...] Nothing like a language barrier to make people leave you alone.

I do not speak Arabic, but I would bet that means something like "Sorry, I don't speak English."

[Goes to check Google Translate.]

Ah, apparently it means "I suck at English." Close enough! As far as I could tell, that is the only place in which bilingualism actually impacts the plot, and it could easily have been left out, but that is totally a thing that a bilingual person might do, in a very relatable situation! It's like a context clue, but relying on your understanding of the social context being described, rather than the literal context.

Project Hail Mary has a much higher count of interesting linguistic bits, but I can't tell you about them without some spoilers. So, if that's a thing you care about, click that Amazon Affiliate link, buy the book, read it, and then come back here and give me another page view!

Are we good now? Good!

The main character, Ryland Grace, starts out monolingual in English. However, he has to interact with speakers of Russian and Chinese, and an alien, along with text in three of their languages. The only Chinese which is directly represented is the name of the Hail Mary mission commander, Yáo Li-Jie, whose family name "Yáo" is represented as a written character and transliterated in Ryland's dialog and narration. The representation of Russian, on the other hand, is not completely consistent, but spans several representational levels in different circumstances:

Level 0: People are said to be speaking in Russian, but Grace doesn't understand it, so we get no explicit representation.

Level 1: Grace can hear people speaking in Russian, and recognize the sounds, so we get a transliteration of the Russian speech into Latin characters. E.g.:

"Eto Stratt. Chto sluchylos?" she demanded.
"Vzryv v issledovatel'skom tsentre," came the reply.
"The research center blew up," she said.

(Also note the partial diegetic translation, with context that allows the non-Russophone reader to infer what the initial question probably was.)

Level 2: When Grace sees Russian text, that text is represented as-is, in the original orthography, regardless of whether or not Ryland can understand it. E.g.:

The name patch reads ИЛЮХИНА, another name from the crest. This was Ilyukhina's uniform.

In this case, Grace does understand it, because he recognizes his crewmate's name, even if he doesn't speak Russian, and we get a diegetic transliteration. The same thing is done with the character for Yáo's name. And we know that he never actually learned Russian because of another instance of direct orthographic representation:

Five 1-liter bags of clear liquid labelled водка. It's Russian for "vodka". How do I know that? Because I spent months on an aircraft carrier with a bunch of crazy Russian scientists. I saw that word a lot.

Not because he learned to actually read Russian--because he saw that word a lot.

There is one example of orthographic representation of Russian in a Russian person's dialog--just a single word--which is where the inconsistency comes in. Ryland wouldn't have understood it (well, maybe he would, just because it sounds really similar to the English word in this case) or known how to write it, so it should've been transliterated for consistency. Unless Andy Weir was just trying to do some fancy thing beyond my understanding with that.

Anyway, the really cool stuff happens once Grace meets an alien, whom he names "Rocky". Rocky is from 40 Eridani A, lives under 28 atmospheres of pressure at over 200 degrees, and "sees" with passive sonar--very reminiscent of the Hot Abyormenites from Hal Clement's Cycle of Fire! (Although the precise mechanism of sound perception and processing between those species is quite different; in that respect, the Eridians remind me more of the Tenebrans from another Hal Clement novel, Close to Critical.) And...

"Fortunately, Rocky speaks with musical chords."

Like the Machi do, or the aliens from The Jupiter Theft by Donald Moffitt. (Huh. Maybe I should review that book some time....) And yeah, that is pretty dang fortunate, because it makes the alien language ridiculously easy to analyze, and to synthesize. I kinda have to assume that that's exactly why Andy Weir decided to design the Eridians that way--Ryland Grace is not a linguist, and while Weir does a remarkably good job of not sweeping first-contact language barriers under the rug, he's made several decisions about how Eridians and their language work that allow skipping a lot of the potential complexity. Donald Moffitt had a slightly different motivation in his work--giving the aliens a musical language allowed him to make it important to the plot that his main character had perfect pitch, which not all humans do, which made that main character specially suited to learn the alien language and, well... be the main character! But, in another parallel between these two works, by the end of the book Weir has Grace using a keyboard to "speak" to Eridians in their native language.

Grace is not stated to have perfect pitch, but he does rely on Rocky speaking in a consistent scale, particularly to have his computer (which does have perfect pitch!) automatically recognize Eridian words. That's not completely unreasonable, but I am quite glad that Weir did not explicitly state that the Eridian language was actually tied to an absolute pitch scale, because, as briefly mentioned in my review of the Machi languages, there are good reasons to think that any naturally-evolved audio communication system for biological beings could not be based on an absolute scale. Additionally, unless I missed something, the simplest syllables that are actually described in the text from Rocky's speech consist of chords of at least two notes, so identifying phonemes by frequency ratios with no fixed scale is a possibility. Unfortunately, we are told two unlikely-seeming things about the nature of Rocky's speech:

1. Some Eridian words use chords consisting of notes that can be described in terms of named notes on the Western musical scale. That particular pattern of frequencies (or rather, family of patterns of frequencies, depending on which tuning system you use) for making up a scale is not even universal among human cultures, and certainly has no relation to the use of pitch in any human language with phonemic tone or any whistling language, so it kind of defies belief that an alien species would develop a tone-chord phonology that lined up with the modern Western musical scale. I choose to retcon this by saying that Ryland Grace just picked notes that were close enough to the frequency values spit out by his waveform analysis to make things easier to write down.
2. Rocky is described as transposing his speech by an octave to indicate certain emotional states. It's important that the transposition is exactly one octave, because that makes it easy for Grace to figure out what's going on and fix it when his computer stops recognizing all of Rocky's words. Now, the octave is a very mathematically natural interval... but the idea of octave equivalence isn't actually natural even for humans; it has to be learned, and its importance as a musical concept it also not universal in human cultures. So... why would an alien species develop octave equivalence as a key feature of their natural language?

A lot of the complication of learning an alien language is avoided by making Rocky (a non-viewpoint character) take on most of the load, rather than Grace. Rocky (if not Eridians in general) apparently has an eidetic memory for sounds, including human speech sounds, and can pick up Grace's English words for things on a single exposure. I have to wonder what implications this might have for the childhood Eridian language acquisition process, and how language works for them in general. The immediate implication, however, is that they quickly get to a point where Grace can just speak English and have Rocky understand him, while Rocky adopts a sort of Eridian-English pidgin in which he speaks Eridian words (not being able to articulate the human speech sounds of English) slotted into an English-like grammar. This has the convenient side-effect of meaning that Weir didn't have to actually construct any Eridian grammar! Although, it does appear that Rocky's native language lacks a distinction between nominative and possessive personal pronouns, based on the fact that his italicized dialog never features possessive pronouns.

This kind of "receptive multilingualism", in which each person speaks their own language while understanding the other, is not a new thing, although I believe this is the first media I have reviewed that uses it. It's notably quite common in Star Wars, where it is used for exactly the same purpose: to portray communication between species who can't pronounce each other's languages, most famously when Han Solo is conversing with Chewbacca, or anyone at all is talking with a beeping R2-series droid. However, receptive multilingualism is also a thing in real life, where it does not occur because of differences in physical articulatory abilities (which are the same for nearly all humans), but either as a side-effect of the simple fact that learning to understand a new language is far easier than learning to speak it, or due to cultural restrictions on who is permitted to use various languages.

While the diegetic purposes are the same, however, the presentation to the audience of receptive multilingualism in Star Wars vs. Project Hail Mary is quite different. In Star Wars, multilingual conversations without a translator are always structured such that the half of the conversation which the audience has access to is enough to infer all of the necessary information from the scene. Weir, however, uses a two-layered approach similar to what he does with Russian and Chinese: any Eridian speech that Grace does not understand is presented as a string of Unicode musical note symbols (e.g., ♪ and ♫)--a conceit which I have seen only once before, in Lorinda J. Taylor's The Termite Queen. There are no appropriate Unicode symbols for chords or staffs, so we have to assume that the actually chosen symbols do not represent anything salient about the actual phonetic content of Rocky's speech, except maybe the total number or chords/syllable, or the relative utterance length. Meanwhile, when Grace understands something that Rocky has said, it is presented as an English translation in italics.

As briefly implied above, during their initial interactions Grace uses a computer to record Rocky's utterances and recognize known utterances later to help him understand what Rocky is saying before he learns to recognize Eridian words himself. Additionally, he uses audio waveform analysis software to extract the component frequencies of each utterance. Computer assistance would almost certainly be essential in documenting and decoding any alien language we might come across, but it's too bad that Grace was not trained as a linguist, or he might have known about all of the software tools that exist for analyzing and documenting human language already, and pulled out Praat for doing spectral analysis of Rocky's speech--it would not be the first time Praat had been used to analyze non-human utterances! (A note on worldbuilding: the starship Hail Mary is supposed to have been loaded with every piece of software available to humanity at launch, just in case, so Praat would definitely have been in there.)

There is one instance in which Weir-via-Grace makes an explicit claim about linguistics:

The oldest words in a language are usually the shortest.

Which is... sketchy. Depending on how exactly you interpret it, it might not be false, but it's not particularly useful. For example, old words tend to be common words, and common words tend to be short... but not all common words are old, and not all old words are common. And this topic comes up when Grace is learning Rocky's words for numbers, which brings up the further question of why Grace assumes that numbers would necessarily be old words. However, this statement has absolutely no relevance to the story. Charitably, perhaps it is meant to show that Grace only has no linguistic training, and only folk-understanding of linguistic science? But what really comes across is that the author didn't really know what he was talking about, and the book would've better with that one sentence just cut out.

This does give us a nice segue to talking about Eridian numbers, though. For the most part, the problem of translating between numeric and unit systems, just like the problem of learning a new language, is offloaded to the non-viewpoint character, who is not merely a linguistic savant but also a mathematical savant, able to do unit-of-measure and numeric base conversions instantaneously in his head (er... cephalothorax?). Grace does, however, learn Eridian numbers to decode Eridian clocks, and works out pretty quickly that they have a base-six numeral system. The choice of how to represent Eridian numerals in the text is kind of interesting--much like using musical note symbols to represent Eridian speech (or at least, that Eridian speech is happening), Weir makes use of existing Unicode symbols that are not typically used in English text and which approximate the diegetic forms of the Eridian symbols to show Eridian numerals in the text. That's the closest we come to any representation of Eridian writing, and cleverly avoids needing to include any pictures in the text (aside from the diagram of the ship provided in the front of the book). Now, Rocky has 5 limbs and 15 fingers, so why would the Eridians have a base-6 system? Well, while all of Rocky's limbs are functionally interchangeable, balancing on two legs for a natural tetrapod would be unnecessarily tricky--but an Eridian could stand, and possibly walk, on any three limbs at a time, leaving two free to use as arms, with a total of 6 fingers between them. Thus, developing a base-6 numeral system based on counting the six fingers of two Eridian hands would be directly analogous to humans developing base-10 numeral systems based on counting the 10 fingers of two of our hands. Note that the actual logic behind Eridian numerals is not addressed in the story, but this seems like a reasonable reverse-engineering of the author's probable intent. If Project Hail Mary had instead been written by a human who natively spoke a minority language of Papua New Guinea with a base-27 body-counting system, perhaps the Eridian numeral system would be slightly more opaque.

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OK, fine, I'll do Arrival

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How can we portray languages in games?

I've looked at books. I've looked and movies and TV shows. I've skirted around looking at audiobooks.

But what about games? Table-Top Role Playing Games (D&D, Pathfinder, GURPS, etc.) have a rather unique relationship to their audience--the audience is an integral participant in the creation of the story that they are experiencing! Which makes any linguistic issues considerably more immediate and immersive than they can be in any other medium. They are also uniquely difficult to study, as the stories are (excepting streamed and recorded gaming sessions) ephemeral.

At LTUE 2023, I had the realization that this was a medium worth studying, and that the only way to really do it would be to talk to game masters and players about their experiences, if they have had any experiences with integrating multiple languages into a game. So, if you're a player or GM and have something to say about this, contact me!

In the meantime, I've got my own experiences to reflect on, and a few preliminary conversations. A lot of gaming settings include multiple languages in the background (and in fact, I am currently under contract with a game publisher to create naming languages for a new RPG campaign setting), but game systems almost always provide some mechanism for getting around any real language barriers--universal translators, or Comprehend Languages spells, etc., and most DMs won't include linguistic content as more than a brief puzzle or background color. And there are perfectly understandable reasons for that--aside from issues that pertain to all fictional media, telling your players that they can't understand what someone else is saying can feel a lot like saying "You can't play my game." And to quote Bob Defendi, "If you tell your players 'you can't play my game', they'll just leave."

But I've been in games where language barriers were used to good effect, without spells or technology to eliminate them. This was done in two ways: one which relied on the fact that I myself am bilingual, and one which did not.

In the first instance, our GM mapped in-game languages onto the real-world languages spoken by various members of our group. Thus, we could map our real-world linguistic diversity into the game--if I didn't want everyone in the party who spoke Common to understand something, I could speak Russian rather than English to represent that my character was speaking a particular in-world language, and only the other players (and by extension, their characters) who also spoke Russian would understand. So, do you ever have players who keep secrets from each other? I know my groups do! And exploiting natural language barriers is an easy way to manage that.

In the second instance, we all just kept track of which languages our characters spoke in-world, and the GM avoided Not Letting Us Play The Game by simply ensuring that every NPC could be understood by some member of the party--but, it was then up to that member of the party whether or not to inform everyone else, and how accurately to "translate"! Thus, the GM could direct information to particular characters, with in-world justification. Real-world communication in this case just relied on passing notes to keep secrets.

Neither of these approaches involve literal representation of in-world languages. They can be completely fictional, with no concrete form. So, making decent role-playing use of conlangs is still unsolved, from my perspective, although I know there are people who have done it! But, my own experiences do show that it is possible to integrate linguistic representation into a game in a way that involves the characters and still keeps things fun.

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Decoding Sangheili in Halo

The Halo TV series, adapted from the eponymous video games, features a conlang, Sangheili, used by the Covenant aliens and developed jointly by David J. Peterson and C. Buck.

Unfortunately, its deployment in the show is... uninspired. As such, I'm not going to bother much with quotations in context, because there just isn't anything to analyze! All Sangheili dialog (with the exception of one word, which we'll get to later) is just straightforwardly subtitled, with no attempt at affordances for comprehensibility in the construction of the dialog, acting, or set design. This kind of surprised me given the general film industry avoidance of long stretches of subtitles (maybe the stigma is going away now that we all need subtitles all the time anyway?), to the point that I tried to find some artistic motivation behind that choice. And I did come up with a possible one, which maybe somebody else would actually use--subtitling with no other affordances does, at least for me, have the effect of making a scene understandable while maintaining a certain emotional distance from the characters involved, compared to the English-speaking characters whom I can understand effortlessly. That's a good thing for bad-guy aliens! However... they do exactly the same thing with, e.g., Korean dialog in the series. And I don't think we are supposed to be emotionally distant Korean-speaking humans!

In order to attempt to make sense of this, I reached out to C. Buck on Twitter to see if he or David had any insight into the creative process for using the Sangheili language in the series. And, well... the answer is "no". Pretty much what I expected, but still disappointing. Quote:

The language creation is very much driven by how and when the writers and/or producers decide they want to use it, in order to enhance the story, or add depth to the narrative. While David and I did quite a bit of work on the grammar, and how the language works, ultimately, the syntax, lexical features, and in some ways the rhythm of the language is where our decision making ends. The rest is very much in the hands of the show-runners.

This is standard in the industry right now, but despite being standard, it is something of a sad state of affairs. I would think that if a production is going to hire a linguist, they might at least consider asking for their input on linguistic issues! Note that that doesn't mean I expect such input to always be acted on--consultants of all types are routinely ignored in film and TV production when it turns out that realism gets in the way of the plot--but it would be nice if showrunners at least were interested in what options were available to them! Oh well. Baby steps.

Sangheili also highlights a generic problem with conlangs in sci-fi film contexts: they are always designed to be pronounced by human actors (though, see Star Trek: Discovery, to be covered in a later article), possibly with some electronic distortion added in post. This makes sense--actors wanna act, and modelling and synthesizing an alien vocal tract is a whole lot of work. So, we just sort of all accept this standard trope that all aliens have human-like vocal tracts--it's not that much of an additional stretch when we are already accepting that most aliens are humanoid-with-funny-foreheads anyway! But Halo makes its aliens at least a little bit weird--not just humans in costumes with prosthetics. And it makes them weird in ways that obviously and significantly impact their vocal tracts! The Elite Covenant soldiers don't even have lower jaws! So the idea that all of the various species in the Covenant can speak one language, and that that language is also compatible with human physiology, just stretches my suspension of disbelief a little bit too far. In improving in one category, the show's creators have highlighted the deficiencies of another.

However! There is one shining beacon of linguistic awesomeness in this show. In episode 4, we get this conversation:

-"I know what a Needler is, Kai."

-"Well, the Covenant have another word for it. What is it again?"

-"Qkhep'os."

-"Oh, yeah, that's it. Qkhep'os. Qkhep'os."

-"Correct"

-"How-- How do you know that?"

-"Well, that's what they say when we turn it on them. Though I guess it could just mean, [Crap], please don't kill me."

-"Also correct."

They highlighted The Gavagai Problem! That's the kind of sweet, sweet linguistic science popularization that I am here for!

This is the impetus for realizing that the Spartan soldiers, who have had a lot of close contact with Covenant soldiers, might be very useful for decoding the Sangheili language. And a few seconds later, we get this lovely frame:

There's a spectrogram! With time-aligned IPA transcription! Somebody was trying, and that makes me happy.

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Some Thoughts on Gripping & Backtile

Gripping and Backtile are languages (or language sketches) by Sai, with collaborators, in the tactile modality--i.e., communicated through the sense of touch.

Gripping, developed in partnership with Alex Fink, is by far the more fully developed of the two. Sai documented the development of the phonology in two YouTube videos, Phonology of a gripping language, part 1 and Phonology of a gripping language, part 2, and Sai & Alex gave an introductory talk on the language at LCC3 (slides available here to follow along). There is also a reference grammar.

Backtile, developed in partnership with Nai Damato, is a language sketch, for which the linked Google Doc is the entirety of available documentation.

My initial approach to relating to either of these languages is to compare them with how natural tactile languages operate. There are not many of those, but between nat-tact-langs, Gripping, and Backtile, we can define a fairly large field of potential design space for tactile languages, which is pretty exciting from the point of view of providing inspiration for other conlangers. Unfortunately... I don't actually know a whole lot about natural tactile languages! In fairness, not many people do--the literature is sparse--but Sai and their collaborator for Backtile, Nai, at least have considerably more personal experience in that area (where "considerably more" means "any at all", and Nai actually has a relevant university degree). Fortunately, the Backtile document does explain its naturalistic inspirations, and Sai, Nai, and Alex have all been available to provide additional context.

I want to be annoyed at the limited documentation for Backtile, but it is admittedly just a sketch, and I can't fault the creators for not feeling like developing it further; if that's all there is to document, then that's all there is to document. As it is, Backtile intersects with some of the coding strategies used in actual Tactile ASL / Protactile. There is, however, also a smidgen of artificiality in the use of braille, with finger and palm pressure used to communicate the dot pattern of a braille cell for spelling. In fairness, this is something that is actually done in Deaf-Blind communities, but importing braille feels to me like importing oral spelling into English--it's a distinctly technological process, tied to the idea of writing, and as such goes against my own intuitions about what is "natural to the medium". Alex has expressed similar feelings, though neither of us can precisely identify which features make it feel artificial, aside from its history as a designed system. But hey, if real life Deaf-Blind people actually do that already, then clearly it works, so you might as well use it! The other aspect in which Backtile feels somewhat artificial is in the extremely restricted articulatory space--it's articulated exclusively on the upper back/shoulder blade (hence the name). However, this feeds into some desirable properties of the system--being less tiring than hand-following, less socially awkward than more high-contact tactile signing, easily accessible, and allowing full duplex communication between two people with hands resting on each other's shoulders.

Gripping is in some ways much more artificial, although it has some of the aesthetic of hand-following tactile signing. It is meant to be a covert communication system for couples in situations where it would not be weird for them to be holding hands in public. Though neither Sai nor Alex were aware of this when constructing Gripping, it has some similarities to Somali Tactile Livestock Negotiation Code, in that involves one hand from each person, communication by pressure on particular points of the receiver's hand, and is meant to be covert--although in the case of Somali Tactile Code, only the message is covert, not the fact that communication is occurring in the first place, and Gripping is considerably more elaborated and flexible! (Note that the linked article refers to the Somali system as a "language", but it's really not--it is a highly context-restricted code with limited expressivity.)

I mentioned above the concept of "natural[ness] to the medium", a useful concept which I was introduced to by Sai. I'll just quote, because they describe it at least as well as I could:

I have a conception of "natural to the medium", which has only a coincidental relationship with "is similar to natlangs". All natlangs are natural to their media (barring some bad conlanging by authorities), but not all things that could be natural to the media are found in an extant natlang, because the latter is by no means a covering set of the possibility space. There are things they just don't happen to have evolved to, but which could occur — and among those, there are both ones that could occur by derivation from extant/historical natlangs, and ones that could not occur from them because the founder effects plus diachronic changes wouldn't reach some part of possibility space.

This is a useful concept to have around for critiquing all sorts of conlangs, but especially for critiquing conlangs in media for which there just aren't a lot or (or any) natural points of comparison. And while Gripping does seem very artificial with things like Tactile ASL and Tactile Auslan as one's basis for comparison, I don't think it can be said that it isn't natural to the medium--and given that it has radically different design goals, I don't think we should expect it to look "naturalistic" with regard to natural tactile sign languages. Indeed, Sai's phonology videos go to great lengths to explain how it is natural to the medium, by detailing the extensive experimental work that Sai and Alex did to find sets of contrastive features that were easy to articulate and easy to perceive, which is really a rather unique opportunity available in this particular medium, because it still uses the human body, just in a new way. That kind of interactive experimentation with a new communication medium is considerably harder to pull off for, e.g., alien languages using senses and articulators that humans don't have, like my own Fysh A language.

One particularly interesting feature of Gripping is that the phonology is asymmetrical--the person whose thumb is on top in the grip produces signs differently at the articulatory-phonetic level than the person whose thumb is on bottom. This is to get around the fact that switching positions is awkward and slow. However, if one were to eliminate the secrecy requirement, a different solution inspired by four-handed Tactile ASL signing presents itself--you could use a double grip for a full-duplex communication, where each participant has a dedicated receiving hand and a dedicated sending hand! There's an idea if any other conlanger wants to pick it up. (Also note that there is a lot more phonetic space available to explore if you drop the requirements for secrecy, so if you want to experiment with your own one-pair-of-hands tactile language, don't assume Gripping has already covered the entirety of available phonological options!) Sai and Alex did not pursue this route for several reasons, in addition to the obvious loss of secrecy:

1. You can't move around easily while clasping both hands--this would make it a converse-in-place system. However, that's not too different from what actually happens with natural Deaf-Blind tactile communication, so it's not a deal-breaker if someone else wants to run with the idea.
2. Clasping both pairs of hands is considerably less comfortable in a relaxed position, and more effortful in an un-relaxed position.
3. Full duplex communication is absurdly mentally challenging, so while having the option is neat, lacking it really isn't a problem. Full duplex really just allows you the option to interrupt and talk over your interlocutor. (But perhaps this could be used as the basis for some linguistic sci-fi--imagine an alien species which does have the mental capacity for full duplex communication, and a medium that supports it!)

As-is, with the single-grip setup, Gripping is somewhere between half- and full-duplex on the phonological level, similar to audio languages in which it is possible to talk over people. Unlike audio languages, however, certain combinations of subordinate and dominant articulations are actually physically impossible to pull off! The half-duplex system currently documented is already an improvement over what is possible with, e.g., Tactile ASL, which does require repositioning to exchange the roles of sending and following hands. On the other hand, Protactile communication does allow for limited back-channeling (e.g., "ACK", "uh-huh", "yeah", etc.), and Sai has speculated that a similar level of discourse-management simultaneous communication could be added to Gripping using the subset of phonology that can be simultaneously articulated and perceived, though they have not yet tried it.

Additionally, just as oral languages can be partially lip-read and ALS signs can be felt, Gripping articulations are useful outside of their primary modality. Sai has given the example using Gripping as a very restricted sign language with no hand motion, for covert hand signals--which is very similar to the "small motion" Atreides sign language that David Peterson developed for the latest film adaptation of Dune.

Some Thoughts... Index

Some Thoughts on...: An Index of Conlang Critique

1. Some Thoughts on Machi Languages
2. Some Thoughts on AllNoun
3. Some Thoughts on Khangathyagon
4. Some Thoughts on Zimvisz
5. Meta-Critique: Some Thoughts on Glossing
6. Some Thoughts on Gripping & Backtile
7. Some Thoughts on Toki Pona
8. Some More Thoughts on Toki Pona
9. Some Thoughts on Iljena

Some Thoughts On Glossing

A Note: This article has been edited from its original version to take into account feedback from David himself.

David J. Peterson has on several occasions been outspoken against Interlinear Glossing, particularly in the context of developing and documenting conlangs. I find that very strange, as I find glossing absolutely indispensable in language documentation, so after our last social media exchange on this topic, I decided to do some Deep Thinking.

And this is the part where I feel a lot like Brandon Sanderson expressing his dissatisfaction with Audible. I don't dislike DJP! I still have signed copies of his books on conlanging for kids and adults, and I am quite happy to provide those Amazon Affiliate links so other people can give him money for them! But on this one point at least, I think he is wrong, and I want to understand why, and what glossing is really good for.

To that end, I asked a bunch of people on social media about their opinions on glossing. You can see the raw responses on Facebook (group 1, group 2), Reddit, Quora, and Twitter. It turns out to be very difficult to get the question across effectively given the differing restrictions on message length and type on different platforms, but I still got some pretty useful data.

There are, I think, two major factors at play:

First, David does not believe in morphemes--or at least, does not find the concept of morphemes useful language design. And that's fine! David is far from the only person to point out that morphemes aren't necessarily a great concept even in formal linguistics, or to propose alternative models of morphology.

Second, David works for an unusual audience. As essentially the world's only full-time professional conlanger for movies and TV, the primary audiences for his documentary output are:

1. Actors, who have to be able to pronounce translated lines, but not necessarily understand what they mean.
2. Set design artists, who need access to font files and translated text, and need to know what it looks like and how much space it will take up... but again, not what it actually means.

Now, I thought that these would be situation where, admittedly, full on Leipzig-style interlinear glossing won't be particularly useful, and may in fact be an inconvenient distraction. I am, in fact, fully ready to admit that there are many situations in which interlinear glossing is not useful. However, while (as I would expect) they are not fully detailed Leipzig-style morphological glosses, David does provide phonetic and word-level interlinear glosses for actor lines, as you can see published on his website, and has said that this is "one of the only places I think it's useful." (Incidentally, William Annis also provides actors with interlinears so they don't stress the wrong words--but again, not with full morphological analyses. I don't know how, e.g., Marc Okrand, Paul Frommer, or Christine Shreyer work, but I would not be at all surprised to find that it's very similar.) 

But, I suspect that David's unusual success in this particular context has led him to overgeneralize. Now, to be clear, I don't know that David has any problem with glossing in an academic linguistic context; to quote "When you're glossing to analyze, that's analysis. It has its place, and its place is in analysis, not creation." Thus, some of this might seem like attacking a strawman--but as far as I am concerned, conlang documentation is language documentation, and what's good for natlangs is good for conlangs, and vice-versa. In fact, I don't even particularly disagree with the statement that glossing is for analysis--but I do strongly disagree with the idea that analysis and creation must be considered distinct, and with the implication that analysis should be excluded from presentation, which is where conlang creation and natural language documentation collide.

In this reddit post (a response to an earlier revision of this article), David breaks down the problem as follows:

The problem I see is twofold:

Biased morphological analyses (both betraying the framework being used, and how the language itself is being used).

Taking something readable, like language data, and exploding it, so it's a mess.

These are not bad points. However, they should not be applied overly broadly. Thus, when David goes on to say that "In short, morphological glossing is for analysis, not for presentation—or for comprehension.", I must vehemently disagree--that is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And while this looks initially like a very different breakdown of the issue than what I came up with, they actually line up pretty well--so let's take a look and my two points and David's to points together.

Regarding morphological analysis: It is true that any particular gloss at a level deeper than word-for-word will entail some kind of analysis, and an associated theoretical position. But does that mean you have to believe in morpheme theory to use glossing? No! Martin Haspelmath doesn't believe in morphemes (see links above), but he is (along with Bernard Comrie and Balthasar Bickel) nevertheless one of the editors for the latest edition of the Leipzig rules! Which rules include several options for notating non-concatenative and non-trivially-segmentable morphology. And while not all such proposals are included in the current edition of the standard rules, there have nevertheless been even more proposals for glossing symbols that explicitly avoid making theoretical claims (e.g., "+" as an alternative to "-" vs. "=", to indicate that some particular subforms are joined without making any claim about whether the joint is an instance of affixation cliticization, or compounding). And nobody is forcing you to strictly stick to the limits of the Leipzig conventions. In fact, one respondent to my social media surveys was explicit about the idea that glosses "should be geared towards the readership, and the idea that glosses should always follow a standard format is wrong".

So, just because you don't accept a particular theoretical position is no reason to reject interlinear glossing altogether. You can design your style of glossing to fit whatever theoretical or non-theoretical considerations you prefer, to best communicate with your target audience.

But suppose you do expose a theoretical bias in your glossing: is that actually a bad thing? Certainly, it can be bad, particularly if you aren't doing it on purpose, and I will address that in more detail below, but it does not need to be. In many cases, the analysis can be the whole point, and betraying the framework being used can be a positive addition to the presentation. Several of my own conlangs, after all (notably, the three "Languages of Spite") exist to demonstrate that a language with a particular theoretical grammatical structure is possible. Omitting the intended analysis from the presentation in such cases would make it nearly worthless. So what is David's solution? "On the other hand, if there's sufficient language data and accompanied by faithful, accurate translations, that's all you really need." Technically, this is true--it's what a working linguist would rely on for documenting a natural language in the first place, after all, and the same can certainly be done with conlangs--but do you really want to ask that of your audience? I don't; no matter how much raw language data is provided, among the people who might read an appreciate a conlang grammar, practically none of them will do the work to produce the analysis themselves. So, again, I think David's success in a particular context has led to overgeneralization--if you are producing a conlang with the intent that it be appreciated through the aesthetics of text produced in that language (where "text" here is meant in the technical sense, encompassing spoken dialog as well as written text), then a gloss may be unnecessary to your purposes. But if you intend the language to be appreciated for itself, as an exercise in constructing a system, then the analysis is the thing, and it must be part of the presentation, just as much as it must be included in any academic paper analyzing the structure of a natural language.

Furthermore, creation and analysis need not be separate stages. If you work that way with your own conlangs, cool, I won't tell you that you're wrong--but it's not the only way. In my own experience, analysis and creation feed back into each other; analyzing what I have already created generates new ideas other features to create, which may interact in unexpected ways and lead to changes in direction or re-analysis that makes the original obsolete. When working this way, interlinears are a way to communicate with myself.

Now, David has also said that

In fact, most of the time when I'm looking at conlangs, I completely ignore the glosses, because they're often (a) incoherent, and (b) wrong.

And... yeah, I can't argue with that. But does that mean that we shouldn't do them at all? No! It simply means that we shouldn't do them badly! (At least, not in the final presentation; if your glosses-for-yourself produced in the creative process are crappy, but they work for you, then more power to you!) If your glosses are incoherent, then get better at glossing! If your glosses are wrong, I am glad that you included them, so that I could make that determination myself. It opens the door to a potentially productive conversation. It is not at all unusual for me to come across a datum in a natlang grammar or analytical paper and think "I'm pretty sure that analysis is wrong", so it should not be at all surprising that the same would happen with conlang grammars. But the gloss provides a means of understanding the author's analysis as well as formulating my own.

Now, let's move on to considering my and David's second points: what's appropriate for the audience, and when does a gloss enhance or detract from the presentation? Well, as I've already explained, when The Analysis Is The Thing, you should include a gloss! But beyond that, I myself thought that appropriate usages were more restricted than it turns out they actually are before I started this little bit of research; in particular, I thought "well, if you are writing a document intended to teach the language, then interlinear glossing is probably not terribly useful." After all, in my formal school studies of French and Russian, not once did I ever encounter a textbook that contained interlinear glosses--they just teach you the vocabulary and morphology ahead of time, or else expect you to memorize complete constructions and infer the rules later, and the main point of a Leipzig-style interlinear gloss is to make the text accessible to someone who doesn't have the necessary background in the language yet (or ever). And yet, if we look up Interlinear Glossing in Wikipedia, the very first phrase of the article is "In linguistics and pedagogy" (emphasis added). And furthermore, consider this excerpt from Nishnaabemwin Reference Grammar by J. Randolph Valentine:

Linguistic researchers may be disappointed to see that morpheme-level segmentations of examples are rarely provided. At a conference held in Thunder Bay, Ontario, in 1996, a steering comittee of Nishnaabemwin speakers explicitly requested that such details not be included, as it was felt that they interfered with the flow of the presentation, and contributed to what is sometimes called the "intellectual mining" of aboriginal languages and cultures. To accommodate these concerns, I [provided] word-level annotations[...]. [I]t seems to me that there are many good reasons for working the annotations into the text. For one, many of my readers will be semi-speakers of Nishnaabemwin, who will benefit from the help annotations provide; secondly, Nishnaabemwin varies dialectically, and the word-level glosses will allow fluent readers to more readily accommodate dialect differences; lastly, of course, the annotations make the language more accessible to those lacking prior exposure.

I have complex feelings about this situation. On the one hand, if this is an academic reference grammar, then yeah, I would be surprised and dismayed at the lack of detailed glosses. But, on the other hand, if it is used largely as study reference for learners of the language, then I agree with steering committee that detailed glosses would indeed interfere with the presentation! But on the gripping hand... readers "will benefit from the help annotations provide". And that triggered a realization that I am shocked I did not have earlier, given that I spent 9 years working for a university language department developing software to improve adult language acquisition! What's the number-one most effective technological assistance you can give to a new language learner? Parallel translations, subtitles, and word-by-word glosses to ensure they are exposed to comprehensible input! Anything that will reduce the friction of discovering the meaning of words or phrases the reader is unsure about, keeping them engaged with the text in a flow state. At the end of my time in academia, we were even looking into automatic morphanalysis for augmented reader applications. So while a fully detailed Leipzig-style interlinear gloss can get distractingly complex, and thus unhelpful, some level of glossing--tailored to the audience, not slavishly holding to the formal Leipzig rules in maximal detail--is clearly appropriate to pedagogical settings!

To quote David again: "The glosses I typically see make the work less accessible, and the work would be improved by their removal." I suspect that Nishnaabemwin steering committee would agree. And yet, "the annotations make the language more accessible". The issue is not, fundamentally, interlinear glossing. The issue is bad interlinear glossing! David is absolutely right that many people (conlangers and academic linguists alike) are not great at writing glosses clearly, and often have a tendency to include far more information than is necessary for the purpose of the given example. This is why you don't give a full morphological breakdown to an actor who just needs to pronounce the line with right prosody! But let's not throw out the good with the bad; don't just stop glossing, learn to consider your audience, and learn to gloss well.

What about not-teaching-a-language settings? Well, that's where glossing really shines. If you are writing an article, or a descriptive grammar, whether documenting or analyzing a natural language or a conlang, pretty much everyone surveyed agrees that interlinear glosses are "crucial" or "absolutely indispensable"--and as I have argued above, there is at least a certain genre of conlang presentation in which The Analysis Is The Thing. But, that genre aside, on its own, this is just an opinion, and no more forceful than "glossing is useless". So, why are interlinears indispensable? Fundamentally, it's because your audience does not know the language (or at least, cannot be assumed to know the language--if you are writing a paper on English in English, you can probably skip the glosses most of the time; same goes for, e.g., writing a paper on Spanish in Spanish, etc., where obviously your audience will know the language under discussion) and will not be learning the language. As one respondent put it, the gloss is

the part that lets me know what the hell I'm even looking at. A string of Latin script doesn't even tell me what your language sounds like, let alone how it works. If you don't gloss, you could literally just as well post gibberish and no one could tell the difference.

Which, given the mystery surrounding the Voynich manuscript, does indeed seem to be true! And as I already stated above, even if you provide "sufficient" language material for the reader to come up with their own analyses... they just won't. Ain't nobody got time for that! To quote David again: "I expect if you give a grammar and unglossed data of a language you've created to someone else to gloss, you're going to get back glosses that surprise you." No doubt! And I would love to run that experiment! But it's not an argument against making your own analysis more accessible.

The more different the structures of the analyzed and analysis languages are, the more important interlinear glossing is to help elucidate the structure of the original and how it actually corresponds to the final translation. It gives you the details that the author knows and the reader needs.

If you are trying to support a particular theoretical analysis, then glosses are a succinct way to illustrate that analysis. As noted about above, you don't have to subscribe to any particular theory to use interlinear glossing, but if you do, an appropriate choice of glossing conventions will let you show it! But whether or not you are committing to an analysis, interlinears are also helpful in allowing the reader to develop their own analyses. To quote another respondent:

An example sentence without a gloss conveys that an example or illustration exists
An example sentence with a gloss actually illustrates how things work and shows the reader information that might actually be part of it working.

(Emphasis added.) In other words, a gloss, which conveys author knowledge about the structure of the analyzed language, helps to prevent the reader from going astray and engaging in "analyzing the translation". It makes the source more accessible without having to analyze huge quantities of text on one's own, such that the reader can usefully formulate and propose their own hypotheses to explain the data, even if the original glosser is theoretically biased. This is particularly important when the point of an example is to illustrate a grammatical feature that may not be fully preserved in the language of analysis. For example, to quote another respondent:

If I were writing in Eng. about resumptive pronouns in X, and I gave a sentence with a translation "I saw the neighbors we sold the car to" without adding "I see-PST neighbors Rel we sell-PST them-DAT car", I'm not really presenting direct info about pronouns in X.

Information is almost always lost in translation, and appropriate glossing allows you to preserve it, and focus on what you want the example to show!

So, should you always gloss everything? No, there are definitely situations where it is not useful for the target audience or purpose of the text. Should you always gloss in maximal detail and with perfect conformance to the formal Leipzig rules? Also no--you should tailor your glosses to the intended audience and what you want to convey with a particular example. But should you never gloss? Also no! If you intend your documentation to actually be useful to other linguists, or appreciable by other conlangers, you should know how and when to gloss, and do so liberally!


Some Thoughts... Index