The Pitfalls of Humor

I couldn't blog last night because I was out - watching the taping of the NPR radio quiz show called "Wait, wait... Don't tell me."  My husband loves this show, so we often hear it on Saturday mornings.  It's full of political humor and quirky stories from the week's news.  I laughed so hard my face hurt - but I wonder if someone from a different culture or country might have enjoyed it quite as much.

Humor doesn't translate well.

I admit I laugh at "Wait, wait... Don't tell me."  And Jon Stewart gives me quite the chuckles.  The hardest I've ever laughed was at The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Monty Python - English humor.  Some of the jokes, of course, went right by me.  They didn't make me groan, but instead made me go, "Wha...?"  The ones that got me, on the other hand - whoa!  Monty Python's parrot sketch brought tears to my eyes.

I think a lot of humor is like that, because if humor didn't tread borderlines, it wouldn't be funny.  My preference is for humor along the random/weird borderline, because if I don't get it, it just leaves me behind.  I laugh at some types of uncomfortable/taboo borderline humor, but when I don't get it, I can hardly stand it.  With Mr. Bean, for example, I have to leave the room after about five minutes - same with Mike Myers at his worst.  Profanity generally leaves me cold, but it "fits" well with certain types of humorous content.  Seinfeld was always firmly on the borderline of inanity/pet peeves, and I couldn't stand it.

But in English generally, even if I don't "get" the humor, at least I understand what it's trying to do.  Humor in a foreign language is much tougher.  

French humor was always a rewarding effort for me.  I thought Asterix and Tintin comic books were hilarious - Tintin went more for the physical slapstick humor that was relatively familiar, while Asterix added a dimension of puns that is difficult to describe.  I think puns in English are often considered to be low humor, though they are used constantly in the area of sports, and often in news headlines.  The puns in Asterix were so thoroughgoing that you just had to love them.  And the cultural borderlines they played with were somewhat familiar. 

Japanese is harder.  I've studied a heck of a lot of Japanese, lived there three years, watched a lot of Japanese television shows, and I have yet to get it completely.  Some stuff I've figured out.  The physical humor - I can understand the ridiculing/embarrassing/fooling/injuring people borderline to some extent.  It was a little like America's most sadistic home videos.  The humor satirizing extreme elements of Japanese culture, I could also get - like a sitcom-style show that depicted a number of families going to extreme measures as their children passed through rigorous testing to enter kindergarten.  Or like Juzo Itami's The Funeral - a great movie - which satirized the societal expectations of behavior surrounding a funeral for a man whom everyone in the film disliked.  But some of it, especially comedy-dialogue, left me totally bewildered.

So what about in writing stories?

Well, as I've told all my critique friends, I can't write humor.  Not jokes, at least.  So I don't try to go for ridiculous situations or funny twists or wild over-the-top comedy.  On the other hand, I love to have my characters be funny just because of who they are.  Like the gecko Allayo in Let The Word Take Me (Analog, July/August 2008), who because of her cultural background drew the utterly serious and sensible conclusion that the young Human man David Linden was possessed, simply because he talked so much. 

When I started writing this post it made me wonder what an alien or fantasy society would look like if it were designed with its own particular brand of humor.  I'm not sure if I've ever seen anyone do something like that - not having the entire story be a comedy, so much as having the people in it make humor an important and integral part of their lives.  If any of you have encountered such a thing, do tell me where, because I'd love to see how it was done!  

Manners Matter...

No, I'm not talking about Emily Post.

I'm talking about polite words.  Please and thank you, obviously, which have been drilled into many of our heads - and which I drill into the heads of my own children!  (I do try to do it gently...)  But there's also that other stuff: all the things we say to each other which seem to have no real content or meaning, but which we say anyway.  "How are you?" when we don't expect an answer.  "Fine" when we don't really feel fine.  The list goes on and on.

These things are important.  Why?  Not because they have empirical value, but because they have social value.  They express alignment, and to mark us as members of particular social groups.  They are largely unnoticed and unconscious, but that makes them all the more problematic.  

If a language learner makes a mistake in verb conjugation, we go, "Okay, that was a mistake."  And we move on.  But if a language learner makes a mistake in politeness, usually we don't say it was a mistake; we conclude that this person is abrasive or rude.  Mistakes in politeness (and pragmatics generally) tend to reflect on the person, rather than on the person's use of language.

Here's another one.  Where do we draw the line between politeness and lying?  If we don't like a friend's outfit, it would be pretty inconsiderate to tell him so - but what do we say if he asks?  If we say he looks fine, is that lying, or is it simply polite?  It's a tricky distinction, but potentially explosive, and begging to be used in a story.

Then there's mimicry, which came up recently on Kelley Eskridge's blog.  Many of us unconsciously fall into the speech patterns of the people we're talking with - it seems to feel better, to help us fit in by aligning us with those people.  But how much is too much?  How do we know when it might turn into mockery? 

I spoke Australian once.  I'd been waiting at a train station for half an hour, watching trains go by and fuming, when I suddenly realized that I'd made a mistake in reading the destination signs, and I could have caught any of about five trains that I'd seen.  This made me hopping mad (literally!  I must have been quite a sight).  But when the kind people around me asked what was wrong, some unconscious part of me decided they'd call me stupid if they knew I was American, so I launched into Australian without thinking.  Luckily I was smart enough not to try it for long, and I escaped without offending anyone.  They assumed (correctly!) that I wasn't from the neighborhood.

How many of you have been part of situations like this?

I'll come back to the topic again soon.

Some more mythical creatures

Today I went with my family to the Field Museum in Chicago, where they've been running an exhibit on mythical creatures of the world.  Absolutely wonderful!  This was the second time I'd been through it, and both times I've considered it to be fantastic research for the purposes of fantasy and science fiction.  It gives me some really amazing ideas for fantasy creatures, but also for designing local mythologies and their origins in science fiction contexts.

The exhibit included first the mythical creatures themselves:  amazing statues, costumes, images on ancient coins, and illustrations in old manuscripts.  Then it went on to speculate about possible origins for the legends, showing manatees with mermaids and giant squid with the kraken, and demonstrating the way the backs of dolphins or whales might be mistaken for the coils of sea monsters when they appear in groups. 

I'd been familiar already with the idea that stories of dragons and giant reptiles might have arisen from dinosaur fossils - but this exhibit took it further.  For example, it linked the griffin with fossils of protoceratops, and the roc with giant birds like aepyornis, which lived in Madagascar before it became extinct (mind you, it didn't look much like a roc, but more like an enormous emu).  The cyclops it said may have been a reinterpretation of elephant skulls, which have a large hole in the center (nasal passages) that could have been interpreted as a single eye socket.

Maybe some of you have heard about how Father Christmas used to dress in all sorts of colors like green, purple, brown, etc. until Coca-Cola decided to dress him in red?  Well, a similar thing happened to the unicorn back in the middle ages!  Early stories had the unicorn appearing with a goatlike body and a colored horn (the color varied).  Then after traders appeared on the scene selling spiral narwhal tusks, all of a sudden the unicorn's horn started appearing as a white spiral!  A sign that stories are traded along with objects... Something similar apparently also happened with mermaids, where stories handed from person to person across the world made combs and mirrors common accessories for mer-creatures that had originally been more distinct.

I also saw a picture of a hippocampus, or mer-horse; along with it came the explanation that there was once a belief that every creature of the land possessed a counterpart in the sea.  What an idea - just bursting with possibilities for extrapolation!

There were also some very unusual creatures, many of whose names now escape me, but a few of which I'd like to share.  The Australian bunyip, supposedly about the size of a small cow, usually said to be furred but which is sometimes portrayed with scales and/or feathers as well - this one started out a fearsome abductor, but over time became more benign.  The chupacabra or "goat-sucker," quite a fierce and colorful creature which is said to act something like a vampire for livestock.  The Nasca killer whale, which has extra fins, human hands, and carries a human head.  Barong Ket, a lion-like Balinese good guy who fights the chaos sown by the evil witch Rangda...

If any of you would like to check out photos or learn more, you can either head on over to the Field Museum (if you're in Chicago and can go soon, since the exhibit is about to close) or go to the following url, which has a great collection of pictures and some of the explanations as well:

http://www.fieldmuseum.org/mythiccreatures/

My mind swims with the possibilities.  I hope you can find inspiration here too.

Do you want to consider language change?

Have you ever tried to hear the difference between a Cockney British accent and an Australian accent?  

Once I set myself the challenge - I was on a train platform in Tokyo, and I heard some people talking near me, and I started listening just trying to place my best guess as to where they were from.  It was pretty hard.  Eventually I fastened onto one single language feature:  these people were using glottal stop "t" (a "t" pronounced way back in the throat) in the middle of words instead of flap "t" (like in American "batter").  That one difference told me I was listening to British English instead of Australian English.  The rest of it - vowels, intonation, everything else - was at the time too subtle for me to distinguish.

Why in the world are these accents so similar?  It turns out that when Australia was first settled, starting in 1788, most of the people who moved there came from the same area of England where Cockney speakers live today. A lot of them were convicts.  My Aussie husband will tell you that these folk were subjected to a trip to Australia for petty crimes, like stealing or poaching, rather than anything more serious.  Who'd want to be stuck on a ship full of murderers for six months?  But as a result, both Cockney and Australian English are actually  "daughter languages" of the same parent, an English dialect spoken in a particular region (and by a particular social group) in London at the end of the 18th century. 

It's been more than two hundred years since then, and at the sound level, the two dialects are remarkably similar.  There are more noticeable divergences of vocabulary, of course (for example, Australians say "truck" instead of "lorry") but a lot still remains common (such as saying "lift" rather than "elevator"). 

I remarked in my earlier post on dialects that the longer a language exists in a particular area, and the more isolated regions are, the more dialects will diverge.  In the United States, there are isolated regions in the East (I'm thinking it was the Appalachian mountains?) which preserve language features that haven't been present in a standard American dialect for hundreds of years.  These are in fact useful for scholars who study language change.

You probably already know how I'm going to be connecting this to speculative fiction.  It becomes relevant in all kinds of contexts.  One possible science fiction context is that of extrapolating the language used by future societies (I think immediately of Mike Flynn's The January Dancer).  One possible fantasy context is that of quoting ancient texts (I think of Tolkien).  Either science fiction or fantasy can easily support the idea of two societies that have been isolated for a long period of time suddenly finding one another again and having to resume communication (I think of Stargate, and one of my own planned stories).

If you're writing a story that involves language change, it's useful to consider the following factors:

1.  amount of time elapsed

2. presence or absence of written language (this can slow change)

3. amount of intercommunication between isolated groups (more communication can mean slower change)

4. amount of intermixing with other language groups (this can accelerate change)

It's also useful to consider that change can occur in any of the following features:

1.  phonology (consonant, vowel systems, etc.)

2. morphology (verb conjugations, noun pluralization, negation, etc.)

3. vocabulary (some words lost, some words new)

4. syntax (probably not the main word order, like subject-verb-object for English, but phrasings can vary a lot)

5. discourse (the order in which thoughts are presented, for example)

6. politeness (all kinds of manners may change along with social activities)

When you think about the degree of change that you want in your language, here are some English-language landmarks that you may find useful.

Old English:  Beowulf, dated variously from the 8th or 11th centuries, so between the years 700 and 1000

 hwaet we garde na, in gerdagum, theod cyninge, thrym gefrunon, hu the athelingas ellen fremedon.

(You'll have to forgive me, because this is actually an extremely rough transcription of the first line, which I memorized solely by sound - I've reconstructed some of it from internet sources, but help me anyone who has the actual text!!)

The words I know have remained most similar to modern English here are "we" and "hu" (who) and "the."  I think "gerdagum" means "those days" which sounds a lot like German to me.  Needless to say, not a lot is comprehensible after more than a thousand years.

Middle English:  Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, written between 1387 and 1400

  Whan that Aprille, with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote

And bathed every veyne in swich licour, 

Of which vertu engendred is the flour...

Okay, this is much, much more comprehensible, but still pretty tough.  Consider also that its pronunciation is quite well reflected in the spelling of the words, so that gh is actually pronounced like "ch" in the German "ich". In addition, "flour" is actually "flower."  So here we've got a pretty serious degree of difficulty.  Amount of time elapsed:  600+ years

Shakespeare's English:  excerpt from "The Tempest," written 1610 or 1611

I have done nothing but in care of thee,

Of thee, my dear one, thee, my daughter, who

Art ignorant of what thou art, nought knowing

Of whence I am, nor that I am more better 

Than Prospero, master of a full poor cell,

And thy no greater father.

This should be much more familiar to a general audience.  And while it is written in verse, it does give us an indication of the kinds of phrasings and vocabulary used in this time period, because Shakespeare's plays were intended to be performed for the general public (I would argue that they still come across better read aloud than read silently).  Time elapsed: 400 years.

It's late and I'd better wrap this up, but I hope it's been interesting.  A last couple of notes:  slang is always present, and changes pretty rapidly, but may not always be incorporated into the main thrust of change in a language.  Also, language does not always simplify, nor does it always complicate - it will generally simplify in some areas of the language and complicate in others.  

I welcome any questions or suggestions you may have on this topic.

Translation problems

Tonight I saw a great discussion on Kelley Eskridge's blog about translation:  http://www.kelleyeskridge.com/when-you-are-jadeando/

I couldn't help linking it up in my mind with a suggestion from the Asimov's board ( www.asimovs.com ) that I discuss languages that occur in really unusual channels, like chemical odor signals and pheromones.

Here's the thing.  No matter what kind of language you're proposing that your aliens use (or your humans, if you include sign language), in order for it to appear in a story in English, it has to be rendered in English!

You can always start by describing your language's transmission, and then put the content of messages in English.  But if you want the language to feel real, doing a search-and-replace substitution of "emitted" for "said" obviously isn't going to do the trick!  That's when you start looking for other places to put information related to language channel.  

One possibility would be working with your descriptions, considering how people receiving this communication might respond to it.  You could describe emotional response to this alien "speech" in the way you might describe response to scent signals in our world, for example.   You could find every scent-imbued word you can think of or look up, and consider ways to integrate them into the dialogue and surrounding text.  

All of this is for interaction that occurs in the scent language, internally to that language with "emitters" and "receivers" who can both understand it.  But what about contrast, when you have scent communicators and auditory language speakers in the same story, or the same room?

Suddenly now you have to have two versions of English:  English rendering of the auditory language, and English rendering of the scent language.  How do you construct the dialogue so the two are sufficiently differentiated?  Okay, so you design yourself a sophisticated translator which can pick up the scent signals and give a rough rendition of the language in English - what is going to come out of it?  The easy solution is to say that your translator is just so darn good that of course it's going to give you the English equivalent of what the aliens say.  But as Kelley Eskridge was discussing, translation isn't ever clean; there's no true "English equivalent," and in fact for a language as completely different as this hypothetical pheromone language we're discussing, I struggle to imagine how precise equivalents might be found for anything!

That's when I'd suggest looking into the idea of cultural and linguistic basic concepts for the alien language.  The following will be a sequence of speculations, so I hope it makes sense!

In our scent language, very likely individual speaker identity will be hardwired into any "statement",  because scent has a long history of being used for marking territory.  Then, on top of that, you might have an ambient layer of the emotional state of the speaker as indicated by his or her scent profile.  This might be used to correspond linguistically to English things like "definitely" or "maybe" or "!" which indicate the person's level of commitment to the content of the message.  Beyond that I guess it might be a question of which chemicals were emitted when and how they were combined to form concepts.  

But on the other hand, scent is less flexible than sound as far as temporal variables, because it's basically impossible (outside of a whipping wind) to emit one scent after another  without having them mix.  So maybe that very mix, that sequential deepening and complication of scent, would be our main variable rather than just a simple question of which chemicals were emitted.  Which leads me to wonder how a species using this mode of communication might conceptualize time and change...

This is all totally hypothetical, of course, but it shows some of the ways I go about trying to tease apart cultural and linguistic concepts that I can use when I'm looking for a prose style for an alien language.  So to put the final piece on the end for our scent language, maybe this is one where I'd try to have each piece of dialogue consist of a single initial word, followed by sentences of increasing length which would continue to feature this word but add concepts to it on both ends.  

Now how the heck would I make that comprehensible by readers?  Maybe I'm lucky that I'm not working with this particular scent language at the moment...