Workshop: Update

Hello to my five participants. I have had some significant internet outages yesterday and today, which is the reason for my delay. My thought is this: I have some general questions that have been piqued by the different entries, and I'm hoping we can all weigh in on them even though they don't all apply to every person's language. I'm going to post this now while my link is up, and the questions will be forthcoming.

Thanks for your patience.

Workshop: Final Participants

It looks like I have five participants for the workshop. I was hoping for more, but maybe the people who were daunted by my linguistics entries this month will come out of the woodwork later when they discover I'm not going to bite - or require grammatical completeness for a created language.

The participants are:

1. Catreona
2. David Marshall
3. Pyraxis
4. Wordjinn
5. K

I'm going to go off and dig into the material you've provided. More soon...

The appearance of text and script

This post was inspired by the internet discussion that has prompted my latest surge of visitors - welcome, all of you who've never visited before! It is also quite relevant to my language design workshop (fortunately!).

I'm talking about letters. That is, how a language is written down. In previous posts about designing languages (see the label "designing languages"), I've talked about how different writing systems correspond to different sounds, so today I'm going to come at it from a different angle - what those characters look like, and how to discuss the appearance of text, letters and script in a story.

When I was designing my Varin world, I actually designed the language after I drafted the novels for the first time, and I had to go back and look for every instance in which I mentioned the appearance of the text. Lucky for me, this didn't involve instances of naming letters so much as places where people were looking at books or handwritten notes. So I sat down and designed a single-sound-based alphabetic character system with a print and a cursive form.

The trick with designing alphabets is that you want them to be simple enough to duplicate, and yet distinct enough for them to be easily recognized. The alphabets I created as a kid were almost always too complicated to duplicate with any reasonable degree of speed, as are some of the character systems I've seen used in published fiction. I've also seen many character systems in published fiction in which the characters were not easily distinguished from one another. Tolkien's Elvish/Mordor script is of course wonderful - you see it and you immediately think you're looking at a foreign language, but that it's a language.

Another factor to consider is what tools your people use to write. If they just use pens, then you're pretty flexible. If they use a reed stylus and clay, then the form of the characters will be influenced by that.

Back to my Varin alphabet design story. The Varin alphabet (which is written with pens) has the basic elements of dots, vertical lines, horizontal lines, and diagonal lines. No curves or circles, unlike our writing system. Instead of orienting itself at mid and high distances from a single line at the bottom of the text, the Varin text orients itself along a central axis. The curves come in when people start writing in cursive. So when I went about describing it in the context of the story, I used these elements. Examples: "He stared at the note until it became just meaningless dots and lines sprayed across the paper." "He had gorgeous handwriting, with axis serifs at the end of each word."

That will take you some distance toward solving the problem - but suppose you want to deal with particular characters, as when a child learns their ABC's? I have several recommendations here:

1. Unless your people actually speak English or another language that uses the Latin alphabet, don't use the appearance or name of the letters we use.

2. Don't try to list out the entire alphabet and the names for all the letters. Keep the description general or appearance-based and restrict yourself to naming two or three, maybe four of the letters.

3. Make sure that the names of the letters are short, easy to pronounce and remember.

4. Make sure that the sounds of your letter-names match the phonological system of the names of your characters. A made-up word for a letter will always stand out, but it may stand out more than you want if your character's name is Aramia and the first letter is called grixbat. Not that this is impossible linguistically, of course - but the contrast will be noticed. So take a look at the sound characteristics of the words you've already created, and match them with one another and with the names of the letters (I have already made posts on sounds; see articulatory phonetics).

I hope you find this helpful. Please feel free to comment or ask questions.

Welcome to the Language Design Workshop!

Welcome to February, and the Language Design Workshop. Consider yourself invited.

If you would like to participate in this workshop (for free, of course!), please submit answers to the following questions in my comments area by 5pm PST on February 8th:

1. Is your language spoken by humans or by aliens?
1a. If spoken by humans, in what climate do these humans live? Please describe.
1b. If spoken by aliens, what kind of aliens? Please describe.

2. How do your people (humans or aliens) live? Please describe as much as you can about their social interaction.

3. What divisions are there between groups of people (aliens or humans or both) in your world?
3a. What kind of language differences are there between these groups?
3b. What kind of value judgments are placed on these language differences?

4. How deeply does your language penetrate your story?
4a. Does your story use names? If yes, give examples.
4b. Does your story use object labels? If yes, give examples.
4c. Does your story use extended sequences of created language material (dialogue, songs, poetry etc.)? If yes, give examples.
4d. Do you have any created-language point of view characters? Please describe.

5. Do you expect language issues to influence the story's plot? If so, how?

Please answer all these questions to the best of your ability. If you can't answer every single one in detail, don't worry. I'm not looking for people who have already got perfectly designed languages here, but people to whom I can be of help. That said, please provide the best and most complete answers you can, because I'll need a good sense of the language you're aiming for in order to help you flesh it out. I urge you to read through my "How linguistics can help you!" posts from the past month. This should help you get some ideas.

Since I'm not sure what kind of answers I'll get, or how many people will submit, I'm being cautious about numbers, but I'm hoping to have five to ten participants.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Thinking ahead to a Language Design Workshop

I'm getting a vibe from some of you that all my linguistics posts are making my language design workshop seem scary.

It shouldn't be.

I'm not planning to sit down and have people design languages from the ground up; that is, not unless they want to. What I'll be looking for will be a description of the people speaking the language with details about their physiology (not so tough with humans) and their social structure, and also a sense of how deeply the language should penetrate the work, i.e. whether use of the language is intended to feel intimate or estranging. As with my last workshop, I'll give more specifics on the day the workshop opens, and ask for people to submit within the first week of February.

It's my bedtime, but I'll try to do some pragmatics tomorrow.

Ideas for Languages: animal sounds

It can be hard to get ideas for alien or fantasy languages. Even with the four languages I know (and the sound systems of a few more) for ideas, I find myself running dry sometimes. And of course, the last thing you want is for your languages all to sound the same.

Here are a couple of ways to get around this:

One: use a sound system extremely close to an existing world language. The only pitfall here is that your designed language can get a little too close to the language model and people can tell what you're up to. This may not be a problem (many people don't care).

Two: design your sound inventory based on the physiology of your aliens (caterpillar aliens, octopus aliens, cat aliens, etc.) If you've got aliens with a really unusual physiology, this can be fun (if at times difficult to write out using the English writing system).

Sound system itself isn't everything, though. Two languages can have very similar sound systems, but the way the sounds pattern may be entirely different. Japanese and Spanish, for example, are very similar in their sound inventory, but I hardly have to explain that they sound like they come from opposite sides of the planet. They do.

So here's another idea. Listen to animal sounds.

Use the obvious ones, sure, like barking for dogs or meowing for cats. But then take it further. What are the little sounds these animals make? Whining, gurgling, howling, purring, half-meowing, etc. Do they make them repetitively? Try to take these additional sounds and turn them into speech patterns.

Here's an example:

A cat who says "meow" may also say "mrrk" or "meeg", or "mrk-mrk" depending on context. I could imagine that someone who says meow a lot would be fond of diphthongs, so I could say maybe this language doesn't have the lax/short vowels, but only long vowels and diphthongs of all kinds. ow, ai, oi, and push it further. Maybe the length of the vowels would be significant, like a distinction between "meow" and "meeow" or "meoow." Maybe this would be a language where repeating a word indicates a mood of excitement or eagerness.

If I can do this with cat sounds, which are incredibly familiar, imagine what can be done with other animal sounds. There's a ton of stuff out there on the web. Look for monkey sounds, bird sounds, whale sounds, elephant sounds, ground squirrel sounds, anything you like. If you can actually find a recording of it, instead of just imagining it, the task will become even easier and more fun.

Because I'm planning a language design workshop to open on February 1, I thought I'd do a few language-related posts during the month of January. As with the worldbuilding workshop, this one will begin with me asking for submissions, so if you're interested it can't hurt to start thinking now. And listening...

Schoolhouse Rock: Pronouns

Last week I got the DVD compilation of Schoolhouse Rock from Netflix. This dates me, but I remember really well watching TV as a kid and hoping and hoping that one of those songs would come on, all the while never quite being able to track when they would appear. So having the DVD at home has exposed me to some songs I was familiar with, and also some that I've never heard before. Blast from the past for me, and my kids love it. Niall is constantly coming out with snippets of songs and information now. It's great fun.

My favorite song of the moment is the pronoun song. For those who may remember, it's entitled "Rufus Xavier Sarsparilla" and the most memorable line in it for me is "'cause saying all those nouns over and over can really wear you down."

Needless to say, that got me thinking. In fantasy and science fiction there are a lot of tough names and concepts, and sometimes when I read I feel people are overusing nouns when I would prefer a pronoun. The trick of course is to have the pronoun link back properly to the noun so the reader can track it. ("It"=a pronoun linked back to "the pronoun" :) ) My son is working on tracking pronouns in his reading right now.

I would encourage people to look through their prose and track their hierarchy of reference. This just means how you refer to something when you introduce it the first time, refer back to it the second time, then the third time, etc. The most flexible element in this hierarchy is the straight pronoun, i.e. he/him/her/it etc. but there are also phrases using demonstrative pronouns like "this man" and "that alien" and of course there are definite noun phrases like "the alien" etc. Generally the complexity of the phrase undergoes a successive decline across the number of references, except when there is a possible confusion and you need to reestablish the reference in contrast to that.

This isn't the only thing that pronouns make me think of.

Since I have a language design workshop coming up in February, I'm going to start doing a few language design topics to get people thinking, and pronouns are wonderful things to play with. The English pronoun system says a lot about our concepts of individuality, gender, and relative position, for example. Compare our use of the word "I" with the Japanese pronouns for "I": we've got one pronoun and we use it all the time, while Japanese has more than six different ways of saying "I" but much of the time people don't use any of them at all. They just drop the subject of the verb completely and leave the listener to infer the information. The pronouns themselves vary depending on whether the speaker is a male or a female and how formal the situation is - demonstrating the importance of gender and formality in Japanese society.

So what do you do with pronouns if you've got a language of your own? Well, think about the social structure of the place and try to determine what identity parameters are important. Do your people think of themselves as individuals? Do they divide themselves primarily by gender, by some other criterion, or both? Do they consider the formality of the situation to be relevant in how they refer to themselves or others? Or are there other factors involved? For example, would they refer to themselves in one way in the presence of a member of an oppressor race, but in another when alone with their own kind?

The tiny little pronoun can do an enormous job in showing (not telling!) how the social structure of your world works.

Designing a Story

So Chicago has been great.  And busy.  And I'm still here, but I'll be flying back home on the 28th.  Being so busy having fun that I can't think straight does put a damper on my blogging, unfortunately.

Okay, so I've been designing a new story.  Making a sale tends to inspire me in that way.  I thought I'd share some thoughts.

When I do a linguistic/cultural story I tend to start with five questions (or so)

1.  What is the linguistic problem?

This is the toughest one.  What is the exact phenomenon that our linguist hero (whether it be his POV or not) is trying to pin down?  What is the punch line?  Without this, no story can work.

2.  Who are the aliens?

Here I'm talking about what kind of animal to base the aliens on.  Yes, you can design an alien from scratch, but it puts a huge processing demand on the reader.  If the nature of the alien is part of the central point of the story, then by all means go to the trouble of designing their physiology from the ground up.  A great example of aliens of this type is the story "Doctor Alien" by Rajnar Vajra, which appeared in the January/February issue of Analog.  I loved that story.  But because for me the way the aliens speak is the main issue, I don't want to send a lot of my reader's attention toward understanding the physical and physiological nature of the aliens.  Sometimes I like to select an animal that fits well with the language phenomenon I'm looking at, like wolves for status language.  Other times there isn't a really good parallel between an animal and a language phenomenon, so I can pick something else.  But after I pick an alien, I try to look at their diet and behavioral patterns so I can use that information to expand my understanding of how the aliens might live.

3.  What is the alien technology level?

This is one of those details that has to be pinned down, of course.  I like to try to make their technology real in an atypical way, by considering how the aliens make light, and what kind of objects they would keep in a home, etc.  This one has two sub-steps:  first designing the objects, and second, figuring out what they mean to the aliens.

4.  What is the plot?

Those who know me will laugh at this one, because honestly, the plot comes as number 3 or 4 in the list for me, every time.  Once I've got a sequence of events to work with, I continue tuning it throughout writing and rewriting.

5.  What is the language?

This is not the same as the language problem - it's the structure of the language, mostly the phonology and morphology.  That means the sounds and the way the sounds are put together.  I also have to know aspects of the language that relate to the language problem listed above, but this is where I have to figure out how the alien physiology meshes with the sounds they make, what words they might use in the context of the story, how the names and titles work, etc.

These are of course only the entry points.  But the nature of these stories is so complex that I can't just sit down and start something; I have to figure out this kind of stuff first.  I know I'm getting close to sitting down when I start hearing names and alien phrases in my head, and seeing a scene where two entities are talking to one another.

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...

Writing your language down

Bill Moonroe over at the Analog forum asked me to talk about writing systems, so I thought I'd do a bit of that tonight, starting with the linguistic characteristics of writing systems, moving through a few real world examples I'm familiar with, and finally taking a look at fitting writing systems to a created language and writing technologies.  It's quite a list, so here goes.

Some peoples don't write their language down at all.  Those who do tend to use one (or more!)  of the following three strategies.

1.  An alphabet.  The symbols of an alphabetic writing system are intended to depict the sounds of a language.  Alphabets generally start out as systems with roughly one-to-one correspondence between sounds (phonemes) and symbols - but anyone who has struggled with English spelling knows that this correspondence isn't always clean.  This is due primarily to two factors:  first, the fact that language sounds change more quickly than written spellings, and second, the fact that languages borrow words from other languages that may not be easily rendered in the alphabet (but must be rendered somehow!).

2.  A syllabary.  The symbols of a syllabic writing system are intended to depict chunks of sounds, usually the syllables of a language (though in the case of Japanese, the unit of sound that corresponds to a character can actually be less than one syllable).  What I said about language change applies here too, but at least in the case of Japanese, there has been official reform of the syllabary to try to bring "spelling" more into line with sound.

3. A set of pictographs or ideographs.  The symbols of an ideographic writing system are intended to depict units of meaning rather than units of sound.  Chinese is the classic world-language example of such a system, where there is a character for "I" and another for "you," etc.  Complex concepts can be depicted in such a system by putting two characters together, such as "electricity" and "talk" for "telephone."  And in this case, since no correspondence between sound and meaning is expected, changes in sound and changes in the character system occur independently.

On to examples.  Alphabets that I know about include the Roman alphabet used in different permutations for English, French, Indonesian, Dutch, and many others; also the Greek alphabet, the Cyrillic alphabet, the Hebrew alphabet, etc.  Feel free to comment listing any others you know about, and if anyone has further questions about alphabets do let me know.  But for now I'll assume this is a type of writing system anyone reading my blog has to be pretty familiar with.   

The syllabaries I know best are those of Korean (Hangul) and Japanese (Hiragana and Katakana).  Hangul is actually more properly representative of syllables than either of the kana systems.  Interestingly, each character is made up of subparts that represent sounds - but they're arranged as parts of a single more complex character.  Korean symbols can show either open syllables like "a" and "ka," or closed syllables like "kan", just by including one, two, or three sound parts in a single character.  The Japanese kana symbols represent only open syllables like "a" or "ka" and have two separate symbols that are used for closing syllables (one doubles the following consonant, and the other is roughly "N").  The reason there are two types of kana has nothing to do with sound, and everything to do with function; hiragana is used for core Japanese vocabulary, and katakana for foreign-derived words.

In the realm of ideographs I'll look at the Chinese symbols, because they are used by the Chinese, the Koreans, and the Japanese.  Many of these symbols began as pictographs, or picture-symbols of recognizable objects, and then became abstracted and complicated over time.  In much the same way as Hangul, they have recognizable subparts that can be recombined - but all these subparts are meaning-based, and none sound-based.  In a language with the non-conjugating structure of Chinese, such a system can be used alone.  But in Korean and Japanese, both of which have conjugations and small function words, they can be extremely inconvenient.This is where the "one or more systems" part comes in.  Korean uses both Hangul and Chinese characters, while Japanese uses both kana systems and Chinese characters - all mixed together by function.  

Okay, now for created languages.  Most created languages I have seen use alphabets, but if you're going to put your language in written form, I'd encourage you to think through three things.  

1.  While you're free to pick any type of system you want, it's helpful to consider language structure, as I mentioned for Chinese above, in choosing which system to use (unless you want to design more than one!).

2.  If you're going for an alphabet, you'll get a much more alien or world-local feel if you work directly with the sound system of your language, assigning symbols directly to sounds rather than using a code that corresponds roughly to the Roman alphabet.

3.  Consider writing technologies when you design your symbols.  Also known as, not everybody uses pencils!  Cuneiform was written with a reed on clay; runes were scratched on stone and wood; Chinese and Japanese began with brushes of bamboo and horsehair.  People will first begin to write with the materials available to them, on the materials available to them, and this will have an enormous influence on the appearance of the symbols.  I challenge anyone with a bioluminescent species to think about how that species would first begin to make recordings of its language (Wow, that's tough - and cool!).  Real world writing systems generally need to be written relatively quickly, the symbols should have systematic design and parts, and they should be easily differentiated from one another.

That's it for now!  I'll try to come back to worldbuilding tomorrow.