In my novel Moonstruck,14 the Krulirim have this body plan. I had to give these aliens a magnetic sense. A Krul locates an object in part by reference to the angle between a line toward the thing and a line toward the nearest magnetic pole.15 Now imagine the Krul relating the relative positions of separated objects or describing those objects’ positions to another Krul. The Krul’s propriocentric sense—and so, its language—necessarily deals with trigonometry.
Consider group minds like, but more intelligent than, the bees of a hive.16 What sort of proprioception—if any—might the collective mind have? How might its propioceptive “read-out” change as the collective’s members disperse and regather? How would one such collective mind describe the position of an object relative to itself? To another collective mind?
A moving target
Languages evolve.
Vocabulary changes. We don’t exactly speak like characters in a Shakespeare play.17 Consider end-of-year “top word” lists (a couple of 2009 examples: H1N1 and [as a verb denoting concise communication] twitter). Consider the flood of terms entering the language from:
• Company names (like Xeroxing and Googling).
• Acronyms (like RN, UFO, SAT, and AIDS).
• Commercials and popular culture (like “Where’s the beef?”)
• Science and technology (everything from a veritable bestiary of subatomic particles18 to such neologisms as dark matter, blog, and carbon footprint).
• Current events (such as anything with the –gate suffix, from the name of a hotel that saw “a third-rate burglary attempt”).
Expressions go in and out of vogue.19 “Hold your horses” is, to be charitable, on the dated side. “Too big to fail” is a recent coinage reflecting events that we would all be happier not to have experienced. Verbs become nouns, and vice versa, such that dynamite and telephone can be either part of speech.20, 21 Idioms borrow from literature (say, Catch-22 ) and from mythology (say, Pandora’s Box) in ways that don’t translate.
Pronunciations change, too, sometimes for no better reason than that people can’t always be bothered to enunciate clearly. English is full of anachronistic spellings: time capsules. And so it is that “rough” rhymes with “tough,” but neither rhymes with “though.”
Languages fragment and diverge. For example, around 500 B.C. Proto-Germanic split off from Indo-European. About a millennium later, one of Proto-Germanic’s many offshoots split into High and Low German—high and low being geographic distinctions—on the figurative road to modern German and Dutch (and amid that split, pronunciations shifted too.) The fallen Western Roman Empire’s onetime European territories evolved various “Romance” languages (such as French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan) by blending Latin with the local vernaculars.22
Languages collide. Redundant terms speak to successive conquests of England. Think house (from the German “Haus”) and (upscale, from Old French, because the Normans were the last to conquer England) mansion.
Languages borrow from one another. And so you can travel Europe ordering a hamburger (in English, French, German, and Italian), hamburguesa (in Spanish), or hampurilainen (in Finnish).23
National authorities also sometimes try (with mixed success) to resist such borrowings. Thus the “English” neologism telephone (from Greek roots tele [far] and phone [sound]) gave way for a time, by official decree, to the German neologism Fernsprecher (far speaker).24 The English neologism computer was rejected in favor of the French neologism ordinateur.25How quickly do languages change? Without attempting to quantify change, conversation with adults merely one generation younger or older than I suggests an answer. Very.
In short, human languages reflect more than our physiology—they reflect our history, technology, and sociology too. Aliens’ languages may have similarly complicated origins.
Time out
What about stories set in Earth’s future? Humans aren’t evolving so quickly we need to worry about changes to future humans’ sense organs or body plan.26 Or we can set our stories in the past to preclude changes to human nature.
As we saw earlier, languages transform over time. Set a story in another era without addressing the language differences (“Chill out, dude,” Socrates said) and something is apt to seem amiss.
Communicating with strangers: the easy cases
If two languages—and the beings who created them—are sufficiently similar, the difficulty can be finessed. After all, people do learn new languages. A story that opens long after humans and aliens (or whoever) met can credibly assume that at least one side’s linguists previously figured out the other’s language.
Translation programs get written even today, although today’s state-of-the-art in translation software is as often humorous as helpful. Correct and complete translation requires an understanding of both languages, their historical contexts, idioms, and literary traditions. Translation software, at its core, is a matter of artificial intelligence—and AI is certainly a staple of science fiction.27
Stories dealing with travel to the past have a lower language hurdle.28 Our Hero can research the historically appropriate dialect of the language he’ll find spoken at his destination before jumping through time. Even then, the time traveler may, and probably should, be surprised once he arrives by idioms and pronunciation shifts absent from the historical record.
So much for the easy cases. What happens when the others’ languages, native environments, or worldviews are very different from ours?
The cavalry trope to the rescue
A linguistic trope, such as a metaphor or simile, uses words or expressions in a non-literal way. A literary trope is a common theme in storytelling, well-known examples including heroes and quests. Assuming a degree of reader familiarity with common literary tropes, authors can avoid spelling out related specifics.
Science fiction, as a genre, has its own literary tropes. Some science-fictional tropes use known science in a non-literal way, such as by postulating a faster-than-light space drive, a method of time travel, or a true artificial intelligence.29 I think of an SF trope as a willing-suspension-of-disbelief contract between author and reader.
As with any contract, both parties must agree.30
An SF trope works best—in one person’s opinion, anyway—in the background, rather than front-and-center in a story.31 By way of analogy, suppose wind-powered sailing ships had yet to be invented. A science-fictional Robinson Crusoe might treat the ship as a trope. The vessel served its purpose in the story when it sank; the mechanics of sailing don’t matter. In contrast, consider science-fictional versions of Moby Dick or Two Years Before the Mast. Those stories can hardly be told without showing the technology of sailing ships.
It’s not 100 percent clear-cut when a story premise is a trope. Science-fictional time machines are usually tropes, ways to shift a modern character—someone with whom the reader will empathize—to the time(s) of the story. But when I encounter a passage such as:
“Early in the twenty-second century, physicists succeeded in dependably stabilizing entangled quantum particles. When the entangled particles were tachyons, quantum teleportation became time travel... ”
I infer that the story is meant as hard SF.32 In this case, the nature of the supposed time-travel mechanism and its underlying constraints may prove to be central to the story.
We now return this essay to matters of communications...
Language-related tropes
SF authors use many tropes to circumvent the problem of human/alien communications.
The simplest science-fictional language trope, so deeply embedded as to go unnoticed, is the universal language. It’s not that everyone suddenly adopts Esperanto.33 Rather, future (or alien) science has discovered principles that—unknown to human science today—underlie all communications. Anyone knowledgeable of the underlying principles of the universal language can readily master any other language.
Does the universal language exist? No one has disproven it,
so its use remains fair game for SF. That said, it’s difficult to imagine what underlying principles could encompass the many historical and physiological differences between human and all alien languages.
(Humans, with the advantage of a common physiology, have yet to achieve a global language.34, 35 Technological shortcomings might once have precluded convergence on a single human language, but with radio, television, the Internet, and on-demand publishing, we could—at least among the high-tech societies—standardize on a single language. I don’t foresee that happening anytime soon. That prompts the question: how many languages are apt to be extant within an alien civilization? If only one, that discovery alone would suggest interesting cultural differences between the aliens and humanity.)
If a universal language exists, that’s no guarantee everyone is physically able to understand or speak it. One may still need a universal translator to perform the translations, or to convert between such disparate formats as modulated sound waves and aroma blends. The universal translation device is only as plausible as the language skills and technological mechanisms by which it has been implemented.
The Star Trek franchise makes frequent use of a universal translator—or a not-quite-universal translator when plot logic requires a bit of misunderstanding. Viewers accept the (il)logic because a new linguistic puzzle every week would get tedious.
Perhaps we or the aliens can bypass the incompatible-language barrier through telepathy. Setting aside questions of how—even at the handwavium level of a trope—mind-reading might work, this hypothesis raises questions about the relationship between thought and language. Unless thought operates independently of language,36 or thought uses the undiscovered universal language, it’s hard to see how telepathy can overcome language barriers. And for telepathy to work across species—especially species with disjointed neural mechanisms and biochemistries—requires an additional leap of faith.37
Finally—and not for the faint of heart—we come to the shush!-we’ve-all-agreed-to-look-the-other-way language trope. The Stargate: Atlantis franchise features remote worlds whose populations descended from humans abducted thousands of years earlier. Pegasus Galaxy humans speak English even though their ancestors left Earth before there was English. It’s an impressive feat that certainly moves along the storyline. Just try not to think about it....
Putting it all into words
So: your fictional aliens, alternate-Earth residents, and humans from other eras have language(s)—or at a minimum, pronunciation(s) and vocabulary(ies)—different from our own. By technology or by trope38 the human (or human-empathetic) characters establish communications. An important question remains: How, within the story, do we represent that communication? Writers have used many techniques:
“ Snippets of foreign vocabulary rendered into a familiar character set sprinkled into otherwise English text. Items without human equivalents, like advanced technologies of the aliens, retain their alien character.39
“ As above, but with foreign usages limited to proper names. Guillaume, when he visits London, may speak English, but he doesn’t start referring to himself as William. (Of course English readers can pronounce, to greater and lesser degrees, the name Guillaume. What if the alien names are hard or impossible to pronounce? I have it on good authority—read: irate emails—that such words annoy some readers. Should I as an author avoid hard-to-pronounce terms? Perhaps sometimes, when language cues aren’t meant to emphasize the alien nature of the nonhumans.)
“ Aliens with great language skills, who have mastered English so that the human characters (and readers) don’t have to learn, say, Tau Cetian.
“ Arcane word orders that make the English seem alien.40
“ Alien speech and writing rendered into non-Roman character sets, even to non-linguistic symbols such as musical notes, with translations nearby.41The author must fit the technique(s) to the story. And nowhere is that challenge harder than where tropes just won’t serve....
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)
SETI inherently deals with another civilization’s communications. Suppose Earth’s observatories hunt for extraterrestrial signals, perhaps transmitted our way as microwaves or laser beams. What modes of long-range communication might the aliens use? Suppose a signal is detected. What method(s) might extract the signal’s meaning? If a signal seems intended for us, how will we ascertain what the aliens are attempting to say? If a signal seems accidental—their analogue, perhaps, of “American Idol,” spreading at light-speed across the galaxy—what meaning might we manage, through cleverness, to extract?
It’s hard to imagine a SETI story that is not at least somewhat concerned with the details of communication. Tropes won’t do—there is no story without delving into the method by which the signal is received, what within the signal is understandable, or the cleverness with which that meaning is extracted. In a SETI story, we can hardly start to understand the aliens by tapping our chests and over-enunciating our names.
How might we find meaning in an alien radio broadcast? It’s not as though we can hope to uncover something like the Rosetta Stone.42
Except that for some messages nature is a Rosetta Stone. To the extent physical laws are universal—and known by both parties—representations of those physical laws may provide a basis for mutual understanding. Why may? Because common understanding of physical principles does not assure compatible representations.43 Lots of hard work would be required to establish a mutual understanding of the physical domain.
If limited translation succeeds from clues provided by physical laws, what then? It’s less than intuitive how to proceed from a specialized vocabulary based upon shared physical discoveries to the broader vocabulary necessary for unrelated-to-science topics. “Catch-22” is far afield from the periodic table.44, 45
A Trail of Bread Crumbs
Earth’s earliest transmissions were likely submerged in the naturally occurring radio emissions of the Sun, but perhaps aliens with sensitive receivers can make out humanity’s more recent transmissions. It’d be interesting if visitors were to backtrack such signals and come calling already conversant in English (or Cantonese, or whatever).
But can Earth’s transmissions teach human languages? Our broadcasts are hardly designed for an alien audience. The transmissions employ a multitude of frequencies (not all of which propagate equally well through the interstellar medium), carrier-wave modulation schemes (e.g., amplitude and frequency modulations), data representations (e.g., audio and audiovisual, analog and digital, “in the clear” and encrypted46), and spoken languages. Superimposed over the constant radio and television chatter are powerful radar pulses.
Suppose nearby aliens (including those simply passing through the neighborhood) intercept Earth’s transmissions of the past several decades. Reconstructing video from TV broadcasts may be a simpler problem than extracting meaning from radio broadcasts or TV’s audio sub channel. If so, imagine what impression video alone—say, from the evening news—might make. Perhaps humanity should hope that “we’re here, and we use technology” is the only significance that distant visitors can attribute to our transmissions.47
First Contact
First Contact stories up the ante: the interaction is face (or whatever) to face. Where SETI stories look for the commonalities between species that might enable communication, First Contact stories more often focus on our differences. It’s hard to imagine a First Contact story in which inter-species differences don’t manifest in contrasting worldviews and languages.48
But from the Department of Special Cases... the SETI discovery or First Contact situation can itself be a trope, the author’s way to make us think about ourselves and our culture.49 Challenges in translation, or the detailed process of learning a new language, are downplayed because the focus is on (a) the message content or (b) the unexpected truths about ourselves that the existence of aliens forces the human characters to confront.
From which we conclude
&n
bsp; Tropes and translations, alphabets and aliens, worldviews and walruses50... this essay has covered a lot of ground.
So in your next alien-featuring story, should you invent an alien language, complete with lexicon, syntax rules, and odd idioms? Should your next time-travel story feature classical Greek? Or should you go the way of the trope?
I can’t— not, I won’t—attempt to answer. The needs and logic of the story outweigh the alien creatures and the temporal displacements. Hopefully this essay has suggested ways for you to approach the questions.
Back to our story
So why does our walrus/lobster friend speak like a Victorian Englishman? Because parody is one more reason to break the rules—
And (check his uniform) he is the very model of a modern major-general.
About the Author
Edward M. Lerner toiled in the vineyards of high tech for thirty years, until, suitably intoxicated, he began writing science fiction full time. His novels range from near-future Earth-based technothrillers like Fools’ Experiments and Small Miracles to space epics, like his latest, InterstellarNet: Origins. Ed’s short fiction and fact articles appear most frequently in Analog. His website is: www.sfwa.org/members/lerner/
FOOTNOTES:
1 For a broader survey of human languages and an alternate take on alien speech, see the chapter “Alien Language” in Aliens and Alien Societies: A writer’s guide to creating extraterrestrial life forms by Stanley Schmidt. (Yes, that Stanley Schmidt.)
2 For much more about gender differences among languages, see “Der Mann, Die Frau, Das Kind,” by Henry Honken, in the June 2010 issue of Analog.
3 http://www.physorg.com/news76249412.html
4 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-do-squid-and-octopuse
Analog Science Fiction and Fact 03/01/11 Page 18
